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.
Developer: Outsider Games Publisher: Outsider Games Year: 2022 Genre: Adventure
Since AdventureGamers has decided to become a gambling slop farm and is slowly deleting all their old content (and was apparently stealing content from other sites before that anyway), I have decided to repost the review I sent to them a few years ago here. The key for the game was directly sent to me so I don’t think the site really deserves any loyalty since they didn’t do anything to enable this opportunity. It’s a good time to repost it anyway since the game just got a release on the Nintendo Switch
Throughout their ups and downs, adventure games have had a devoted following for decades, partly because of their willingness to tell stories where the players can see themselves represented in ways they may not in other genres. Jennifer Wilde: Unlikely Revolutionaries by Outsider Games continues this tradition by exploring themes of queerness that I rarely get to see in other games. Despite occasionally frustrating issues with the controls, Jennifer Wilde is a well-crafted adventure game that features a unique story and beautiful black-and-white art.
Jennifer Wilde tells the story of a young French artist named Jennifer Chevalier living in Paris in 1921. Suspecting that the recent death of her father was not an accident, Jennifer investigates her father’s apartment. After finding a locket in his room, she attempts to use her childhood gift of talking to ghosts to summon his spirit. She accidentally summons Oscar Wilde’s ghost instead, with whom her father had an affair many years ago. The two team up and travel across Europe to find the murderer and uncover a massive conspiracy along the way.
The controls, as in your typical point-and-click adventure, feature clicking on parts of a room to walk around, interact with an object, or talk to someone. I thought the speech text moved too fast, and the dialog controls didn’t feel as responsive as they could have been when talking with people, but there were various options that allowed me to resolve both issues. I also appreciated that this game let me play with a controller and found it a very enjoyable way to play.
The primary mechanic for solving puzzles is a fun innovation. Throughout parts of the game, you will come across obstacles, like a police officer not letting you pass a crime scene while they are doing an investigation. To progress, you must gather clues by talking to people and interacting with objects relevant to the mystery. Each time you get a clue, it shows up in your inventory, resembling something that looks like a comic panel. Once you get three or four of these, you must organize them in a linear order that recreates the sequence of events of the mystery you’re trying to solve. I had some issues with this mechanic a couple of times because I wasn’t sure if I was missing a panel or just putting things in the wrong order, but overall I thought it was a commendable concept and would like to see something like it again in the future. I believe some feedback, such as Jennifer saying a line about how that doesn’t seem like the right solution, would have helped me learn the mechanic and know if I had the wrong answer or wasn’t following the procedure correctly.
At first, I thought the game was too easy and linear, but eventually it opens up a bit more and introduces more challenging puzzles. You can switch between Jennifer and Oscar to solve puzzles due to their different abilities, which adds complexity. This never feels too difficult though, and I didn’t get stuck on any puzzle for too long. The game has an objective tracker that helps manage everything you’re investigating, so the process never gets overwhelming once additional goals are added. There’s also some nice variety in the types of challenges later on that keeps the experience from ever feeling tedious.
Jennifer Wilde features incredibly detailed 2D black-and-white artwork that often evokes a comic book style. This is appropriate since it’s based on a comic mini-series released in the early 2010s. Characters have speech bubbles when speaking, and captions appear on the page when describing new locations. The game reminds me of a motion comic; characters generally only have animations when walking, and other actions have a slideshow effect. It all works very well in-game and suits the comic book style.
Aside from the catchy, period-appropriate music on the menu screen, there isn’t much music in the game, and most of what you’ll hear are ambient sound effects that fit the room you’re in.
I was initially skeptical about the inclusion of Oscar Wilde, but I felt it was a good fit with the story they were telling. There aren’t many commercial adventure games that explore queerness, so I thought it was nice to see. I appreciate that this shows a kinder and deeper portrayal of Oscar Wilde than we usually see in media. He often just seems to be portrayed as some guy with witty one-liners. He shows a lot of empathy towards others here, which is also a rarity in a video game. I thought Jennifer was a well-written character, and I liked her interactions with other characters and the arc she goes through. At a few points, you are allowed to make minor decisions that don’t affect the outcome but help make it seem a little more personalized, which was a nice touch.
The core mystery is fine, but it felt rushed towards the end. It took me about 3.5 hours to complete, which usually would be the perfect length since I generally prefer shorter games, but I think I would have preferred some more time in the end to allow the plot elements to unfold more slowly. Where the writing shines is in the character development and the interactions between Jennifer and Oscar, and that is where the majority of the focus remains. Aside from some quirks with the controls and feeling a little rushed toward the end, Jennifer Wilde is a good adventure that explores themes you don’t see too often in commercial games. I enjoyed playing it, and I hope we see these two engaging characters in a game again soon.
Developer: Soft Not Weak Publisher: Soft Not Weak Year: 2025 Genre: Puzzle
Recently I played through Spirit Swap, an incredibly polished match 3 that I got a few months ago from backing it on Kickstarter. I had backed the game because the artwork looked great and I wanted to support queer games, but I was pleasantly surprised by how interesting it is mechanically. The game has a story mode that breaks into a dating sim and there’s powers you can use during the puzzling parts. The powers add a nice twist to the gameplay. When you configure blocks into specific shapes, like a diamond, you can use one of your three powers and those will have effects on your board and your opponents. Each character has different powers and you can also specify what powers you want. It’s a nice way to add some variety to this style of game, which I think has existed for 30+ years.
