I saw Devo last night in Detroit and it was great! I had seen them 15 years ago in Ann Arbor but that was basically an eternity ago and they haven’t been in Michigan since then. They’re also coming back in September with the B-52s, who I had seen before about 8 years ago and were also very good. I’m surprised they’re here twice in one year after almost never coming here, that Ann Arbor concert was also their first time here in 15 years, but I think both bands are very close to wrapping things up so maybe they’re trying to hit all the places before stopping.
One day I’ll write about that Devo adventure game from the mid 90s. It’s an incredibly frustrating experience because I love Devo and the studio that made the game, it’s by the same folks that made The Dark Eye and The Residents: Bad Day on the Midway, but has a couple bits that kind of ruin the whole thing. Even removing the timer from it would do a lot to improve the game.
Oh well, people are probably more interested in blog posts I liked reading and not ramblings about Devo Presents: Adventures of the Smart Patrol, a 1996 adventure game that got poor reviews at release.
Unwinnable also had this very good article on the allure of the summer reading program. I am currently in TWO reading programs for different libraries. You’ve probably already seem my post on Ann Arbor’s Summer Game. Libraries are the best and so are reading programs. It’s not too late to join your local library’s summer reading program and get cool prizes.
It just made me happy to see Terry Cavanagh praise a mod someone made for his game VVVVVV. When game devs get excited about fan art, mods, etc that other folks have made for their game it’s the best.
Martijn Frazer has a very good post on Dutch snacks. I never even heard of most of these and want to try making some. I’m not a big mayo person (sorry) so that limits things a bit, but there’s still quite a bit for me to try.
That’s it for this week! There’s actually a bunch of blog posts I haven’t read yet just sitting in my RSS feed reader so next week may be longer. I just think blogs are neat!
Developer: Wales Interactive Publisher: Wales Interactive Year: 2023 Genre: Interactive Movie
Unfortunately I am on my FMV bullshit again, and that means looking through the games I have access to and playing as many as I can until I get burnt out on the medium and go back to playing normal games. This time it’s Mia and the Princess Dragon, an interactive movie by Wales Interactive. I’ve played one or two of these by the studio before and didn’t really enjoy them because I had felt you were making branching decisions with no idea how they would go, and then you get a bad ending and have to restart the whole game with no ability to skip what you had seen before. This was how Late Shift worked, a game a lot of people seemed to like from Steam reviews but I thought was pretty bad. However, I am sucker for FMV and Doctor Who, and this is a game starring the 8th Doctor, Paul McGann, so here I am playing this interactive movie.
On a side note, I will take every opportunity I can to recommend the 8th Doctor audio dramas by Big Finish. They’re fantastic and the Doctor gets to actually have character development. Storm Warning is the first one and a solid place to start, but Chimes of Midnight is fantastic and also a good first one. If you live in the US, you can also check out some of these for free through the Hoopla app if your library has it.
Seriously, it’s really good!
You play as Mia, a barmaid working at a dive bar, when a woman who is unable to speak English shows up and is on the run from a group of thugs led by Paul McGann. Pretty quickly it starts throwing decisions at you where you make binary choices. It will show you stats when making decisions but doesn’t give you context for it. You can pause it to see what the stats actually are. I never could tell what these were actually used for and as far as I could tell, they did not seem to have an impact on the story.
Some of the choices made no sense or felt meaningless. Early on in the game you can escape the bar you’re trapped at and leave with the mysterious woman, and get out before the more people arrive, and then your character decides to come back after eating and gets stuck in another situation and it felt like some very important context was missing because we weren’t there. At another point a cannon is aimed at someone and you can choose between warning the friend or stopping the person at the cannon. After you make this decision, someone walks up and stabs the friend anyway. I know this is something that is just going to happen with interactive stories that use FMV, because you can only film so much on a small budget and have to make compromises at certain points, but when it’s so transparent that the choice does not matter, don’t even offer it.
