Anachronism>
Detailed review:
This is based on my own opinions.
I will try not talk about the events and details of the story in my review. I think the less you know about it before you start, the more enjoyable it’ll be!
Context:
1. Value for money
2. Gameplay
3. Story
4. Graphics and Art
5. Nice-to-haves
6. Negatives
7. Recommendation to players (+18)
8. Summary
1. Value for money
For the price I payed, I have definitely got my money worth from this game. I have 40+ hours and enjoyed most of the game. I personally think anything below $2 that provides 40+ hours of fun is worth it, for sure!
– Real player with 44.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Interactive Fiction 1990's Games.
The game was nostalgic for me. The sounds of the computer, keyboard, floppy disk are sensational and the fact that the game doesn’t have music gives you a very good immersion. The story holds your attention and you want to know all the endings. I loved this game, waiting for the second one already! :D
– Real player with 7.8 hrs in game
CRYPTIC
Great game I’ve been enjoying and replaying ! After playing “Stories Untold” and “Open Sorcery”, I was looking for another game that would allow me to “type in” my way through the story ! It uses all your imagination to find your way, find the clues and avoid the “Game Over” traps. Original and excellent kind of game !
– Real player with 17.9 hrs in game
Very intriguing, solid, old-shool IF. This is only my first impression after 1h of gaming but my opinion is at moment very good. If you are a enthusiast of the text adventure genre like me this is a mandatory purchase. Thanks to Shoho Games to keep alive this type of games, I’ll buy all your next games!
– Real player with 4.7 hrs in game
Hadean Lands
First off - I very much enjoyed this game, and thought it was well worth the money. If you like interactive fiction, you should definitely buy it and play it.
Pros:
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Very well written - evocative descriptions.
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Zero instances of ‘guess the verb’. No puzzle succeeded/failed on obscure words.
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An extraordinarly helpful parser, which remembers item locations for you(once encountered), as well as how to perform various chains of actions(if you must repeat them), removing the tediousness of having to type long sequences of commands again and again (including ‘go to location ‘, if location was previously discovered) /location
– Real player with 189.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Interactive Fiction Adventure Games.
This is an exemplary model for what interactive fiction should be. I gladly paid for the DLC (which does nothing) to support the author.
I don’t want to give away anything, but I will say the core mechanic is alchemy, and the game is largely about experimenting to modify alchemical recipes in novel ways to overcome obstacles. It’s a very flexible text adventure, and it rewards clever forethought rather than random guessing. This is the sort of game that works best when you decide to put it down for a while and think about the puzzles to brainstorm ideas before returning. It’s a game you play even more when you aren’t playing it, in other words.
– Real player with 69.0 hrs in game
Ishmael
Ishmael was a weird experience, I’m still not sure how to feel about it.
First of all, I didn’t like writing, it wasn’t immersive for me at all. Tho English is very good, I didn’t notice any typos. The whole atmosphere seemed so distant, so alien. But then I actually thought that maybe it’s how it should be ‘cause the world described in the game really IS so foreign to me.
It’s the shortest novel I’ve ever played, just about 15 minutes long. We learn the story of a young Palestinian boy. The way children spend their free time playing outdoor games with just stones and sand wasn’t one bit gloomy for me. That’s practically how I spent my childhood growing in a Siberian village—playing snowballs, making snowmen, snow huts in winter, hopscotch or a great number of other games in summer. I actually believe, that time was great fun without computers, internet… But in the game the boy is bored. I didn’t feel related. Of course, when it’s war, occupation, death nearby it changes everything significantly.
– Real player with 0.8 hrs in game
a boring game with a very bautiful purpose.
i’d like to reward the purpose, ‘cause there is a deep meaning in this game, unfortunally, it’s not touching as it should be.
it’s actually pretty dull(even if short), it ’s just a glimpse of daily life for a child, used by the developer to make you understand how people see war, and how people are raised up to bacame soldier in middle easth.
– Real player with 0.7 hrs in game
Nightingale
A bit of background : I have played both acts of Shadows on the Vatican to the end. And I am also old enough to have played every Infocom text adventure when they first came out. So I was really looking forward to Nightingale.
Alarm bells rang when I found I couldn’t save whenever I wanted but I must say the branching system works well whenever you wish to change any earlier decision. I have managed to get a few different endings in one playthrough – and not a save file in sight.
I found the pacing of the text worked well, introducing a sense of tension that might not have been there otherwise.
– Real player with 6.3 hrs in game
Nightingale
This was a very interesting read; I was intrigued!
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Clean crisp user Interface
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Story: Not one I have seen covered
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Excellent music that reflects the tone and pacing in the scene.
The protagonist in this Text Adventure has a special talent. The Nightingale has been helping people for years with their paranormal gift. One person that the Nightingale helped is a professional assassin. That creates a dilemma.
This is a short-story set in the “Shadows on the Vatican” universe, but you need not have played them.
– Real player with 2.8 hrs in game
Silent Earth
The situation, characters and call for action are all set up well for the beginning of a great story. There are lots of nice themes being built that could take this game in so many different directions. An ambitious adventure for the characters and ambitious plot for the writers. Although, I only came to one of the endings. I hope they all sound as interesting as the one I ended with.
