Orwell’s Animal Farm
This game explains nothing about its gameplay (after multiple playthroughs I’m still unsure of what the Animalism stat does) and appears to be a buggy mess of RNG. Dead animals can still comment on events occurring (Napoleon and Boxer appear to be the biggest culprits) or show up at the gravesite despite being dead (such as the Cabal of Pigs ending where Snowball and Napoleon have died, but Napoleon is at the grave). You can run into problems where you have plenty of supplies and want to repair the buildings but you can’t until the option presents itself, or similarly where you had the opportunity to harvest with multiple animals to fill the supplies to their maximum but suddenly only one animal can be chosen and you have far less than usual. Sometimes it skips letting you plant for next year which makes supplies much worse and no longer lets you plant on subsequent years, even if you have the supplies to do so.
– Real player with 12.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Based On A Novel Political Games.
Introduction
George Orwell’s dystopian and satirist literary work undoubtedly influenced, and still influences, a lot of other creative people, who are inspired by his themes, and use them for their own work. However, having a full videogame adaptation of his work is something else, and now we finally got it with Orwell’s Animal Farm, which adapts the original allegorical novella. This text-based game tries to capture and expand the book’s themes and experience a bit by adding several story choices. There is not much more to this game, as you could say it is similar to a visual novel. Is it a good addition, though? Well, let us dive into the review to find it out!
– Real player with 6.6 hrs in game
Painting Werther
The Sorrows of Young Werther, was written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1774.
Loved by artists and emperors, it shows the inner struggle of a deeply romantic man.
Or at least that’s what I used to think…
Come with us on this interactive visual novel to see another version of this legendary story.
Was young Werther really a romantic? Or was he just a man with a death wish?
How deeply did he really love his friend Wilhelm? Maybe his letters hide some clues…
Did he even loved Charlotte? Or did he just love the idea of an unrequited love?
For all these questions and more, Mad Cream Games presents you and overloading artistic experience, full of brush strokes and ink spots, where Chopin played the sax and Mozart the guitar, where love turns into hate, and pity into madness:
With this game we want to celebrate the mastery and abilities from the painters and musicians that came before us, presenting their work in a new original and respectful way.
Read More: Best Based On A Novel Point & Click Games.
The Lost Legends of Redwall™: The Scout Act 1
I will begin stating I have been following this project since nearly its inception and announcement to be funding via Kickstarter. This is for all intents and purposes an early access prototype meant to glean feedback from people like myself. Do not buy this game at this moment, if you are expecting it to be 100% complete and ready to play. It is early access for a reason. Giving it a negative review for being incomplete after willfully purchasing it as early access content is ignorant.
I do recommend it full heartedly for those who are willing to pick through, nail down details that can be improved upon, and are willing to provide that feedback to the developers. I’ve played through the polished level multiple times now. I still feel like I have missed things, and each time I have played I’ve found something new.
– Real player with 28.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Based On A Novel Third Person Games.
This game is a hot mess, and it really doesn’t need to be. Redwall is special to me. As a young child I loved the books. I was fairly obsessive about reading them, and I was for years. I could recite the plot of almost any one of the books, despite how long it’s been since I’ve read any of them. I was surprised to learn there was a Redwall game in development, I first heard about it in 2014. When the game came out on steam early access I bought it within the first month, it was one level, and extremely buggy, but it had promise. I would play it for a little while whenever there was an update, until it stopped working.
– Real player with 18.5 hrs in game
A Little Lily Princess
I absolutely loved this romance sim. It was very delightful and interesting.
There are 4 romance routes, and 2 friendship routes. It involves stat raising, but it is not tedious or annoying.
It takes place during the Victorian era in London, England. That is a vague time frame considering Queen Victoria ruled for 63 years. However, since the book this visual novel is based on was published in 1905, I would assume the story took place late in her reign before she died in 1901.
The young protagonist arrives at a boarding school for girls after living in India her whole life; do remember that The British Empire ruled over India for a long time. She is a tad out of place in her school for having grown up in India, and for also being half-French; The English and French are long-time rivals, after all. Although, elitist English aristocrats would have prejudice against anyone who wasn’t completely English anyway.
– Real player with 34.9 hrs in game
This was a rather unique experience for me. I’ve played visual novels before, and I had a cursory knowledge of the source material going in.
In short, this is a visual novel retelling of the story “A Little Princess.” It takes a few liberties with the source material such as Miss Minchin’s sister being completely absent, and they created one character wholecloth.
Being a visual novel, there’s really not much that you can expect from the game. The interface is clean, the mechanics are explained well enough, though the RNG element can make it frustrating if you’re shooting for a specific ending. Jessie’s route, for example, requires a high number of high count skills, while characters like Mariette and Becky tend to have lower costs. It also completely goes out the window in the second have of the game, where you can completely cheese the system.
– Real player with 18.8 hrs in game
Dear Althea
About this game
This visual novel, full of decisions and repercussions, is a fun reinterpretation of the novel “Dear Faustina” (1897) by British author Rhoda Broughton. Each chapter is filled with beautiful, high quality artwork that illustrates all the situations and moments you will experience alongside the charismatic characters. The art that you will be able to see has been made with special care in the representation of the British Victorian era as well as taking into account the class difference that is present at all times. The entire video game has 51 chapters that you will only be able to see if you play all the routes and enjoy the nine endings of the video game.
Story
In Dear Althea, you play as Althea Vane; a young upper class British woman whose life is turned upside down after the death of her father which causes her family to fall apart along with her future. She will be forced to choose a new future, a place to call home and a group to belong to. To get there she will have to face all sorts of situations in Victorian London, but love and romance will fortunately abound and make her quest more enjoyable.