I’m dumping on the game quite a bit but there were parts I liked too. The game features a decision tree, which shows you what scenes you’ve seen before and the whole branching layout of the game. I actually liked the decision tree a lot. It’s probably a big spoiler if you looked at it before playing and it probably destroys the magic of how the game functions for some people but I found it to be really interesting. It showed me that there was more going on than I initially thought and was less linear than I had assumed. It was just interesting to look at and see how one of these games is laid out. The game actually lets you skip scenes you’ve seen before, unlike Late Shift. So I could actually replay the game without feeling frustrated. I will bag on Late Shift every chance I get, sorry. It also didn’t sort the choices into a good and bad decision. Well maybe it did a little, but it mostly tried to sort the game into two different but hopefully interesting choices for you to pick.
Mia and the Dragon Princess was also a lot lighter and more fun in tone than that game. It knew what kind of story it was and just felt like it was trying to have fun. The cast was perfectly fine. I’m sure it was a paycheck job for Paul McGann but he was fine. This wasn’t a Dennis Hopper in Black Dahlia situation.
So would I actually recommend it? I don’t know. I had a better time with it than some of the other interactive movies by the studio. It felt a lot sloppier than some other Wales games but also a lot less frustrating since the choices weren’t funneled between good and bad and it was easy to replay the game to try other branches. So far I feel like my impression with the studio’s games, the ones they’ve developed and weren’t just the publisher on, is that the ones that don’t take themselves too seriously are more fun to play and are maybe worth considering if you see them in a bundle or on sale and know that you’re getting yourself into An Interactive Movie that will last you an hour or two and that’s it. It’s not really a ringing endorsement but I’ve played worse ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Mia and the Dragon Princess is available on a variety of platforms you can find on the developer’s site.
If you can believe it, it’s a Friday once again. This one is short. Maybe I missed a ton of big announcements or people are just holding off from releasing games during a Steam, or both. That’s fine, there’s still quite a few games that came out this week.
Video Games
Don’t Eat the Cat (Itch.io) is a free Bitsy game where you make an Important Choice in a video game.
Dino Sort (Itch.io) is a cute and free puzzle game made in PICO-8 where you sort dinosaurs into groups.
Quantum Witch (Steam) is a 2D fantasy adventure game heavily built around making decisions and multiple playthroughs to see how the game’s story changes.
Project Silverfish (Steam) is an open-world immersive sim with horror elements that just entered Early Access and may or may not be furry adjacent (I don’t know! I don’t know shit about anything). It looks very neat and maybe I’ll play it when I can stop being a baby.
Ruffy and the Riverside (Steam) is a 3D platformer, maybe one of those that counts as a collect-a-thon. I just really like how the 2D character art looks in a 3D world.
Tabletop RPGs
Break the Law (pdf on developer’s site) is a short uhhhhh roleplaying game that the dev linked to on their site about ways to subvert the system.
cutestpatoot had a birthday and celebrated by releasing a new game. Mixed Feelings (Itch.io) is a tabletop rpg that you play by making mix cds and playlists.
I am a big fan of Cezar Capacle’s solo ttrpgs and there’s a new one! Mausworn (Itch.io) is a ttrpg that combines the solo ttrpg mechanics with the Redwall and Mouse Guard inspired game Mausritter.
Developer: Digital Pictures Publisher: Digital Pictures Year: 1994 Genre: Arcade
Unfortunately I have the FMV bug again so I played through Corpse Killer, a rail shooter where you are a marine dropped onto an island to stop Dr. Hellman, an evil scientist who is bringing the dead back to life. On your quest you meet a woman reporter, who becomes your love interest at the end, and Rastafarian man who drives you around the island.
For the most part, the game is just rail shooter sequences where digitized sprites of people dressed as zombies walk around the screen and either try to get close to you or throw stuff at the screen. You do this for about an hour and then you’re done. They try to add some variety by giving you some powerups and choosing the order that you do the levels, but you have to do them all anyway so it ultimately doesn’t matter. For the most part you just repeat this sequence of levels and then fight a final boss and the game ends. One level type has you using a dart gun to shoot the zombies, I think to be stealthy. It’s not fun. There’s some optional side missions that give you a little bonus cutscene. They tried! I think there’s only so much you can do when a team films a bunch of zombies running around and then you’re told to make a rail shooter with it. I think it could have still been more fun to play by making the enemies feel less like bullet sponges and eliminating all the situations where there was an attack that was impossible to dodge.
