Chuck’s Challenge 3D 2020
I had previously downvoted this game, citing many bugs and frustrations with the control scheme and the GUI. But after an incredible show of dedication from the developers in addressing and fixing (nearly) every one of my complaints in the “massive invisible” patch, I’m finally giving the game a thumbs-up. Very impressive, guys! Previously, I felt that this game might have perhaps gotten more attention and understanding as an “early access” title, but now it has earned its status as a finished product, one which can be built upon. I’m confident that the small number of remaining issues left will be addressed, and even if not, they do not detract too much from the game’s quality.
– Real player with 60.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best Kickstarter Difficult Games.
Huge nostalgic trip for me. When I was young (can’t remember when, when I was 8 years old or so I guess?), I used to play this game called Chip’s Challenge . It was a timed puzzle game with Sokoban elements. I never quite got to finish it as the levels grew too difficult for me near the end, but I remembered it fondly as one of the most favourite games I used to play. Hell, I remember being incredibly jubilant when my father helped me to beat Blobnet. Yeah, that infamous level with all the blobs.
– Real player with 24.5 hrs in game
Influent
At the time of writing this review, I’ve mastered all 420 words the game has to offer, and completed all the tasks on the ‘To Do’ list. I played the English version of the game, so that’s the one I’ll be reviewing. I also own the Japanese pack, but I haven’t completed that one yet.
One thing I’d like to start with is that ‘Influent’ never advertises, nor does it claim to make one fluent in any of the languages available here (and I double checked this). The description of the game here on the store page clearly states that it is a game focused on VOCABULARY ACQUISITION and PRONUNCIATION. It never claims to teach one grammar, syntax, conversation, or any other facet of language. I feel like a lot of people thought ‘Influent’ was a full-blown language learning tool, which it is not. The negative reviews here are unnecessary and uncalled for. Having addressed that, let’s move on to the actual content.
– Real player with 55.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Kickstarter Free to Play Games.
Before I begin my review of Influent, let’s all get real about language learning:
Learning a language is difficult. For adult learners, there’s no exception to this, and the how-to of language learning is a skill in itself. Becoming conversational, let alone fluent, in a foreign language takes significant time. Someone otherwise very smart once declared to me that they intended to learn Japanese in a ‘generous’ three days, so that they could read untranslated manga. Suffice to say, it didn’t happen.
– Real player with 36.3 hrs in game
Where the Bees Make Honey
Recommend on Sale if you are looking for a short casual to entertain you for a couple hours.
If you want an in depth story or hard puzzles you should pass.
Visually Where the Bees Make Honey is beautiful to look at so I decided to take a chance on it despite the reviews. Overall I enjoyed the game., it is pretty linear you can’t really mess up the progression. The puzzles were not that challenging but still provided me with a couple hours of entertainment with much better visuals than some other indie titles of the same difficulty. Making this an easy game to complete.
– Real player with 3.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best Kickstarter Experimental Games.
《蜜蜂何处酿蜜》，这游戏名乍一看还以为走错片场，来到了少儿科普频道。这款游戏类似于《纪念碑谷》，是一款唯美解密型游戏，玩家将会操作一只拟人化的蜜蜂通过不断改变障碍物的位置，收集几片蜂巢碎片，从而完成关卡。蜂巢碎片采用扁平化设计，与金币有些相像，并不断自传，样式如同完整的蜂巢被机器纵向切割而成，规整工艺化。
游戏不支持中文，仅支持英文，有女声英文配音和字幕。英文字幕不默认打开，需要玩家设置中勾选字幕选项。文本显示很舒适，速度不快不慢刚刚好，几乎能和配音想匹配。英文配音语气情感都很充沛，你可以当做故事广播来听，或许能够提高自己的听力水平。
如果你仅仅依靠商店视频就认为这是一款卡通风格的解密游戏，那么你就大错特错了。游戏刚开始采用模拟器类型的玩法，让玩家感受一位辛苦加班的女性白领的工作环境，使用第一人称视角进行一些寻找物品的简单任务。不过，这部分优化不是很好，部分3D眩晕玩家可能及其不适，游戏操作也不行。据笔者推测，开发者们设置此环节目的为了让故事完整度高些，自然引出因为工作压力过大，女性白领不知不觉中开始幻想童年的一些往事，从而不断地有逻辑地展开故事讲述。
游戏画风绚丽多彩，环境建模逼真，选用一些经典配音渲染环境，游戏没有过多的背景音乐。游戏关卡设计简单，稍微动下脑子就可以过关，不过唯一难点就是应付糟糕的操作方式。游戏操作键位非常简单，但是使用后的效果不如人意，有些蹩脚，障碍物忽高忽低，视角互转互停。游戏关卡环境有些粗糙，可能大部分精力花费在外部环境创建上，总体上而言，游戏性不高，游戏剧情有意思。
– Real player with 2.6 hrs in game
Adventures of Pip
As a supporter of this game since its first Kickstarter with high hopes and standards for the game, I’m thoroughly glad to be able to finally recommend this game to everyone!
