Adventureland XL
I played the original Adventureland alongs with many other Scott Adams’s Interactive Fiction games back in the late 70s and loved them. As soon as I heard I could play Adventureland again with my kids and grandkids I purchased it right away on Steam. It brought back so many good memories for me and the new version is even better now using the Conversational parsing engine!
– Real player with 13.7 hrs in game
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Revival of the classic, plus much much more :). Great game for both seasoned and new adventurers alike :)
– Real player with 8.4 hrs in game
Love is Dead
At the time of this review, I’ve read every other review for the game. You’ll notice that all but two negative reviews had the game booted up for 6-12 minutes, the remainder upset that there’s a make your own gender option under the he/she/they options, and there’s a reason for that. The first few levels are simple, and therefore might bore you as they’re more about teaching controls and mechanics than puzzles, they’re a tutorial. The game ramps up after the first world…you know, like most other games.
– Real player with 17.4 hrs in game
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First, let me denounce some other negative reviews as they are merely stupid butthurts. At the same time a number of positive reviewers have very short playtime as well. The game starts off as a decent casual puzzler. But fairly quickly turns mostly into action of sorts. Dodging, timing your actions, precision movement - these are the things you’ll be doing for the most part if you are to endure this game.
Movement is grid based, which should be very precise, but there are bits with kinda off-grid movement, so you loose that precision in some moments. Thanks to that and because of slight bugginess, you might get stuck in a place or two, but this is a minor issue compared to controls. They are awfully slow. It feels like you have a delay of 1 second between button press and corresponding action. Very annoying unresponsiveness, especially when you have to dodge.
– Real player with 16.8 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
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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
Sanitarium
This is a weird game. The premise is that you are a researcher who discovers a cure to some deadly disease, but you get in a car crash and your head injury causes you to go insane. You wake up in some twisted insane asylum run by a mad scientist. A lot of the time you are totally sane and know what’s going on. But every time something traumatic or stressful happens, your character has a dissociative episode, and you are teleported to an alternate dimension where you need to solve some problem.
– Real player with 28.4 hrs in game
A 1998 point and click adventure originally created by an American company known as DreamForge Intertainment which unfortunately no longer exists and later thanks to a French company known as Dot Emu ( http://www.dotemu.com/ ) was ported to Steam and other mediums with achievements added.
While the game is no doubt dated graphically, the game has stood the test of time thanks to its superlative and artistic use of storytelling. Unlike cheap jump scares used in many stories today, the main story here and many of its sub plots concentrate on having the gamer enthralled with concepts teetering in the morbid and with adult themes that constantly confounds you with the creepy and bizarre mysteries that make you want to push forward and learn more.
– Real player with 28.3 hrs in game