Obviously the FMV is the reason why anyone would play this. Since I played the remaster from a few years ago, all the digitized sprites are now in a higher resolution and it just looks weird to me. They’re all much more crisp than the background they’re walking on. I think the original game actually looks better in a way, because the background and zombies are at the same quality level and it fits together better. I do like seeing the cutscenes at a higher quality than what it originally shipped at on the Sega CD. I’ll admit that I am a giant baby and some of the zombies creep me out a little, especially when they do the jump scares in front of the screen. I am not proud of this.
I wish I had enjoyed watching the cutscenes more. The tone is right, they’re intentionally doing a more campy approach, but there’s just not a whole lot going on other than the brief moments when you get to see Vincent Schiavelli do something as the evil doctor. It’s clearly just a paycheck job for him but he’s still trying to do something with the limited material he has and is the most fun to watch. I was surprised at how uninterested I became in the other cutscenes. I love garbage but they were mostly very boring. As you can guess, a game about voodoo and zombies may not be the greatest when it comes to race, even if the villain is a white guy. It could have been a lot worse but it still sucks.
The game then ends with you shooting zombies in front of a blurry photo of Vincent Schiavelli’s face and then it cuts to a scene of the woman reporter in a bikini at the beach, after she’s spent the entire game flirting with you. I guess they knew their market for this game. After the credits, it ends with a memorial to Vincent Schiavelli. Well, ok.
It’s not a great game and it’s boring, which is probably the worst thing a game with FMV can be. There isn’t even any gore. I understand why that’s not happening on a Sega CD game, especially after the whole Night Trap thing, but it’s still funny to see in a game with so many zombies.
Since it was the rerelease of the game, at least it has a lot of bonus stuff. The behind the scenes stuff is fun. I was surprised by how many videos were made and preserved since the making of this game. It’s goofy that you have to buy them with points that you earn from playing the game, but you can unlock everything after a single playthrough. At least it gave me these gems from someone interviewing the cast.
Talking with the lead actress: “Do you think kids will like this game?” “I think it’s going to be fabulous”
And interviewing Vincent: “Do you have a favorite moment in the script?” Laughs “What are you talking about?”
I get the impression he didn’t think very highly of the script but he’s very nice to the makeup crew while they work on him so there’s that. He did do at least one other video game though, one of the Dune RTS games. I didn’t realize the game had Bill Mosely as one of the soldiers until I watched the behind the scenes stuff.
There’s documents like a Corpse Killer 2 design doc. It looks like Virtua Cop is referenced in this one. There was also a pitch for a Cold War inspired Corpse Killer ‘53. I just think it’s funny they had multiple sequels in mind as they were making this one. Again, it’s fascinating that all this stuff got preserved when you see that other companies like Sierra basically threw out everything when they closed. I think this part of the remaster is great.
The remastered version also adds a new level where you shoot 3D models and also sprites of the two founders of Limited Run Games. It’s bad and I don’t know why they added it, other than to insert themselves into the game. It’s optional and just exists for points so it’s easy to ignore.
This is probably too many words about a rail shooter for the Sega CD. It’s not good but I’m glad that the rerelease has lots of bonus stuff because mediocre games should be preserved too. I don’t know if I would recommend actually buying it since the game itself is very tedious and Limited Run Games as a company is…well…..not great, but at least they didn’t half ass it?
Corpse Killer is available on Sega CD, Sega CD 32X, 3DO, Saturn, Windows, Macintosh, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch.
Probably goes without saying but fuck war. No war with Iran or anywhere else. End the genocide in Palestine. Leave people the fuck alone. What the fuck. I don’t know how to seamlessly transition from all that to what I’ve been reading lately and just like using the beginnings of these and the indie game posts as my check in/diary, but there you go.