I hope the developers aren’t finished yet. This free game doesn’t feel like a full game but rather a test or set-up for a future, more detailed game. I think the plot and characters are interesting enough to go all the way. Please continue the story! A Mass Effect-like world would be fun if you have the budget! :D A point n click would work too. And, again, if it remains text-based (cuz text-based is cool, too), need to bring the readers further into the world and make the user experience nicer. The black screen does have a feeling of reading in a void. And I turned off the music half way through. I thought that the progression of the game, as it is, already does the same things as a point n click game such as being able to hover over words/objects to get more detail. Just needs more development and encouragement to keep going.
– Real player with 1.9 hrs in game
Silent Earth is a delightful and short text-based trip. The setting and overall tone felt novel to me, even in the generally overcrowded sci-fi space genre. The narrative is well-written in conveying each character’s motivations and connections with little reading necessary, while still allowing the characters to feel compelling in each interaction. In my first run, going at a slow pace to explore everywhere I could, it took me about 45 minutes to reach its conclusion. This game successfully left me thinking about it well after I had beaten it. Highly recommend.
– Real player with 1.1 hrs in game
Nothing To Remember
First off, don’t look at the hours on record, I may have left the game open between streams. Overall a decent visual novelish game. The main story events were good, the relationships were mediocre and made me wish I could ban Dick’s number so I could skip that part of the story. There is a critical choice later in the game that isn’t worded correctly and should be fixed, they either meant to add “don’t” at the beginning of the sentence or were was meant to be “weren’t” which I assumed and made that my choice.
– Real player with 96.8 hrs in game
Plot is very well written and character development is exquisite. More of a visual novel with major choices. It took me about 20 hours for an ending.
– Real player with 40.1 hrs in game
Death off the Cuff
fun game so far.
finding a lot of ways to mess up.
my favorite so far is deliveing a never ending speech on the virtues of proper mustache care while i stall for time, this cunning tactic enraged the murderer enough for him to reveal himself by resorting to violence.
sadly that violence was shooting me in the back but the important point is that mustache care can tell you a lot about a man’s character……..
– Real player with 3.5 hrs in game
Fun little premise, deceptively simple (there are less verbs than you might think if you’re an IF veteran). It’s a little fiddily to get on the right path at first, but overallI thought it was fun and funny and a nice little exercise in observation.
– Real player with 2.6 hrs in game
Fate of the Storm Gods
This is one of the most disappointing Choice of Games I’ve played.
For you to influence various plot pivots, you need very high stats. Not only does this not given you much wriggle room (if you feel a choice the writer has given to boost a stat doesn’t fit with your character); it also assumes you can also understand how each choice will affect which stat (which is often far from clear). All those kills any feeling of agency I felt I had at the most pivotal moments.
And on the less plot-consequential side of things, I was disappointed with the romance options. Apparently, there were very few opportunities to pursue anyone you might be interested, and they competed with other options (ones that often felt more sane in context). In other words, rather have a range of options to resolve of the choice of whether and how to enter a relationship, you had to choose between those triggers and options to learn more about the world. As you need to understand the setting to make choice to affect the plot, that’s a terrible trade-off to make your player make.
– Real player with 287.6 hrs in game
Fate of the Storm Gods is an interactive novel with a unique setting. Step into the shoes of a Weather Builder as you fight to stop the unbalanced weather anomalies. Pick your gender, your appearance and grab some hiking boots cause you have quite the journey ahead of you.
Plot: Fate of the Storm Gods had such an amazing plot- in theory. The Idea of being a Weather Builder sounded exciting and was an idea that I hadn’t come across prior. Sadly, in reality, it felt like what was being offered was a mismarketed story. Weather Builders felt far more like a form of Elementalists than divine beings that control the weather; yes, you do get to manipulate massive storms and throw around lightning but you also have control over fire and earth, albeit with the help of artifacts but still.
– Real player with 16.8 hrs in game
Jolly Good: Cakes and Ale
Tally Ho is one of my favorite cogs, and this is a delightful sequel. If you like Tally Ho (or, if you haven’t played Tally Ho but enjoy goofy hijinks, quick-witted dialogue, and falling in love with your valet), then I highly recommend this. I’m sad to have reached the end, but I’m eager to play it again.
To get into specifics:
First, I liked the romantic interests so much that I had a very hard time choosing between them on my first run–I was totally convinced I would go with one, but then fell for another, and that thought process was so nicely portrayed in the story itself that I stopped in the middle just to think about how lovely it was to have this problem at all.
– Real player with 87.2 hrs in game
I’ve played through to several different endings and many different paths (though most of my playtime is the game sitting idle), and this is an extremely fun, very well written game with a ton of variation. As others have said, this is the first story in a trilogy, and as such does not reach a firm conclusion, a fact that the game itself lampoons, but I really did enjoy the journey and look forward to future installments.
That said, this is another game that highlights how poor COG’s save system is, or rather how it doesn’t exist. A game with as many variations and complex storylines like this begs for multiple playthroughs, but the lack of the ability to save your progress when you’ve completed a run means that you will either have to play through it again multiple times when the next game comes out or wait until the entire series has been released to play through all three games as many times as you’d like. Probably a minor quibble, but I get the sense that a lot of people who really like these games, like myself, play through them multiple times to uncover as many scenes as possible.
– Real player with 43.3 hrs in game