Day of the Tentacle Remastered
A brief overview…
Goal: To stop an evil triangle from taking over the world.
Method: Travel back in time to the day before so that you can stop the triangle from becoming evil in the first place. However, the majority of the story revolves around blowing a large sum of money on a shopping channel product, and finding sources of electricity that you can plug toilets into.
Heroes: The true heroes of this game are a metalhead who has zero book smarts, a trainee doctor who cannot be trusted with her own scalpel, and that nerd from the first game who used to be a coward. This trio receives help along the way from an ex-villain mad scientist, the founding fathers, a hamster and a dead guy.
– Real player with 141.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Cult Classic Cartoony Games.
My previous article on my experiences with working on Day of the Tentacle Remastered cover a lot of my own history with the game, but don’t dive deep into my feelings about the remastered edition itself - after all, the game was more or less finished before I came onboard and I had plenty of time to play through it before I started working on it.
Re-creating low fidelity assets with greater detail removes a degree of ambiguity that different players invariably fill with different impressions. To one person, a few pixels here, might be interpreted as a smooth shape, while to another, the pixel edges define something more jagged - are the ends of Laverne’s fingers square or rounded? Are outlines fixed or varying width?
– Real player with 102.7 hrs in game
CHRONO TRIGGER®
This game will be one of my favorite JRPG of all time. I have known that Japanese gamers has voted this game for the best game of Heisei era (1989-2019). I played it and now I know why. I recommended for both JRPG lovers and those who want to start playing JRPGs.
– Real player with 61.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Cult Classic Turn-Based Games.
Honestly, it aged gracefully, from both a gameplay and a story perspective! 10/10.
– Real player with 58.2 hrs in game
Time Gentlemen, Please! and Ben There, Dan That! Special Edition Double Pack
I have separate reviews for both games included in the double pack
Ben there, Dan That.
This is a legitimately funny and great point and click game. Ben There, Dan That has the point and click elements you expect: inventory, combining items, interacting with NPC’s, puzzles. But it does this with really great humor. Throughout the game I was chuckling to myself at the dialogue between Ben, Dan and the characters. It was breaking the fourth wall a lot and poked fun at itself and the genre. I truly enjoyed playing this and wish it was longer.
– Real player with 13.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Cult Classic Hand-drawn Games.
This is a review of the first game of this bundle: Ben There, Dan That.
Ben There, Dan That! is an adventure game in the purest tradition of the genre. If you’ve played LucasArts adventures in the 90’s, you are in familiar territory (and also, lucky). Same if you played 90’s Sierra titles (except you weren’t so lucky). Indeed, you’ll find again every emblematic ingredient: look/use/talk/walk commands, inventory management, branching dialogs, humour…
The story begins with our two heroes, Ben and Dan (who happen to be digital incarnations of the game designers) coming home from a jungle expedition, just in time for watching Magnum P.I. on the TV. Unfortunately, the aerial is broken and you must help our heroes fix it. It very soon happens that Ben and Dan get abducted by aliens in the process. They (and you) must therefore navigate through alternative dimensions if you want to go back home.
– Real player with 9.7 hrs in game
A New Beginning - Final Cut
A New Beginning is a time-travel Point & Click Adventure game. While it opens in the distant future, most of the game is played in the more recent past. The game has a heavy political focus on climate change and conservation, but I think it fits it well into its narrative while maintaining a fun game environment.
The story is another post-apocalyptic disaster, this time, focusing on humanity’s inability or unwillingness to stop climate change, which leaves the future with a devastated planet that is about to be wiped out by a solar flare. In the future a team team is sent back to the past to bring about change to save the planet. You play alternately as two protagonists, Dr. Bent Svenson and Fay. Bent is a retired scientist who had been working on a sustainable energy source. He’s bitter and disillusioned over the slow progress of his life’s work and the sacrifices he made for his research. Our other protagonist Fay is optimistic and a bit naïve, but truly believes they can save the world. Overall, the story does sometimes feel a little preachy about the environment and climate change, but it is a pretty big element of the story and the motivation for the characters, so it makes sense in the context of the story.
– Real player with 57.3 hrs in game
I wouldn’t recommend this game, at least at full price.
To begin, A New Beginning is a point and click adventure that has some decent strong points. It has great music and background set pieces. Oftentimes, it is lighthearted and doesn’t take its ridiculous premise that seriously, and there are even some decent introspective moments interspersed throughout. It has a very likable main character in Bent Svensson. Its best points during gameplay come in the form of straightforward puzzles that require heavy critical thinking but do not require you to, in the words of another commenter, ‘have a telepathic link with the developer.’ A New Beginning is at its strongest when its newest puzzle doesn’t require heavy backtracking but still asks you to put in some decent legwork to find the solution.
– Real player with 12.0 hrs in game
Deponia Doomsday
Lotta mixed reviews for this game. Lotta negative reviews for this game. Some have valid points, some have invalid points. Thought I would write this review to clear up some things that I didn’t find to be true.
I assume that if you plan on buying this game, then you’ve finished the trilogy. So it would only make sense to compare it to the trilogy. Staight up, this is the worst Deponia game. And that makes sense. It was supposed to be a trilogy. Everything was planned out, the story wrapped up nicely, everything worked. But then they made this game after they though they were done, and it clearly shows.
– Real player with 30.3 hrs in game
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but this is Deponia at its finest.