I’ve been reading Alex Rinehart’s blog, which has recently had interviews with ttrpg game designers like Aaron King and Jess Levine. I didn’t even think about how you can just have interviews on your blog but yeah, no shit? Anyway, now that I’ve interviewed two librarians for my grad school class, can I talk to you? (points finger towards the screen)
Rascal had an article today about how DriveThruRPG delisted a game because of its anti-fascist politics. I stopped buying anything from DriveThruRPG a long time ago because it’s a visual nightmare but the site sucks. I’m not going to tell people to not sell their stuff there because it’s the biggest site for ttrpgs, but please make your games available elsewhere. They have a history of crappy decisions like this and that 30-50% cut for selling your pdf is ridiculous.
Unwinnable had a good article about the recent RoboCop game. Ultimately I still ended up enjoying it, but agree with everything this article says in addition to the game being too safe and basing a lot of its beats off Robocop 2, a movie I don’t like that much (it has its fans) because it’s too similar to the first movie. It has its moments but still has the stink of Frank Miller on it (I’m sorry, I am a Frank Miller hater).
And finally, I’m just happy to see erysdren doing a dev log.
This is my first summer participating in the Summer Game at the Ann Arbor District Library and I’m hooked! It’s a yearly event organized by the library, and the 15th one in its current run, where you can get points through a variety of activities and use them to get prizes like shirts, little toys, stickers, etc.
Activities to get points can include:
Entering codes you find around the city on signs at buildings, front yards of people participating,
Codes can also be found at events held by the library
Getting badges, which are challenges like finding specific items in the library’s catalog and plugging in info from newspaper archives, which I believe will be used to help the library later.
And of course, reading
It’s turned my oldest and I into point goblins and we see a code on the side of a bus or at the top of a building and lose our shit. We just started a week ago and she already has the points for the flamingo stuffie at the shop that opens in the middle of July, so anything else is just a nice bonus for her. I’m hoping to get a nice t-shirt and poster. It’s just a really nice way to get you to explore the library’s branches, the city of Ann Arbor itself, encourages reading, and educates people on everything the library has available for checking out.
If you live in or around the city of Ann Arbor, I cannot recommend it enough. You do not need to be an Ann Arbor resident. I’m not, and I was encouraged to join by the director of the library. Many of the activities are virtual too so you don’t not need to drive into the city every time you want to participate.
First I’ll do some self-promo and mention that I’ve made a Steam curator page. I don’t know. It seemed like a fun thing to do. Still the same goofy website name I use here. I probably should have come up with a better site name years ago but then sometimes I think, no, websites should have goofy names like Happy Puppy. I also made a similar list of things I’ve reviewed on Itch.io except you can’t follow Itch lists! That should be something you can do IMO.
Ok, self promo over. Here’s some games. If I missed anything, feel free to mention it in the comments. Self promo is absolutely welcome too!
Video Games
Games To Get Excited About is a little festival organized by Alpha Beta Gamer on Steam. I discovered some neat stuff through there and maybe you will too!
Dreamsettler, the sequel to Hypnospace Outlaw, has been canceled and some of the developers will need work soon. You can read more about it in this post on BlueSky. Really sad to hear about this one and hoping things improve for everyone there soon.
There were a few games zines this week! ChoiceBeat (Itch.io) is a free zine about interactive fiction and visual novels while Adult Analysis Anthology (Itch.io) is a paid one about adult indie games.
Cell Sword (Steam/Itch.io) is a Descent-inspired by where you fly around inside a human body and blast away at anything threatening it. I enjoyed the demo for the game from a previous fest thing and I also strongly recommend the dev’s previous game Liberation (Steam/Itch.io) if you love open world sci-fi flight sims that have an approachable learning and also love classic British science fiction tv like Blake’s 7.
Tower Wizard (Steam/Itch.io release coming soon) is a short incremental game where you help a wizard construct a giant tower.
Korter 1996 (Steam) is a first-person point-and-click adventure where you explore apartments and solve mysteries. It’s described as an exploration of loneliness through adventure games. The Steam page has a demo too if you want to try it out.
Parallel Experiment (Steam) is a two player cooperative adventure game where each player is a detective that must communicate with the other player to solve puzzles.
Mushroom Musume has been on Itch.io for a while but it just got a Steam release! This is a game where you raise a mushroom spore into a woman and make import decisions that affect her. There’s a demo on the Steam and Itch.io pages.
