Kolkhoz: The Red Wedge
Nice little indie game, if you like constructivism, puzzles and Soviet history then you’ll like this.
– Real player with 4.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Based On A Novel Indie Games.
A good debut for a solo game developer. Lovely graphics and succesful storytelling, average but acceptable gameplay features for a interactive novel kind game. With in game info about era and fine atmosphere, I especially recommend to people who interested in Bolshevik Revolution, 1930’s collectivization process, CCCP or enjoyed novels such as “And Quiet Flows the Don " or Gladkov’s “Cement”.
– Real player with 4.5 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.
Highly Likely
This is one of the most tedious, poorly crafted, boring, pointless games I’ve ever played.
The art is phenomenal. The developers' interactions with folks on the internet is disappointing. It’s buggy and slow and repetitive.
There are no puzzles, there’s barely a story, there is no skill involved, it’s poorly translated, it’s a little sexist, and the characters' motivations are all over the map. There’s literally a segment in this game where you need to cross a river, so you hold the joystick to the left for over a minute while he slowly turns a crank. This happens multiple times. The most engaging moment of the whole thing is a long and laborious multi-part fetch quest.
– Real player with 4.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Based On A Novel Indie Games.
Highly Likely is a short and light-hearted point-and-click game that is set in a rural Ukraine and follows a man named Mikola as he tries to get himself out of an enormous debt that he owes to the bank. He finds himself a new business opportunity, one that is risky and could land him in trouble with the law, but he knows that he’s got no other choice. This is the basic story premise that is very relatable and could happen to just about anyone.
– Real player with 4.5 hrs in game
The Metamorphosis
I dont usually play games ,but I quite liked this concept of book adaptation, drewings & sound desing is really well done. :)
– Real player with 22.4 hrs in game
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weird main menu behavior
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steam screenshots don’t work
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inconsistent text display:
___narrative text displayed on whole screen most of the time but also on lower thirds
___main character gregor appears in lower thirds dialog box even though he has no dialogue
- art and animation are ok during chapter 1
- art in chapters 2 & 3 was lackluster and didn’t match the text
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read the novel for free on project gutenberg
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listen to the audiobook for free on librivox
– Real player with 4.4 hrs in game
Discouraged Workers TEEN
A quite weird visual novel, actually.. in some senses.
First point - there is no interaction, there are no choices until the end of the game, which is fortunately quite long for its genre, even if you have constantly the feeling of being unable to have an impact on the game itself.
Towards the end, you are asked to save some times (only twice actually but anyways XD) and you can make your first and only choices.. but nothing really breathtaking, although they’re of course fundamental for the (few) endings.
– Real player with 6.0 hrs in game
This game is pretty short, but the storyline drew my attention. Discouraged Workers is a visual novel game that includes a depressed 28 year old woman struggling to find a job (discouraged). There’s three routes in this game I believe, however there’s a lack of interactivity till the end of the storylines.
– Real player with 5.9 hrs in game
Kim
Backed on Kickstarter and now a review two things i rarely do. Unless i feel something is special which Kim most certainly is in my opinion.
First off i have never read the book but i have now purchased and it’s on my reading list.
Kim is like a geography, history and survival game all rolled into one.
The first thing that appealed to me was that the gameplay reminded me of one of my favorite ever games Burntime a post apocalyptic scavenging game ( hint for your next game pleeeease devolpers this game design is perfect for it).
– Real player with 43.6 hrs in game
Normally I don’t do reviews on the games I play, but when it comes to Kim I really felt that I should do one because of two things.
- First is obviosuly the merit to the game itself. It is really enjoyable, unique and probably one of the best indie games i have come across. Once you start a playthrough, you just immerse yourself in the character, the beautiful settings and the writing it offers. The music is lovely, so the deluxe edition is reccommended.
Gameplay wise, having to weigh in the pros and cons of actions as well as taking into account of the limited time and resources available to the character in the playthrough is the strongest element of the game. Basically, you have to make smart choices to score high but at the same time you also get to choose the high road or the low road in making decisions and that will put your own morality to the test, which I really like to see in all kinds of games.