See. I went into Doomsday with great trepidation. I didn’t know if I would like it… to the point I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to play it at all. (btw I’m assuming people who are reading this review have played through Goodbye Deponia).
When I heard about the fourth game, I thought that Doomsday was a CONCERNING idea… would Daedalic be throwing away what should have been the end of a story for more money?
I love the trilogy: its characters, its art, its music, its humor, its world, its creativity, its absurdity, its story. And… I especially adore the ending. Yes, many other fans got furious, but for me, it was the perfect way to end the story. It’s heavily foreshadowed, start to end, through the trilogy. It’s been set up with intention the entire time. It stuck with me, and I had to think about it for several days. The fact that Deponia Doomsday, at its core, seemed to be a story that would retcon the ending… looked to me like a way of erasing the ENTIRE HEART AND POINT of the trilogy’s storytelling.
– Real player with 28.5 hrs in game
Red Comrades 3: Return of Alaska. Reloaded
This game is AWESOME! If you liked any of the monkey island games or any old school point and click/combine you’ll love this game. It has a different feature of detaching items you have previously attached so you have to really think about it. It’s a long game at least several hours as you change areas so much. It has extremely funny humor that is thrown in here and there and funny situations. If you like point and click games then you need this one for sure! 9/10!
– Real player with 17.0 hrs in game
It’s not a bad game, much better than the second part, but not great either, I feel like at some places it was a cent short of a dollar, and some non game breaking bugs were left in the game.
With some places the puzzles made sense but even when you figure out the solution there was an iillogical way to actually apply it, for example
! the puzzle with the magnet where you had to shoot it with the bazooka, clicking on the magnet with the bazooka didn’t work, yo had to click with the bazooka on one of the players in the room with the magnet And some puzzles made no sense at all, like the way you had to get rid of the dog.
– Real player with 15.4 hrs in game
YU-NO: A girl who chants love at the bound of this world
Story time : The first time I’ve heard about this game was actually in the form of an anime around autumn 2019. Ironically, I happened to come across a game sharing the same title as the anime so I decided to play the game instead of watching the anime. No I didn’t play it directly but few months after, around April 2020 I was so bored and looking for a new game to spend my lockdown better. That’s when steam recommended this game to me and I remembered about buying it the previous year. It was just out of coincidence that I launched the game due to my pc not being able to run others I was planning to play. I came in knowing nothing about the game and thought it was just a meh Visual novel. However, the reviews on steam were pretty good. My first impressions when launching the game were kinda disappointing but that changed rather quickly when the fan service was introduced pretty fast. At that time I didn’t know what was going to happen and I for sure didn’t for see it becoming my best game of all time.
– Real player with 103.2 hrs in game
Yu-No is a excellent visual novel that is a must play.
Yu-No is a excellent visual novel. The story had me interested from start to finish. You play as a man named Takuya. Your father passes away in a rockslide incident prior to the start of the game. Shortly after, Takuya gets a package in the mail from his supposedly deceased father. The letter tells Takuya of history and the flow of time and about a gift to Takuya. In the box Takuya finds a device called the Reflector Device. Using the Reflector Device Takuya is able to transfer between time, space and parallel dimensions. After this happens, many mysterious things begin happening in the town the game takes place in called Sakaimachi. People begin getting killed by lightning bolts on the coastline, a construction company has begun a operation and rumors are spreading safety regulations are not being followed leading to people dying. Near Sakaimachi is a triangular mountain called Sword Cape that seems to be thousands of years old possibly holding secrets to the origin of the human species and world, a rumor of a curse is going around about a samurai mansion being haunted, rumors that the mayor of Sakaimachi is corrupt and much more.
– Real player with 86.9 hrs in game
Transpose
A challenging and rewarding VR puzzler, this is a beautiful game that runs on the Vive as well as the Pimax 5k+ with no issues. It allows smooth (controller-based) locomotion as well as teleport.
I’d compare it with the Talos Principle and Portal (but without the narrative) in that each puzzle exists as a separate room that you must move around in to complete a physical task. Each room is a large 3 dimensional space where you play with switches to change the direction of gravity, move platforms, etc. The main challenge is the time switching and interacting with past versions of yourself. There are 4 main sections with a different theme and each has around 10 puzzles. As a whole, everything feels connected and not a just a jumble of random puzzles. The puzzles are quite varied in complexity and often can be solved in more than one way. Some are pretty straight forwards while others took me multiple attempts and sometimes required you to think outside the box. It never felt repetitive and it took me 27 hours to beat the game.
– Real player with 27.8 hrs in game
I just finished playing through the whole game. As someone who prefers VR platforming and puzzle games rather than shooters, I enjoyed the experience for the most part, and would say this as a pretty good game with some flaws. I would have happily paid for it, and recommend it to anyone who enjoys room scale VR and problem solving.
The good
The game is designed around a time manipulation and replay premise, like you might have seen in Braid or The Talos Principle. Each level contains one or more starting locations and one or more slots in which you want to insert cubes. You pick a starting point, step out of it, do stuff, and then choose to either keep or discard your run. Kept runs all play in parallel, so you can do such things as throw cubes to your future self, or steal them from your past self, as well as manipulate platforms for your other selves. Later, different simultaneous gravity orientations are introduced depending on the starting location. These puzzle elements work well together and the levels are creative and interesting.
– Real player with 12.2 hrs in game