tl;dr: The Adventures of Pip offers a tight and well-balanced puzzle platforming experience bolstered by its strong soundtrack, visuals, and mechanics but marred by a slightly weak story!
Adventures of Pip showcases, well, Pip’s adventure as he seeks to save the land from the evil Skeleton Queen!
The Bit Stream allows him to transform between 3 different forms/resolutions, from a one-bit boxel to a sword-wielding 16-bit warrior. Each form has its own benefits and drawbacks (as a boxel, Pip is slow, weak, but can float and greatly decrease the speed of his fall), allowing for many variations in gameplay as you evolve and devolve Pip to solve the many puzzles in the game! It’s an awesome concept utilized very well in conjunction with the tight controls and varying game mechanics!
– Real player with 21.1 hrs in game
$15.00 are they serious???
While the game is nowhere near worth that price, it is a very fun, occasionally challenging platformer to play. The story is that some evil queen has kidnapped the kingdom’s princess knowing that she has the ability to create pixels from nothingness. The queen hopes to absorb this power and reverse it, turning game characters in the kingdom back to pixels. The queen further wreaks havoc on the kingdom by taking 108 of its villagers and hiding them in a variety of 5 landscapes that have been divided into 36 levels for your gaming pleasure. Like always the Evil queen lets the power get to her head and for no reason whatsoever decides that she needs to turn everyone into a pixel so that they no longer are a threat.
– Real player with 16.5 hrs in game
Broken Age
Broken Age is a game that I haven’t yet sat down to distill my thoughts on. It’s the game that brought Double Fine to my attention and would eventually lead me to becoming a key member in the community. Between running Game Club , Bad Golf , becoming a volunteer moderator on the forums, and so on, it’s hard for me to think about Broken Age or the DFA as a whole without stopping to ponder the impact of those activities on my life.
– Real player with 36.3 hrs in game
My rating: 7+/10
Based on: two playthroughs (one full and one speedrun)
TL;DR: Double Fine’s Broken Age may have been one of the early success stories for the Kickstarter-backed projects, but it didn’t live up to the expectations of a long-starved fan of the point-and-click adventure games such as myself. Admittedly, that wasn’t entirely its fault: it’s a good game with a great production value for its budget, but it doesn’t exactly stand tall among the all-time greats of the genre, either. Not an instant classic, but very charming, it offers an intriguing coming-of-age story, memorable characters, excellent writing, art and sound design, but the second act is sort of a drag.
– Real player with 20.7 hrs in game
Jenny LeClue - Detectivu
Note: When I wrote this review, Jenny LeClue had no voice acting, which is why the review doesn’t mention it. The game recently updated with the voice acting. It is extremely good, and on this replay, I can’t imagine going back to no voices. It turned a great game into an exceptional one.
Jenny LeClue is positively adorable. The eponymous hero, yes- exceedingly so- but also the game itself is just overall incredibly charming.
As far as gameplay goes, it’s nothing you haven’t seen before. There’s a lot of conversations between Jenny and the various residents of Arthurton, as she walks about a 2d world, flicking switches and pushing boxes. There’s some neat investigation sections that will feel very familiar to fans of Danganronpa or Phoenix Wright.
– Real player with 22.5 hrs in game
I first learned about Jenny LeClue a few years ago through Adventuregamers, after it had already been funded on Kickstarter. I followed the progression of the game through the developer’s page and eagerly awaited the arrival of this beautifully animated detective game, led by a young girl no less!
I regret to say that even though the developers obviously put a lot of effort in this game, it’s poorly constructed in terms of gameplay, plot and pace. After spending 21 hours of my life on it, which I’m never getting back, I feel a bit outraged – so forgive my long review and negative rant. I really regret being a completionist since I otherwise would have deserted the game maybe an hour after trying it.
– Real player with 21.7 hrs in game
Last Labyrinth（ラストラビリンス）
Alright, I just finished every ending, I’ll do my best to edit this into an unbiased review.
