Omen Exitio: Plague
Omen Exitio: The Plague is the first chapter of a game-book hybrid series developed by Italian indie developer, Tiny Bull Studios. It draws inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, and combines his chilling tales with historical events in the late nineteenth century. When I began playing this game, it reminded me of the choose-your-own-adventure books that I enjoyed reading as a child. Every choice you make impacts the outcome of the story.
Omen Exitio follows Dr. Huntington, a recent widower, who was unable to save his wife from cancer. He joins the army to leave his past behind. Haunted by the visions of his deceased love, he tirelessly performs his duties hoping to suppress the guilt consuming his soul. His destiny was changed forever when he receives a mysterious message. The message eerily reveals that his skills as a physician will be required on the journey that lies ahead. The message is anonymously assigned “a friend.”
– Real player with 10.2 hrs in game
Read More: Best Interactive Fiction Adventure Games.
My first experience with this genre of games.
It’s a lot of fun, obviously you will need to enjoy reading and relying on your own imagination. Despite this I still wished for more variation in the images. The images are used over and over again kind of to a point where they become somewhat irrelevant. I wish there was more variation and more going on in the images if they are to be used at all, since they are meant to be a way to also tell the story, especially since the story is given to you is such short sequences and the way that it is written I found it a bit hard to imagine the scene sometimes, as it’s written quite straight forward sometimes without much reflection or details described. I don’t know, just my personal experience and opinion with it. Sometimes the story also jumps significantly and I found myself a little confused. Time isn’t really described much in terms of the scene sometimes, especially when it jumps, at least not enough for me to really spark my imagination, despite having been to many of these places and lived in many of these places. Albeit, of course, not during this time lol.
– Real player with 10.0 hrs in game
The Terrible Old Man
I never write bad reviews for games, because, if I don’t like one, I usually just put it aside and move along, but I cannot, for the life of me, understand how this game is so highly rated. Am I missing something??
The dialogue was bland and I noticed some very obvious mistakes, which just resonates on the fact that they didn’t put much effort into it.
The portraits were terrifying in an absolutely hilarious way, but it feels unintentional. It gave me serious Legend of Zelda: Wand of Gamelon vibes. The movement was awkward and sticky and there was no. goddamn. plot.
– Real player with 0.9 hrs in game
This isn’t so much of a “reinterpretation” or “retelling” as it is a straight up clone of Lovecraft’s 1921 short story of the same name with a few unimportant details omitted. It says that it’s “based off” the 1921 story in its credits, but this game easily only uses 2% originality (if that) while the rest of the plot comes directly from Howard Phillips' own typewriter. I thought that this was going to more or less be a point-and-click adventure game with puzzles and various threads you can follow. However, there’s only one path to go down and only one ending that you can get. Sure, you can try all the bits of dialogue with each character (of which there are a few), but there’s only one selection per character that’s actually correct. You can easily find the correct answer by process of elimination. While you are supposed to go back and talk to people you’ve already annoyed or conversed with, this isn’t so much a “puzzle” as it’s something that players assume that they already need to do from the get-go (especially with point-and-click interactive fiction adventure games). Just so you know: I don’t care that this isn’t a puzzle game. What I care about is getting invested in a game whose plot from its original source material can’t just be looked up on Google in 10 seconds. If everything that’s going to happen can be revealed with a couple mouse clicks, I feel like something is definitely wrong with the game in question. I genuinely was looking for my expectations to be subverted, and they were not. Although I rather enjoyed the art design (the people’s faces were brilliantly scary and had a unique clay-like quality to them), it still wasn’t enough to keep me interested for longer than its expected 25 minute length. Maybe a longer game with more paths to go down could be worthwhile.
– Real player with 0.8 hrs in game
Theatre of Sorrows
OUR STORY BEGINS…
When a dark cult abducts his sibling, there’s nothing else Killian can do but to comply with their demands. In order to save his sister he travels to the mysterious island of Esha - a place forgotten by even gods themselves, where the unspeakable ritual is about to take place.
Join Killian and Eileen in a deadly journey through Esha and dive into dark secrets of its inhabitants; try to navigate your way through the unknown territory with only a handful of hints that might lead you to a dangerous discovery about things that should have probably been consigned to oblivion…
Because there’s something dark and unspeakable, hidden in Esha’s stormy waves.