– Real player with 19.1 hrs in game
Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth
This game is exactly what a video game should be. The art of wrapping up a brilliant story in the right way. Far from stressful and repetitive games, this work is unique and often made me feel very different from other games. There is not a lot of interaction and is mostly limited to conversations, looking at objects, and the character’s thoughts on a particular object or person. But that’s what made me feel so immersed in the game and this world. I haven’t read the books, but I’m glad I had this experience without knowing the original. Thank you Daedalic !
– Real player with 25.6 hrs in game
Hurts having to give a thumbs down to a game with such a well constructed narrative, but…
For a story game, the story is unsatisfying and the “best bits” feel incredibly rushed. And for a point ‘n click game that is similar to a Visual Novel in many senses, it has a weird pacing whilst 75% of the game consists of slice-of-lifeish moments.
Think of it like this. The game starts incredibly slow. And then, BOOM, there is a big moment and it looks like the story is REALLY going places… But then no, there’s more build-up. And after that, even more build-up. And then even moreso. You’d imagine the story is building up to something grand, right? And that is true!
– Real player with 25.5 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.
Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword
This game is fantastic. I’ve put hundreds of hours into it, and I’ll likely put hundreds of house more into it. Takes place in the real world in mid-17th century Eastern Europe. There’s 5 factions; Muscovite Tsardom (Russia), Sweden, Poland, Crimean Khanate (Crimea, which is a location in the game), and the Cossacks. You’ll meet people from these areas as well as Spaniards, Frenchmen, Germans, and even Scotsmen. There are muskets, and because of the time period, they come in a variety of flavours. Home made, matchlock, wheel lock, and Miquelet (flintlock) are the main ones, in order of quality. Accuracy is in short supply of course, but I do believe there are some rifled muskets in the game, however they are VERY expensive, and not something you can give normal soldiers. Only your own character, and heroes.
– Real player with 485.8 hrs in game
With Fire and Sword, a Winged Hussar’s wet dream (at first glance).
The cover of the game might wow you with it’s fancy looking armor and “updated” gameplay, but once you have it, it gets boring quick and the lack of options is a huge disappointment.
Unlike Warband, this game doesn’t have a troop/progression tree. Instead this game just has you upgrade troops to “veteran”, and while that might not be that bad, the lack of variety can get really old, really quick.
There is no diplomacy, at all, ever.
– Real player with 244.2 hrs in game
The Last Express Gold Edition
I think this may well be the greatest game ever made. Yes, the controls are clunky as all get out. Yes, for people used to today’s games the ultra-high-tech-for-1997-digital-rotoscoping technique looks extremely antiquated. Yes, you’re dropped into the game with no idea what to do, and you’re going to fail. A lot. But at the same time “The Last Express” includes:
- Probably the best-developed characters in any adventure game I’ve yet played (the weakest is arguably Robert Cath, who the player controls, but even he has an intriguing and irritatingly-largely-unrevealed-due-to-lack-of-a-sequel backstory). By the end of the game you know what they want and what makes most of them tick, and since certain bad things are more or less guaranteed to happen to a number of them the result is the equivalent of an emotional shovel to the face.
– Real player with 16.0 hrs in game
Ahead of its time but stuck in the past
First read about this game way back when it came out, in a magazine I still have, where the reviewer was left in complete awe because of unique design for an adventure game. Ever since it occupied a small cluster of neurons in the back of my head, waiting for me to play it and its moment to shine. I should say I never played the original so my review will only address this 2013 port, with some inferior exceptions others have noticed.
It plays like Myst, from 1st person perspective with static scenes as you move around, but is set in realistic environment of an vintage luxury passenger train called Orient Express. The whole game takes place in the same 4-5 vagon carts with beautifully rendered backgrounds. You move by clicking edges of screen with mouse cursor that contextually changes functions to forward, backward and left or right turn, with interaction prompts for opening doors and object/NPC interaction.
– Real player with 9.8 hrs in game