First things first, the ‘endings’ are only endings in name. You’ll get your first ‘ending’ only a few hours into the game, having explored only a tiny fraction of the game’s rooms and puzzles, and each ending shows you a piece of the storyline underlying Last Labyrinth.
Pros:
+Katia is adorable, and while the game could have been played on a flat monitor, there’s something about looking a 3d Katia in the eyes and feeling like she’s present in the room with you that makes it 100x more stressful when she’s in danger.
– Real player with 19.3 hrs in game
IT WAS AMAZING!!
It really had the psychological layer of fear and I loved everything the game had to offer!
The feeling so helplessness as well as having command of the situation. Lovely contrasts executed well, together with the irie atmosphere!
Maybe it is a bit pricey but I am really glad I bought it!
I just wished the game was longer! I really want more of this game even if I would have to pay more for more content.
Update: I take back that is was short. Found more content if I kept playing after they showed the credits. There seem to be a lot more behind everything than I first thougt and I want to know all of it!
– Real player with 14.5 hrs in game
The Gallery - Episode 1: Call of the Starseed
WOW! This is why I bought a Vive! Full Immersion into a great story.
I would highly recommend this game to anyone who values the art of the medium that is video games. Is it a game where you shoot people’s heads off and blow up building for hours? No. But the Gallery is incredibly well crafted, thought through, and engaging by its own merit.
More than any other vr game thus far, I was struck with mystery and wonder.
A must have for you VR library.
As far as the negative views because of the price: please remember that these guys aren’t billion dollar production companies. Yes, the original price of $30 was pretty steep but I doubt these guys are pricing it that way just to screw us over or be greedy. They spent countless hours with a small team of creators (not a hundred of hired hands) and created something beautiful for us to enjoy. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want something back for that effort (so that they can keep working on more products!). You won’t find a good painting being sold for less than a $100, so why not support these artists with $30? I’m just so tired of people complaining about artist’s high prices because they are comparing those prices to mass production goods. They can’t compete with those prices! This is why good artists starve while we complain about “nothing good/original coming out.” Invest in what you want to see more of. That’s the only way they are going to be able to keep making good products.
– Real player with 6.5 hrs in game
The game is really well put together and is one of the most compelling experiences on the Vive so far.
But I simply cannot recommend the game based on the amount of content in the game. It took me a fair amount of time to solve the couple of (actually very simple) puzzles that are there, the time taken mostly by not noticing visual clues which lead to the solution of the puzzle. But even with this relatively slow problem solving the whole game lasted 90mins. Its like a single level of a game.
I fully understand the tiny market the developers are dealing with here and they would like to pay their own wages and invest in the future of the platform, but I have come away from this game feeling very impressed with the content that is there but unhappy with the amount of it.
– Real player with 3.9 hrs in game
Subject 264
Cool game but the puzzles don’t make much sense to me.
I found it a bit frustrating, as I got stuck for a long time not knowing what to do next.
I still haven’t finished, moved on to some other games.
– Real player with 93.7 hrs in game
You wake up in a room with no memories of your past and all you can hear are creepy sounds. The surroundings are also very creepy. You look around and you don’t see a way out. It is up to you now to figure out how to get out of the very first room with ‘Subject 264’ written in blood on the wall. You will explore your surroundings and interact with different kind of items and you will have to solve your first puzzle. When you do, you will be able to go outside this room and reach another room where you’ll have to figure out what to do next. While trying to escape you’ll be uncovering your own past and start wondering if what is going on is real or some kind of an experiment or something just in your head.
– Real player with 8.4 hrs in game
Resonance
There’s a really good story and some very nice ideas in here, unfortunately wrapped up in a game that trips itself with those same ideas. Definitely a case where less would have been more.
Starts off well enough, the introduction to the four central characters is well done with a couple of mini puzzles to work out and an introduction to the idea of timed segments. Unfortunately the game goes awry shortly after as we meet the most annoying janitor ever and he actively gets in your way with his incompetence.
– Real player with 44.5 hrs in game
I love point-and-click adventures. Usually the only chore with this genre is that sometimes there is no rhyme or reason to the puzzles, and one ends up clicking and combining everything possible in order to proceed.
This game has a similar problem with a twist. Most of the time it is clear WHAT should be done, and the actions make sense as such, but the user interface is so horrid it regularly is nigh impossible to figure out HOW to do it. In general, the game’s UI makes doing anything at all as hard as possible, and not in an entertaining manner.
– Real player with 15.5 hrs in game