EVER-CHANGING ISLAND
Esha will always be a bit different; procedurally-generated map, randomized events and branching narrative will allow you to experience something new in each run.
SURVIVAL THROUGH RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Explore different locations, gather things that might help you survive and be mindful of your own limits. Be careful, though, because every time you walk into an abandoned house, it might not be as abandoned as it would seem…
WIDE VARIETY OF MONSTERS
Sometimes the evil will take particular forms, straight from your worst nightmares… Encounter 20 unique monsters that will remind you of creatures from lovecraftian horrors and try to defend yourself from their attacks.
CUSTOMIZABLE CHARACTERS
You may not be able to fight, but that doesn’t mean you’re defenceless. Find and change your outfits, craft and equip talismans, learn about enemies’ vulnerabilities - all in order to survive.
MULTIPLE ENDINGS
Will you find the way out, or will you succumb to the darkness of Esha? The choices you make throughout the game will lead you to one of the five main endings.
UNIQUE SENSORY EXPERIENCE
Feel the despair of the main characters and the desolation of Esha through the combination of atmospheric graphics, music and narrative, inspired by the works of Lovecraft and other works of the cosmic horror genre.
Read More: Best Interactive Fiction Adventure Games.
Arkhangel: The House of the Seven Stars
So far I have read the equivalent of a 300 page book and I’m only an hour in. I don’t mind that there aren’t any voice actors. What bothers me is that every place our hero goes, he “finds” a stack of books and instead of going about his business, decides to pick each one up and read from it. I understand there’s a theme to the books, but why would you kick off a game with this much reading? Our hero goes into the library where there are about 20 shelves filled with books. I’m not exaggerating when I say that he picks a book from each one of the shelves and reads about 3-5 paragraphs from each book. Then he goes around and reads books on stands too. I love to read but today I decided to play a game instead of reading a book. Unfortunately, the game disagreed with me and made me read a book anyway.
– Real player with 15.0 hrs in game
Arkhangel: The House of the Seven Stars is a beautifully great haunting Lovecraftian game; okay let’s talk about the story.
It’s a cold wintery day as Michael Kearney is on a train with his wife Lily and their daughter Gabrielle as they head to their new life in the little town of Haven, where they can put all their troubles behind them and start anew.
But Michael has been having strange dreams about dark waters and an unknown ancient evil resting beneath the cold waves, what could it mean? Is it just anxiety or is it something else. Whatever it is if Michael is not careful it could destroy his whole world.
– Real player with 11.5 hrs in game
I’a I’a Cofflhu Fhtagnyaa
I cannot believe I streamed this train wreck. 10/10.
– Real player with 5.8 hrs in game
Art and char design is just adorable ; music and voice acting is quite nice and the is even a cute badge with quite nice emotes going with
Sadly the game is very badly translated and it’s sometimes quite hard to understand who is actually speaking (outside of the voice acted ones), they mixed up gender and such ; i think even google translation don’t do this
Take it in sales if you really want to do a peek at this game or understand chinese :p
– Real player with 3.6 hrs in game
Mythos Ever After: A Cthulhu Dating Sim
A very short uhm “Dating Sim” with a wide and eclectic cast of characters to interact with. TBH for me its was much more of a head scratcher than anything else. It was hard for me to really find and keep up with any real kind of story line, as there seemed to be several all playing out at once, with a steady rush of decisions to make on things that arnt really fully fleshed out enough to know exactly what you are making the decision about, nevermind guess as to what sort of out come any decision will have (in advance of making it that is, everything gets wrapped up in the end, even if you have know idea what you were doing as you played)
– Real player with 2.0 hrs in game
At Eve’s Wake
High-quality visual novel with multiple endings, fantastic graphic and sound component, and intriguing premise.
The Good Parts:
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Fascinating set-up of family ties based on cult-like faith, bloody competition, and something outright paranormal with overall dysfunction taken to the next level.
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Great writing throughout. It manages to introduce a complex fictional idea in a manner that captures attention and makes you ponder.
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Atmospheric world-building. There’s sinister feeling intertwined with some outright shocking moments. “At Eve’s Wake” isn’t horror in the pure sense of the word, but more in a psychological one, so it has a very well-done horror element burning its way through the game, sometimes on slow simmer, sometimes as a wildfire.
