The Light Remake
I enjoyed this game. You start in an abandoned Russian facility that is in a state of crumbling disrepair. You explore the various floors and learn about what happened through a series of notes found along the way. Played from a first person perspective, part of the game is above ground and part is an especially dark maze-like underground bunker. You have the option of a flashlight and/or a lighter to guide you and your choice will have an effect on the ending you experience. The sound track enhances the feeling of being alone and, in the bunker, the sounds increased my sense of stress and panic as I kept circling in the dark.
– Real player with 7.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best FMV Science Games.
Nice walking sim, with a much deeper story and message than expected.
Short, but at the price, it feels worth it tome. On sale? Yeah, grab it if you like walking sims with very good visuals, moody and appropriate music and game audio, and a few relatively easy puzzles.
Take screenshots, or notes, you have no way to review notes you already read to see the clues they may offer. Puzzle solutions are not so in-your-face that they are totally obvious, many ore in notes or on walls.
Ran well enough on my MSI GS75 Stealth laptop (i7 9750/2070 RTX MaxQ/ 16 GB DDR4), though it did make the fans run up a wee bit. I expect the game will run slightly better on my desktop. No major issues, just a few visual artifacts here and there (some clipping and visible seams if I tried to find them), and the claw game was a bit of a PITa trying to pick up the item that drops from it (pushed the item away from the game machine, and had to pause the game and continue from the main menu to get the game to let me pick it up). So a few minor issues, no major bugs or glitches in my first playthrough.
– Real player with 5.4 hrs in game
Cibele
“If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.” ― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
There certainly is a lot to say about Cibele, good and bad with a cumulative total ending up being “the naivety of the superficial”. Cibele is so superficial, so excruciatingly ordinary and basic, yet so real in that manner; it ends up being naively beautiful. Wait a minute there, I will properly explain what I’m trying to say as the review progresses, I promise.
If we are to establish a definition, Cibele is the combination of a clicker game that serves as a placeholder for an MMORPG, and a collection of FMV scenes, telling the story of Nina and her online romance, Blake. The story is based on real life events, coming from internet personality, game designer and new generation punk poet Nina Freeman’s experience. The game retells Nina’s first love and sexual experience with a guy she meets in a MMORPG game, through some FMV scenes and a symbolic gameplay. We witness 3 separate scenes, observe ongoing events in Nina’s life through her computer desktop - mainly centering Blake/Ichi - and call it an artistic contemplation when it comes to an end in an hour.
– Real player with 1.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best FMV Female Protagonist Games.
One of my favorite horror novels, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, begins with an unforgettable dedication: “This is not for you.”
This game may not be for you.
However, if you spent your first years of college staying up until three in the morning chatting with online friends instead of going to parties, and if you have ever experienced friendship or love online, and especially if you have ever been a nineteen-year-old girl, this game is for you.
In Cibele you play as the MMO player Cibele (Nina in real life), an autobiographical version of the game developer herself, as she falls in love with another player, Ichi. Following in the tradition of other confessional genres, Nina Freeman uses her own old notebooks, fanart, chat logs, and, yes, lingerie-clad selfies to create a realistic history for her character. As a result, the haphazardly organized photographs, poem drafts, and archived personal websites on Nina’s laptop could easily have been taken, with only minor changes, from my own computer when I was a teenage girl.
– Real player with 1.3 hrs in game
Transference™
This game has a deep story clearly inspired in William Gibson and Phillip KDick novels where it shows what happens when science and ethics collide.
Transference is not a casual game, it’s complex and intellectual on the narrative and it plays with your mind at the point to turn everything upside down. Also, this is not a horror game, they are no zombies, critters, or gore like occurs normally in that kind of genre Also, you are not running around shooting everything because the gaming mechanic only focuses on exploration and puzzle resolving. I consider this one as a psychological thriller with some little jumpscares offered through sounds and visions.
– Real player with 3.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best FMV Horror Games.
Experienced on the Oculus Rift with Touch Controllers.
So I bought the game today, post-patch fixing all the reported issues with the Oculus. I am happy to report that I did not experience a single issue during my full playthrough of the game. It look me about 3 hours to finish the game, however, it can probably be finished in 2 hours. I got stuck on one easy puzzle that I thought was more complicated than it was. I then noticed a number near the laptop which soon made the answer obvious.
– Real player with 3.1 hrs in game
Yeli Orog
This is the first time I’ve posted a review but this is a new (and imo brilliant) game and I wanted to support it. Originally posted on AdventureGamers.com :
Wow! Just finished it in one sitting (more on that later). What a thrilling, psychedelic ride. That one(?) person could do this is truly impressive. Good puzzles, great storyline and amazing atmosphere. Very innovative.
There were a couple of bold choices made which I’m not sure about. They ended up working for me but may turn some people off.
– Real player with 2.2 hrs in game
Aargh! My kingdom! My kingdom for a save system!
This is a really, really interesting little game. The main thing stopping this from being a great little game is the complete and utter lack of a save mechanic.
It’s really not a good thing when a game that lasts well over an hour not only fails to provide so much as an autosave, but almost encourages you to rush the reading of long - though otherwise well-written - passages of text, by not allowing itself to be played over more than one session. I can’t be the only gamer on the planet who thinks they might get in a quick half-hour of gaming before bed; only to find that they’re obliged to stay awake a good hour beyond that, lest they be forced to start from scratch again.