Choices matter
You will find that the choices you make will change the story from the very first chapter, even if they change there will be many of them that will affect the story in the long run. In Dear Althea, your choices can affect not only your fate, but also the fate of other people. They can also change your relationship with other characters and open up new routes of dialogue that will change the dynamics of relationships.
Diverse relationships
You don’t have to fall in love with anyone or enter into any kind of romantic or sexual relationship in the game, but depending on your choices you can enter into a relationship with up to four characters that fall within the LGBT spectrum, however you don’t have to choose just one relationship; you can enter into a variety of polyamorous relationships.
Consent
In this video game, consent is discussed and encouraged in all aspects of relationships between characters. In romantic relationships there is no obligation to have sex, and refusing to have sex has no negative repercussions.
Characters
There is a great diversity of charismatic characters in “Dear Althea” but there is a clear division between upper class and working class characters. As a protagonist you can decide from the first chapter and throughout the story which group you are more sympathetic to. Defending characters from one class or the other can have repercussions.
Puzzles
If puzzles are not your thing you can skip them without missing any important plot points; however, there has been a lot of effort in the creation of the puzzles to make them all diverse. They have been integrated in the best possible way into the storyline as well as being completely set in the era in which the story takes place.
Typography
The typography has been created to help people with dyslexia to identify letters more easily. It is based on the typeface that appears in the original 1897 book.
Endings
There are a total of nine completely different final chapters, many of which are the result of decisions that took place several chapters earlier.Due to the branching of the story, finishing a single route can cause you to miss even twenty whole chapters that belong to the other routes, so the title invites replayability. Also, as a final surprise, there are some small post-credits scenes that will change depending on the decisions made throughout the story.
Duration and text
Counting all possible decisions, the game has 112408 words and (although it is not finished yet) I estimate that approximately and depending on the decisions chosen, the game can last about 5 hours.
The Lost Legends of Redwall™: The Scout Act 3
Step into the epic, story-rich world of the wildly popular Redwall books. The Scout is an episodic adventure game full of vivid characters, high adventure, and most importantly, the first new official Redwall story since 2011. The third episode, “The Abbey," tells the story of Liam and Sophia’s desperate race to Redwall Abbey after being mortally poisoned by Scumsnout’s vicious maw. This is the dramatic conclusion of their journey through Portman’s Slough, Pontederia, and the ancient Otter’s ruins.
The Lost Legends of Redwall™: The Scout Act 2
I will admit, after playing Act 1 on release, I was very doubtful that Soma could continue their franchise. The gameplay was very buggy, as expected from a new developer, and it got so frustrating that I couldn’t stand to play the game anymore.
Fast forward a couple years, and to my pleasant surprise, Soma used their lessons learned from Act 1, and it shows here in Act 2 (They even vastly improved the gameplay through patches in Act 1!). Though there are some glaring bugs in the gameplay and level design, they’re much less plentiful than Act 1 was upon release. Most notable were the lack of collision object which would allow you to fall through the world. In general, Soma are really applying themselves in making a great game with a great story for any Redwall reader.
– Real player with 31.8 hrs in game
If you liked Act I, chances are you’ll enjoy this one too. The gameplay is essentially the same and, even if it isn’t groundbreaking, it has the same charm and character as the first instalment. There are new characters with plenty of personality, including one based on an actual character from the Redwall book. The artworks are lovely as before and the soundtrack is great.
Also I’d like to give the devs, Soma Games, some extra praise: though these Redwall games are sometimes a little buggy, Soma really make the effort to correct as many glitches as they can. They actively facilitate player feedback with a bug reporting option on the menu, and week by week they’ve been steadily patching as many issues as they can. A committed developer is one worth supporting!
– Real player with 7.2 hrs in game
Spec Ops: The Line
About halfway through Yager’s third-person-shooter Spec Ops: The Line, in one of the game’s most controversial moments, I found myself disgusted and infuriated. Not at the scene I’d just witnessed, or at the game’s statement as a whole, but rather that it even needs to be said at all. Two of the ten bestselling video games of all time are Grand Theft Auto V
and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
. The “military shooter” is one of the most successful genres of the last ten years, and the objective of these games is to kill people. Lots of people. We eat it up non-stop, and always, always ask for sequels seconds. In order to keep the profit margins wide, we are encouraged to never think about it, to never stop and look at ourselves with a critical, compassionate, clear eye. Of course, it’s not only Hollywood that benefits from the blinders we’ve all put on, since only the desperate and crazy would fight our wars for us if it weren’t for the glorification of war peddled by the governments of this strange, sad world upon which we find ourselves spinning through the abyss.
– Real player with 47.5 hrs in game
Spec Ops The Line is a great third person shooter, with a very dark story, there are some tough choices to make and the game really knows how to portray mental illness. It certainly is a must have.
Dubai has been hit by the heaviest sandstorms in recorded history, John Konrad volunteered the 33rd to help with a relieve mission in Dubai after their tour in Afghanistan. You play as Captain Martin Walker who served with Konrad in Afghanistan, you have 2 Delta Force elites under your command for the mission, And you are being sent to Dubai for a recon mission. Once there you find the horrors of war find out what the 33rd did and go on your own mission; Revenge. The game forces you to make morally heavy choices, or choices will be made for you. I won’t go in too deep because I don’t want to give any spoilers, But I think it is a great representation of war and the effects of it.
– Real player with 27.8 hrs in game