– Real player with 11.3 hrs in game
Ahhhhh I was so excited for this to come out and it’s finally here! I’ve just finished my first playthrough and it lived up to my hype, if you’re having any doubts about picking up the full game then please try out the demo and you’ll see what I mean.
-Gorgeous art and music, just a delightful atmosphere throughout
-A well developed and intriguing story of mystery, murder and mishaps
-An incredible amount of dialogue choices with a variety of endings seemingly possible depending on them.
I love visual novels and narrative-driven games, so I feel that I know what I’m talking about to some degree, and I say this- At Eve’s Wake is a beautiful and eerie story that deserves your attention if you’re at all interested in Lovecraft, mysteries, visual novels, or graverobbing. Trust me on that last one.
– Real player with 7.2 hrs in game
Fhtagn! - Tales of the Creeping Madness
My group of friends and I have been searching for a game to match “The Yawhg” for a couple years now, and the day of prophecy has come. I cannot recommend this game enough, as it became an instant classic for us. It’s fun to play solo, but the meat of the game is playing with 1-3 others. The core loop is simple to pick up, but difficult to master: pick a location, pick one of two known actions to gain stats, a random event (based on your location) happens which you need to resolve, then you pass or fail said event and move to the next turn. Failure is not punished so much as laughed at and, occasionally, rewarded.
– Real player with 17.5 hrs in game
Fun game! A bit hard to grasp at the beginning. I didn’t really like the offered tutorial. I prefer tutorials that unfold while playing. Furthermore it would be great, if the controller support was better. I was amazed as I used a mouse the first time and was able to get tooltips for the different stats.
Using a controller we figured it out by guessing. :)
Sadly this game isn’t much known, so there aren’t many mods written (although the ones that are out are hilarious and fun to play!)
Can’t wait for the update. We played with 3-4 players for 2 days and got most of the achievements (first time I was compelled to do that). But getting the same stories over and over makes it boring over time.
– Real player with 15.4 hrs in game
This Book Is A Dungeon
Wonderful storytelling. It feels like a mix between a text adventure and a choose-your-own-adventure book. And as a book, it definitely engages you and entices you deeper into the story.
Unfortunately, This Dungeon Is Not A Book.
I can definitely recommend this game for its story, and I’m happy about all of the endings, but there are several loose ends that need to be addressed before it’s a truly enjoyable experience. I started off really enjoying it but it got to a point where I had to push myself through the frustration in order to finish it.
– Real player with 4.6 hrs in game
I recommend this game only by the narrowest of margins.
tl;dr If you like dark stuff, and love reading, get this game. If you’re not much of a reader, your time is better spent playing something else, but definitely show this to your friends who do like reading.
The pros are:
The strange, macabre, and very dark world that you are thrust into is very interesting
The words are beautiful and truly resonate with the horrible things that they describe
The minimalist map is wonderfully helpful for when I wasn’t paying close enough to descriptions of where I was
– Real player with 3.6 hrs in game
Anchorhead
This is, hands down, not only my favorite piece of parser interactive fiction, but also my favorite Lovecraftian thing to ever exist. (Like most Lovecraft flavored things, it’s miles better than good old HP’s originals). If you’re here because whatever came out this week was… less than great at working with the source material, thematically you’ll enjoy this a lot more. The prose is gorgeous and unsettling, the puzzles tricky and sometimes spread out over multiple areas, but not illogical, and the town itself is my favorite character.
– Real player with 41.4 hrs in game
If you never really got into text adventures because you were too young back then to understand them. AND you jumped right into graphics adventures and dug those but find them a bit too easy theses days, then you should probably give this one a try! It works exceptionally well as a first text adventure experience when you have all the background knowledge of how a graphics adventure works and that a text adventure just gives you more options to interact with the environment.
Give it a few hours and it will suck you in for days and days to come where you unravel a dark tale around sensitive topics like incest and child abuse with a long history all nested in a town in New England named Anchorhead. It is so well written and illustrated that it really triggers your imagination much more than any modern game with graphics and sounds and all the other bells and whistles does.
– Real player with 40.5 hrs in game