– Real player with 1.9 hrs in game
Obduction
This may well be the best adventure game I’ve ever played. The Myst games, also by Cyan, are great stories with good games. Obduction is a great game with a good story. Just play it!
Let me explain why I’m so thrilled. I’m a huge adventure game enthusiast, but most adventure games have at least one problem to solve that has a stupid solution. How many times have you gone to the hints, only to find that the solution is stupid. In some cases, you didn’t know you could click on the little thing that looked like the background and was barely visible. In other cases, you find out that the game writers thought they were being really witty by having a dumb joke solution that nobody would seriously consider. Ha ha! In still others, you scratch your head and still don’t understand the logic of it even after you do what the hints tell you. Obduction had none of these problems. Every problem and puzzle was one that made perfect logical sense. I never had to go to the hints once to finish the game.
– Real player with 61.8 hrs in game
OVERALL IMPRESSION
I’m incredibly impressed by Obduction, Cyan has done it again! The game has the familiar myst-like feeling that brings me right back to my childhood when I first got to explore the Myst Island and I had no idea why I was there and what was going on, arriving in Hunrath has the exact same feeling. It also brought me back to taking my first steps in The Cleft and Minkata in Uru (even the footsteps sound suspiciously alike). Except this time things are alien, even eerier, even more beautiful, even more awe-inspiring, even more confusing.
– Real player with 44.9 hrs in game
Myst: Masterpiece Edition
I played and solved Myst many years ago, when it first came out. A friend of mine who had also played it a bit was looking for something to do while stuck at home and suggested playing Myst again. So we both bought it off Steam.
I was a bit shocked at how blocky and awful the graphics looked. I remembered it as a gorgeous, gorgeous game. But most of the puzzles hold up well and are still fun to solve. It’s still a nice point and click puzzle game, and I’m glad to have gone thru it again, but there are a few problems.
– Real player with 23.6 hrs in game
IMPORTANT! This, along with Riven, have been updated to use ScummVM. They now run excellently on modern computers, despite the lack of upgraded visuals. With this update, I fully recommend picking this up if you are so inclined.
In the pantheon of video games, few will stand as tall and defiant as Myst. The Miller brothers, Rand and Robyn, along with their development team Cyan Worlds (then known as just Cyan), created a truly remarkable game that has sent countless reverberations throughout the game-o-sphere (or whatever the hell you want to call it). Up their with the greats, monolithic and unsurpassable, Myst truly is out there and here to stay.
– Real player with 11.1 hrs in game
Stories Untold
Minimalist Horror at it’s best
tl;dr
Stories Untold is a short and somewhat taxing game that combines different horror settings and it’s 80s aesthetic to become something greater than the sum of its parts, in more ways than one.
Main Review
Stories Untold is a ‘mostly’ text based made by No Code, an indie game studio based in Glasgow. I thought of grabbing the game during it’s free giveaway on the Epic Games store (the giveaway is still on as of this writing). However, last week I found this game among the backlog in my steam library. I bought this game for a very low price a few months ago and forgot about it. I finally got around to playing the game over the past couple of days and have completed the game. I am also not the least bit disappointed that I had to pay to buy a game that is being given away for free.
– Real player with 6.6 hrs in game
Overall Score: 8.0 / 10
| | | |
| Quality | 8/10 | Solid, budget indie game
|
| | | |
| Performance | 8/10 | _Performs smoothly overall, but deficiently
executed / optimized, rare 3D sequences_ |
| Utility | 7/10 | _No bugs or crashes; has Steam cloud save;
no way to save and quit during an episode_ |
| Controls | 9/10 | Clever usage of outdated retro controls; |
– Real player with 5.3 hrs in game
realMyst: Masterpiece Edition
realMyst is a very simple yet sometimes complex puzzle game that was made back when home computers were just starting to find their way into households. In other words, don’t expect there to be a huge amount amount of gameplay here. If you buckle down, you can beat this game in one sitting. That’s not to say that there’s no challenge to it as there certainly can be at times.
For the most part, you’re playing to find out about the unfolding story. This game used to be a point and click adventure. It seems to have upgraded to being a free roam First-Person which can ultimately betray any new comers to the game leading you to believe there’s more to the puzzle than what there really is. You can now roam in unchecked corners and behind bookshelves which you could never do in the first place so if you’re stumped on a puzzle, it’s best not to start checking every nook and cranny. To be safe, they’ve added a feature so that you can use the point and click system which at times can be pretty difficult to use since there’s multiple things to click on so you have to be pretty precise about what you want to inspect.
– Real player with 17.4 hrs in game
“I know my apprehensions might never be allayed, and so I close, realizing that perhaps the ending has not yet been written.” - Atrus
And thank the great Guildmasters of The Art because this series went on to produce many other excellent games, Riven being the height of exceptionalism.
In a time before the internet I played this game and I remember being so frustrated at points. Rather than Google, we had friends who would hang out together and connect their brain processing power to try and find solutions to the puzzles. There really was nothing like this in the history of computers. This hypercard, photoreal, puzzle game with live action cutscenes and fully immersive worlds. It was jawdropping back then. If you are new to the game it may lack the punch it had from 30 years ago but it is still an incredible game today and while I understand the graphics weren’t up to a lot of people’s expectations in this remastered edition, I found the game to be very much at home as a first person free roamer on the Unity Engine. If you are a puzzle lover you will soon understand why the game is referenced so much and you will see how modern puzzle games have adapted the levels, environments, puzzles etc for use today in games like The Witness, Quern, The Room and ASA.
– Real player with 14.7 hrs in game