10S Forever is another game that has been on Itch.io for a while but now has a Steam release. It’s an arcade game described as a Tennis Hell.
the Devil rais’d the storm is the third game this week that was on Itch.io but just got a release on Steam. It’s also ok to just buy games on Itch, where they get a bigger cut from sales. This one is a point-and-click adventure/visual novel where you are at an outpost on a remote planet.
Cast n Chill (Steam) is a cozy fishing game featuring beautiful pixel art where you just relax and fish. No secret horror elements or twists here. You just fish!
Bone Fire Effigy (Itch.io) is a short first-person horror game set in the woods with art inspired by the PS1 aesthetic.
Espirito Delusion (Steam) is a short rpg containing a dungeon full of puzzles and bosses and inspired by Brazilian culture. The Steam page has a demo.
Devil’s Liminal (Steam/Itch.io) is a visual novel in Early Access about a woman that is being hunted by a hungry ghost and two mysterious girls that have shown up claiming they can help her. As you would hope for a game like this, the price for the game is $6.66.
No Way Home (Steam) just looks like a very nice twin-stick shooter that just got a port from mobile platforms. It’s by the folks that made Moving Out 1 and 2.
The River (Steam) is a short point-and-click visual novel about the afterlife featuring some very nice black-and-white art. I discovered this one through a post on Buried Treasure.
Leaving Home (Steam/Itch.io) is a first-person point-and-click adventure where you navigate a series of rooms in an apartment and do puzzles. I recommend watching the trailer because I think it looks very nice in motion.
I would also like to thank Lucas for recommending the recently released games Squeakross: Home Squeak Home (A Picross-like with a mouse), The Explorator (first-person shooter with very nice 2D animated art), Bioysque (horror action rpg), and Autopeli (free driving arcade game in the browser). Always feel free to recommend games by others or your own in the comments!
TTRPGs
Today is Free RPG Day. Check out your local tabletop game store to see what deals and giveaways they’re doing. I also see a lot of folks on social media giving away their games. All of the ttrpgs on my Itch page should have free community copies anyone is welcome to take.
Break Time (Itch.io) is a solo ttrpg based on the show Severance.
The Invisible Labyrinth (Itch.io) is a game for 2-5 players about branching timelines, uncertain futures, and escaping what seems inevitable. It’s a hack of Microscope and I’m Sorry, Did You Say Street Magic. I’m a big fan of Morgan’s games and you should check the rest out on their Itch page like Memoirs of a Barbarian.
Crowdfunding
Take Us North (Kickstarter) is an adventure/survival game by Anima Interactive that follows the journeys of migrants and asylum seekers on their way to cross the US-Mexico border
Pilgrims is a short adventure game by Amanita Design, the folks who made Samorost and Machinarium. You play as a guy exploring a land so you can get the resources you need to get on a boat. The hook of the game is that each playthrough is very short and you come across a variety of puzzles that have multiple solutions, so the game requires multiple playthroughs to see it all. These playthroughs can also have different solutions based on the people that have joined your party. I’ve played through the game a few times and I was shocked by how different my playthroughs were. The game is only an hour long, which is great, and according to my Steam achievements, my playthrough was very different than the one I did three years ago.
The game uses a deck of cards to represent the inventory items and people in your party, and the deck grows and shrinks in size and you gain items and people, or use them and they leave your deck. I think the card inventory mechanic is great. It’s a very easy and quick way to see everything that is available to you without having to open a separate window. Switching between characters that drop in and out of the game through your playthrough is a fun mechanic too. I really enjoyed seeing how each character would react to puzzles and NPCs.
Since it’s a game by Amanita, it features the excellent artwork and sound design that you would expect from their games. I really appreciate how so many of their games have a different art style but also feel like something only they would make.
Anyway, if you like the studios other games, you’ll enjoy this one too. If you’ve never played a game by this developer, consider giving it a shot. It’s fairly inexpensive and goes on sale a lot, and it doesn’t take long to get through but you’ll probably want to play through it again one or two more times.
