Bizarre Earthquake
Bizarre Earthquake is a good casual adventure game.
It has an original storyline compared with those in the “game industry” as a whole, including the adventure genre. No horror, no blood, no zombies, no vampires, no trashy things : nothing that will hurt your feelings. It’s almost family-friendly BUT not in a way that you’ll feel like you’re playing a children game, far from it. At least it’s not violent nor gore.
Admittedly it’s not realisitic all the way (especially in the end), but it’s a game, it’s not meant to be a hundred percent plausible and the main idea remains interesting, even though certain aspects of the plot lack some depth. But given the price it’s okay and it doesn’t take the fun away.
– Real player with 44.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Mystery Indie Games.
This little charming hidden gem of a quirkily adventure (accomplished by a one-person development team) deserves a closer look/review. The puzzle (and character/dialogue) design is interesting and funny, but can get very challenging (tricky/illogical) at the end. Although, some puzzles can be skipped.
The game offers you to switch between characters and take different approaches on how to solve puzzles/on how to proceed on the main “quest/topic”. The integrated hint/help systems provides additional guidance and support. The general behavior of the game is very slow paced and you need to be patient.
– Real player with 5.5 hrs in game
Intemporel
[FR] Par ou commencer ? Ce jeu… Une petite pépite. Je ne savais pas trop à quoi m’attendre quand j’ai commencé à y jouer, et j’ai adoré découvrir ce platformer assez atypique, avec un gameplay que je n’avais jamais expérimenté avant. Un jeu qui teste les réflexes (on m’avait pourtant prévenu !), mais qui a une capacité à transmettre des émotions assez incroyables. Des personnages intrigants et attachants (coucou Chester), une BO à tomber par terre qui crée une ambiance incroyable, une DA magnifique… Juste trop bien. Et puis le mieux, c’est que ce jeu nous pousse à nous dépasser toujours plus, toujours plus loin, et c’est très difficile de s’arrêter. Et même quand on pense que c’est fini… Ça ne l’est pas ! C’est un jeu qui est fait pour être fait plusieurs fois, afin de faire des choix différents, pour découvrir de nouveaux personnages, des morceaux de l’histoire, et surtout, les 28 fins différentes ! Petit plus pour les stats avec le compteur de morts, qui s’élève à 1 019 pour ma première run… Mais 6 758 sauts ! Impressionnant pour 8 ou 9h de jeu, non ?
– Real player with 9.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Mystery Indie Games.
Don’t be late in this race against time runner-plateformer game ! You can make your own choices and write your own story. The game got pretty intense and deep rather quickly and without noticing it you will be drown in the storyline. I would say the storytelling is clearly inspired by the cryptic Dark souls games so I would suggest you to be prepared to explore this world if you want to piece the whole story together and finally have the full picture. I can assure you it totally worths it !
Concerning the gameplay, I can only say one thing : Prepare yourself to split your brain into two parts, you will need it ! Sometimes you will feel like you want to rage and give up because you cannot get through a level, but the amazing soundtracks just won’t let you. When you will finally succeed, HELL YEAH it is so satisfying !
– Real player with 2.6 hrs in game
Detective Hank and the Golden Sneeze
A VN mystery solving game with four routes in the main game and 3 in the bonus. I liked the artwork mainly for its simplicity and minimal nature. This is easily a game to play when you want to play a quick game but don’t want to invest too much time in it.
My playthrough is longer since I had to take breaks in between my office work. The story is very simple and looking for clues amidst the conversation becomes easier on your second play through. However, by the time I was on route 3, it did start to become a little too repetitive - thankfully, they have the option to skip the dialogues until the next choice. Be warned though, you may potentially miss out on any different dialogues.
– Real player with 6.2 hrs in game
Read More: Best Mystery Indie Games.
This is a wonderfull visual detective novel suitable for younger gamers. The mysteries involve simple things from finding out who stole a cookie to who stole the Golden Sneeze from the museum.
Light hearted and funny mysteries that can be played through in a single evening.
