Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer: Survival Game
We are one of the first studios who decided to make a videogame based on Mark Twain’s books.
So, we took a chapter from Tom Sawyer’s Adventures book, about him escaping to an island with his friends. And decided that this will perfectly fit into a concept of a survival game. But it is not a plotless survival sandbox. As anything with our studio, our games are highly focused on unique experiences, intrinsic motivation, and player emotions. If we make a survival game - it is going to be unique and most of our time is going to be dedicated to immersing the player and creating a feeling of an authentic teenage adventure inside the player’s head.
Read More: Best Beautiful Survival 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 Beautiful 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 Ballad Singer
As much as I would like to recommend this game, I just can’t. I could say that it has beautiful graphics, is fully voiced, has an intricate story with 4 characters, who sometimes cross with each other, has nice soundtrack and several QoL features, like ability to double the speed of narrator’s voice to speed up the game.
But all of this gets completely ruined by absolutely unfair death mechanic and BS choices. At the beginning of the game you’re warned that you will die here, a lot, that’s why developers created fate system. You have limited amount of fate points, every time your character dies you can either continue the game as other character or restart your last choice. Both of these options consume 1 fate point. Ok, so you decided to create a game that revolves around constant danger and death traps, fine. Surely, you will spend extra time making these deaths logical, so only if player actually made a mistake they would die, right? No. Most of choices in the game that lead to your death are absolutely random and, unless you already know which one is the right one, you will die not because you’ve made a mistake, but because you drew a short stick. Here are few examples, technically spoilers:
! I am an “elf” in the middle of the forest who needs to get to the cabin in the distance and sees two roads: a big, stone one or small, trodden one. She has to pick one. I chose small, trodden one. Game then tells me that I spend some time walking on that road and noticed that it leads in completely other direction from the cabin and that day is closing to the night. Now I’m faced with another choice - continue on this road, or go back and choose other road. I, thinking that this new piece of information is game hinting me that I chose wrong, choose to go back and pick the big road. And I died. Because apparently there’s some shitty death trap on the big road. How was I supposed to know that? There were no hints, there was actually a fake hint that made me choose the wrong road.. Another example -
! I am a mage and am currently fighting a giant water elemental. She (yes, she has gender) creates a water wave and I need to defend myself. There are three options: make a tornado, create stone wall or create a flame shield around me. Now, the last one is obviously a bad desision as I’m fighting a water elemental who, surely, can easily fight fire (also, earlier in the game, we already used another water elemental to fight fire elemental, so it’s logical even in game). This would be a logical death choice. Developers could choose other two choices as “right” ones - they will allow you to continue the fight, but give different texts or future options, because the fight would progress differently. That would be cool. But no. Only one of these choices is correct - tornado. Why? Why the fuck should I pick tornado, except by random? I picked the stone wall, because surely, the stone wall can stop water wave. No, you died, fool. And, despite me playing only for two hours, the game gave me tons of such choices already. They, aside from making the player angry, completely ruin the immersion. No, you’re not a mage trying master the elements, you’re an idiot, sitting before your PC and who was unlucky to pick the wrong choice, so now you have to reload and make the “correct” one and it’s correct because developer said so. A death should be a result of either one very dumb and obviously wrong decision, or a series of bad decisions with hints that you’re doing everything wrong. Not what we have here.
– Real player with 15.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Beautiful Indie Games.
If you came here with one thumb on your lighter, ready to lose yourself in some heart-wrenching ballads, I’m afraid I’ve got bad news for you. I didn’t encounter my first ballad until at least 3 or 4 hours in, and it was pretty underwhelming when it finally arrived.
Yeah, their choice of titles doesn’t make a lot of sense, and neither do most of the other choices in this game.
Well, I can’t say I wasn’t warned. They always told me not to judge a book by its cover, and that’s exactly what I did. Can you blame me, though? On the surface it looks great. It’s got that Extremely Fantasy, D&D manual sort of vibe. Everywhere you look you find fierce monsters and sharpened blades, towering dragons, fireball-hurling wizards and pots of stew consumed in shady inns full of adventures just waiting to happen.
– Real player with 7.8 hrs in game
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
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
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