Pilgrims is available on computers, mobile platforms, and Nintendo Switch. All of these are linked to on the developer’s site.
Amazon: Guardians of Eden is a point-and-click adventure styled after pulp serials and adventure films from the 1950’s and earlier. You play as Jason Roberts, a man in search of his brother in the Amazon rainforest after hearing his brother was attacked, and the adventure grows into something much bigger from there. This one had been sitting in my backlog for a while, and I decided to finally play it when I saw that the Adventure Tuesday streams were going to play it next and wanted to go through it before any of it would get spoiled for me. I thought I would enjoy this one because it was developed by Access Software, the developers of the Tex Murphy series, and I also love cheesy FMV, but it may have been one of the worst adventure games I’ve played in a while.
One of the biggest issues with the game is that it just feels bad to play. It’s a point-and-click adventure but walking around by clicking barely works, so you need to use the arrow keys to move around. That’s fine, I’ve played plenty of other adventures that do that. Movement is an incredibly frustrating experience though. Your character is constantly getting caught on territory or cannot walk around the rooms that you would expect. It gives you a limited area to walk around in, but you don’t actually know what spaces you can walk in and what you can’t.
The game also feels bad to play because everything just moves too slowly. The game constantly does fade-ins and outs in scene transitions that just last too long, every pop-up box describing something hangs for a few seconds longer than it should and you can’t skip them, and the death scenes also take far too long. I don’t mind deaths in adventure games. I even think they can be funny when they frequently happen in games like Space Quest. However, whenever a death happens in this game it plays an annoying siren and the screen slowly flashes “Shock Warning” three times before it finally shows you the death image and description that again, lingers too long before you can load your game. For some reason the game dumps you to the parking lot screen near the beginning of the game with all the inventory items you had. I’m not sure why it does this. The game is unplayable if you are in this state, so you need to reload it anyway.
You will see this a lot as the game is also filled with timed sequences, sometimes there’s timed sequences inside of the timed sequences, and there’s not really any way to figure it out other than through failure. I’m not against learning through failure, but it becomes painful when you have to keep seeing a tedious sequence every time it happens. This game also really loves to only allow one character to do specific actions during the timed sequences, but they don’t tell you that. They just give vague descriptions of how an action doesn’t work, and then you try it with another character and it will suddenly work. Some of the scenes are very violent too and will show someone covered in blood after you lose. Again, I’m not opposed to this in theory but I don’t think it fits the tone of this game.
The game constantly tells you to move closer to objects. I’ll be standing next to an object and it will say to get closer. At one point I had to clip through the game’s graphics and walk on a table, so I could pick up an item. In the screenshot above you can see that I’m attempting to pick up an item that is exactly one white pixel and I’m standing right next to it. This was not good enough and I had to stand on top of it to pick it up. The item in question were cigarettes and if I forgot to pick up this one-pixel item, it will lead to a softlock later. The game is filled with many opportunities for softlocks that you don’t see until much later.
The softlocks, pixel hunting, and bad controls unfortunately hurt the puzzles as well. Puzzles are difficult to solve because the room art is ugly and everything blends in together, making the pixel hunting even more frustrating than usual. Puzzles are often very finicky with how you interact with the solution so even if you have the right idea, the game gives you the impression that it’s wrong. For example, one part of the game wants you to put a gas cap on a jeep. Ok, so you would pick it up, right? Incorrect, if you try to pick up the gas cap on the ground, it will give you a message saying your character has no interest in the gas cap. You must “Use” the gas cap to pick it up this time, so your character will pick it up and put it on the jeep. This is despite the game just telling you that you have no interest in the gas cap.
Another fussy puzzle is one that wants you to use a coat hanger to break into a car. You have to grab the correct specific hanger in a closet lined with them that all look the same, or else you get a message saying the hanger is attached.