I had a lot of fun playing this with my nephew and watching him solve the mysteries. Made babysitting the kid really enjoyable.
– Real player with 4.8 hrs in game
Frozen Mystery
Whack.
– Real player with 0.6 hrs in game
Sorry to say, but boring
Played through in 25 min.
– Real player with 0.5 hrs in game
A Sceptic’s Guide to Magic
Thumbs up! I liked the story about a skeptical scientist learning to cast spells in order to solve a murder. A lot of people won’t bother with this game since it was made with RPG Maker, but I thought the gameplay was okay. You don’t have to worry about grinding up through different levels, because there is no combat. Most of the challenge is in finding ingredients for the spells. Some ingredients weren’t easy to find, but if you get stuck, there’s a walkthrough available.
The achievements are pretty straightforward. You either get them for casting spells or for getting to an ending. There are a few different endings so you have to replay the final encounter a few times to see them all. In a nice touch, the game encourages you to save right before that point, so you don’t have to replay the whole game again just to see the different endings.
– Real player with 12.6 hrs in game
Author’s note: Every single ending was witnessed at the time the review was written for the sake of providing an informed opinion. (Every single achievement was also earned during that time as well.)
Overview
If the reader noticed this game was made by Pilgrim Adventures (the same amazing developer who brought us the Space Pilgrim Saga) then chances are the reader will be able to infer that A Sceptic’s Guide to Magic is a casual adventure game made with RPGMaker, has lots of interesting characters with detailed backstories, constant flip-flopping between adventures of a primary and secondary main character, and plenty of humor. These conclusions are not far off the mark, save for the humor being less frequent in A Sceptic’s Guide to Magic and the mood dramatically darker compared to Space Pilgrim Academy: Reunion. Set in 1993 in Birmingham, West Midlands (and not Birmingham, Alabama!) forensics investigator Lester Chapman is called to investigate a murder in an abandoned house involving a young man with evidence about that suggests witchcraft was somehow involved in the murder. After apparently hallucinating, Lester is taken off of the case and comes into contact with a young witch named “Fi” who is also interested in the murder, and the two team up with Lester reluctantly becoming a practitioner of magic, and ultimately gaining the ability to investigate the murder with methods that prove otherwise impossible without Fi’s assistance.
– Real player with 11.6 hrs in game
The Hex
I wholeheartedly recommend this, as I did with Pony Island. It’s a fascinating story with twists and loads of hidden secrets to track down. If you aren’t good at examining the meta layers, there’s plenty of people on the Steam forum who’ve done the legwork so you can see it for yourselves.
It’s hard to talk about the content without getting into spoilers, and since so much of this game relies on those, I think I’ll just say this: Not everything, or everyone, is what you see at first glance. A number of things within the game/story can be open to interpretation.
– Real player with 31.5 hrs in game
This piece of gaming art, a museum piece, that will take you about 6 hours to finish and that looks like it was made by a child manages to pack a lot of fun, a ton of creativity, extraordinary ideas, thoughtful writing, creepy moments and spectacular jabs at the gaming industry and gaming culture as a whole that the entire 3A “gaming industry” couldn’t produce if they hired all the world’s monkeys and resurrected Shakespeare to write them something.
I can’t write a lot in this review because the less you know, the better. The story is very layered through it’s 6 protagonists, residents of the Six Pint Inn, you get to play as, all the genre mashing it does, playing with different game ideas and ridiculing or celebrating gaming tropes in all of them and all the meta, social, gaming culture and industry commentaries it liberally sprinkles through its running time. It’s just entrancing and it’s extremely satisfying getting to the end of The Hex. I really, really can’t write more than this because it would do the game and you, if you decide to play it, a disservice.