I wanted to like the FMV in this game more but a lot of it is very flat. The main character, Jason, is so incredibly dull and generic. You get to have a second playable character later, Maya, and she’s not great either, but at least I liked her more. I think if anything, the actors should have gone even bigger, but I can’t really fault them that much when they have the script they do and it was a brand-new technology that everyone was trying to figure out. To some extent I even wish it didn’t have FMV because once you leave the office building at the beginning of the game and go on your adventure, half the characters you run into are some sort of racist trope or another. I guess it’s not surprising that a game from the early 90’s that’s inspired by adventure serials would be filled with this kind of thing. It just sucks and it’s a huge bummer to keep seeing as you play. It’s all very weird. It’s a game that feels very ahead of its time technically in some parts, like the FMV, and at the same time it feels like the game is barely holding together because I was constantly running into bugs, frustrations with the controls, and lack of descriptions when trying to use objects.
Here I am, clipping through a table so I can grab the item on it
Even if the game didn’t have these racist tropes, it would still be tough to find anything good about the writing because the game essentially has no interesting ideas. I will give the game this, the serial format is a lot of fun. The game is broken down into chapters and each one has a nice little intro and cliffhanger. I think this format works really well and wish they leaned into the pulp serial nature more. One issue is that it doesn’t commit to a specific type of serial. It is going for more of a Cold War-era vibe at the beginning with references to Communism and a robot security guard in one puzzle at the beginning, and then all of this is dropped as it becomes a jungle adventure story once you leave the office.
Unfortunately, I think most of this part is very dull and feels like busy work. You’re supposed to be on the run from a guy you never really see much and be on the search for Amazon women, who you don’t see until an extremely brief part at the end of the game. Most of this game is spent doing very tedious sequences like stealth sequence, doing the equivalent of side quests in the jungle, or arcade sequences where you ride a canoe down a river. So much of the game feels like filler and then you’re done. There are so many more interesting directions with this they could have gone in than just going down rivers and investigating spots to see what happened at places you already saw in cutscenes. At least it has a pro-environmental message at the end? It’s all very frustrating because I think the game becomes much more interesting at the very end when you get the change of scenery and new characters, but it’s so brief. At least you fight a giant ant. The giant ant looks very good.
The canoe sequences are absolutely miserable. The controls are terrible and you have a massive hit box that is bigger than your canoe. If you touch a single rock, you get the fail screen I mentioned earlier that goes on for too long. In addition to this, you’re supposed to take one of two branches at various points and if you get the wrong one then you fail. The correct sequence is given to you before you start the canoe section, meaning you write it down and look it up as you play. I’m not actually sure if you get the right sequence in the third and longest canoe section though. I did all three so I could say I 100% the game but skipping it is an option. There’s a button in the top left you can click to skip the arcade sequences. It’s like they developed all of this and then realized in testing that people hated it so they added the Skip button as a fix.
Why did this room load with one character standing on the other?
The audio for the game is odd too. The music itself is perfectly fine and some of it is very good. The game keeps choosing to use a cheerful jingle you hear in the office at the least appropriate moments though. An important character is introduced and then immediately killed off and I think it’s supposed to be emotional but doesn’t feel like it because it plays the office jingle. It plays the office jingle when people are shooting arrows at you. The game loves this song.
I’m probably being a bit unfair to the game. This is a lot of words to say that a game that’s over 30 years old isn’t good, and it’s not even a game that anyone is really talking about. But a lot of the frustration comes from it being created by a developer that I like who should have known better, and the reviews for it. Access Software was very successful with the Links franchise and would go on to create some of my favorite adventure games like Under a Killing Moon and other Tex Murphy games after it. Reviews at the time praised the game. I assume it was because of the FMV novelty, because the game is filled with so many faults that Lucasarts and Sierra were not doing. I can be very critical of Sierra at times, but at least they nailed the pointing and clicking part of a point-and-click adventure. Their games felt good to play, even if they could sometimes be loaded with design faults. The reviews for the game on GOG are no surprise. It’s people complaining that the criticisms of racism are by people being too sensitive and generally praising a game because they remember liking it 30 years ago when they were children and haven’t revisited it since then.
So would I recommend this game? Well no, probably not. You could maybe watch a stream of it or play one of their later and much better games like the Tex Murphy series instead. If you want a pulpy adventure, go play Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis or Flight of the Amazon Queen. Both do this thing much better and the latter game is even free.