– Real player with 12.8 hrs in game
Fantasy Blacksmith
Original Review before bug fixes (Scroll down to see edited notes):
Now…where to begin. Well, first question that may be asked, is this game fun? Short answer yes, long answer no with a but. This game does something rather unique that hasn’t been done before (as far as I know), it allows you to play as a sword smith in a fantasy world where your goal isn’t to slay the big bad overlord or to plunder deep dungeons so that you may retire on a pile of “phat loot”, but to become the “best” blacksmith (sword smith as you only make swords) in the land. You can design your swords from various parts, choose which materials to use and then forge them into mighty swords from myth and legend. Sounds cool, is cool, BUT and it is a big but and I cannot lie…
– Real player with 50.9 hrs in game
Last Edited: 3/19/2019 for Patch 1.0.3 (see bottom of review for updates)
A game with quite a bit of potential despite getting delayed multiple times with no notice at all to the customers waiting (including release day, coming out over 5 hours late without any word) but if you are not a fan of Early Access games with a lot of bugs I would suggest waiting until a lot more work is done on this.
Current issues I have encountered:
Physics are more of a suggestion than a law in the world of Fantasy Blacksmith. The first thing that happened after I started playing was picking up the Thermometer, testing the current temp of the bronze ingot in the forge, “placing” them next to me, and getting catapulted across the room.
– Real player with 40.2 hrs in game
Knock Harder
If any game deserves to be called a decent single player game that matches the joyful task completing mechanics that are so engaging in the popular Among Us game, then this would be it. Everything from the 2D graphics style down to the countless possibilities of different things that could go wrong while you are trying to figure out whether or not you were dreaming. The only way out of the dream is by death.
I had very similar dreams as a child… However in my case, I awoke from those dreams by taking off my shirt. Every time I would take my shirt off, I would be transitioned into a new dream. Take this same mechanic, but instead of it being a shirt, it’s a gun. It is a very enjoyable game experience. Part of what makes it so enjoyable is the many ways that the developer has added for you to figure out whether or not it was a dream.
– Real player with 41.3 hrs in game
Pros and cons are down below) Check out my vid here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5waCUQmzaM&feature=youtu.be
Pros:
1. The concept is really amazing and the game is so catchy! I literally can’t stop playing it (played the demo through and through (10 hours)) and finally the full version is out!
2. The artsyle is cool!
3. The full version is much less repetitive than the demo. More than 150 hints of a dream, different weapons, monsters, friends e.t.c.
4. The lore for the game is interesting. On the hard difficulty your goal is not only to survive bur to reveal secrets and figure out puzzles - very cool!
– Real player with 14.7 hrs in game
Fire Escape
I really liked this game and I thought it had a few strong points. Primarily, the voice actors and the motives for the characters were well thought out and added a layer of depth to the game which many AAA games lack. The concept of the game, the different windows and selectively learning information, was something that I had never seen before. My one improvement would be to add a function that (when not in VR) allows you to put the phone down when you are on a phone call. Past that I had a great experience!
– Real player with 5.1 hrs in game
Played it in standard mode as I don’t have a VR headset, but I’m not sure if having the latter would make a much of a difference. I was drawn in by the comparisons to Rear Window but the concept wears thin after a while because, as others have pointed out, there’s actually not much to do. Ultimately, there are only two endings to the story, with replay value heavily depending on how badly you want to collect all the achievements (meaning endless grinding and reloading of chapters).
Also, it made my computer crash a couple of times and once even made it inexplicably power off mid-game. I gave up trying to get 100% achievements after that. If you do really want this game, I can only recommend getting it when it’s on sale.
– Real player with 2.9 hrs in game
Locked
https://youtube.com/watch?v=jo9eNB1Ti_w
Neat little mysterious visual novel game which isnt too long, just about 20minutes for a walkthrough. Though there are a few different endings to get so there is some replayability at least. Artwork is good as i do like the design of the character Hoshi,.who is the focus in the game. Downside is that there were a few grammatical and spelling errors along the way, but at least it wasn’t so bad that it ruined the story/game. Also it is a pretty cheap game so at least that isn’t so bad for perhaps an hour to two worth of gameplay
– Real player with 2.4 hrs in game
A fun little game with a slight “twist”. The majority of other novels I’ve played had rather poor sound quality, “Locked” on the other hand focused on it. I found it refreshing. :)
– Real player with 1.3 hrs in game