I love that you “complete” the story mode very quickly and most of the game’s story mode takes place “post-ending” and it becomes a dating sim. If I did have any criticisms, I guess it would be that it throws so many characters at you in a short time span that it felt a little tough having much of an attachment to any of them by the first time the game ends. Some of this is on me since I have been and will always be terrible at remembering names, but that and the lack of any major conflicts and drama in the game means that some of it blends together. I really wish it introduced them more gradually or cut one or two characters from the game, which pains me to say since I like them, but I think it was too much.
It’s also just a great looking game. The effects for the blocks matching and disappearing look nice and the character design and animation while you play is very well done. Everyone in this game is beautiful and actually in a variety of body shapes! It’s great to play a game, or honestly experience any art, that doesn’t just see only skinny people as beautiful.
The soundtrack is fantastic and I recommend both of the soundtracks available on Bandcamp, here and here.
The only other real gripe I had with the game is that there were some typos in the dialogue that I wish got caught. There’s a lot of text so it’s easy to see how it slipped through but it stood out.
The game got some criticism for the “everybody is beautiful but no one is horny” trope but it doesn’t really bother me with this game. I guess maybe because I don’t know if it would have worked if the game was more adult and had characters fucking in it? I don’t know, maybe it would have, what do I know. Usually it’s something I wish for more of as well but I’m not bothered by it here. This isn’t the same thing as what we see in basically every Marvel film. I don’t even know if I completely agree with the criticism to be honest. It would also be great if some of the people throwing the criticism around were covering the queer adult games that do exist. There’s quite a few and they’re great.
I’m one of those annoying people that played Tetris Effect 30 years ago and still goes “hmm this is a good match 3 but it’s no Tetris Effect.” but I really enjoyed my time with this game and it’s nice to finally have a Match 3 that doesn’t require me bringing up SNES emulation if I want to recommend it. Nice work Soft Not Weak!
Spirit Swap: Lofi Beats to Match-3 To is available on Steam, Itch.io, and Xbox
Poco is a short and free point-and-click adventure game released earlier this year where you are the world’s tiniest clown and have been kicked out of a floating circus, only to find yourself in the undergrowth below and must find a way back. From looking at the Kickstarter, it was a university thesis project that needed some additional funds to cover some costs and get it into festivals.
I was very pleasantly surprised by this one. I didn’t know of it at all until it came out and people started posting it in various Discords, but it’s a very solid point-and-click adventure. I love the music and art. The art sorta reminds me of late 90s games with pre-rendered backgrounds and 3D models, although these are illustrated backgrounds and look very nice. The movement feels great, which may seem like a weird thing to say about an adventure game but so many point-and-click games don’t get it quite right.
The game starts with you failing some clown activities through the form of mini games before getting kicked out of the circus, and more fair versions of these come into play later. I get the feeling they’re a little divisive but I think the mini games in this are actually good. The fishing one in particular was nice, short, and satisfying to play.
Overall the game is very silly and whimsical, but some of the background design is very dark. For example, there’s a series of “rooms” where you can see the skeleton of the dead clown and also need to enter its rib cage. Yet, I would still describe the game as “cute.”
The game consists of inventory puzzles that weren’t difficult and felt fair, with the exception of a minor amount of annoying pixel hunting. Some of the puzzles had nice rewards too like a musical sequence. It’s just a nice, little point-and-click adventure that should only take you 1.5-2 hours to play and I recommend it if you want an adventure game you can play in one sitting.
Billy Masters Was Right is a short adventure game inspired by 80s films like The ‘Burbs and has an aesthetic inspired by Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken, but does not use the same verb system as those games. This one does the standard left/right mouse button system you see in most adventures these days, with the left mouse button for using/picking up objects and the right mouse button to look at things. I’ve always been a fan of the big head character design of those games and it always makes me happy to see people make them. I even made one myself. It’s the first game I’ve played by Postmodern Adventures, who has made a bunch of adventure games this point and has moved onto making commercial games for a while now. It’s good stuff! All the puzzles felt very fair and while I have 80’s pop culture exhaustion at this point, I enjoyed it here and it fit with the style of game. It’s certainly not used as a “remember how much better the 80’s were?” and even has a little dig at Reagan. There’s one or two plot threads that maybe felt a little out of place to me, but it’s a nice little adventure game that will take you about 30-60 minutes to play through and I can’t complain about the Pay-What-You-Want price tag. I’ll have to play more games by Postmodern Adventures in the future.
Billy Masters Was Right is available as Pay-What-You-Want on Itch.io
I Don’t Think I’ve Walked This Stretch of Road Before is a short narrative game, about 20 minutes long, where you walk down a road while ruminating on your thoughts. The gameplay is rather simple, you walk down a linear path, sometimes walking around objects or through buildings while looking at objects from your past and reading your thoughts, but I really appreciated what the game was saying about its subjects like mental health, trauma, and cycles that you can break when you have children. I think a much worse game would have gone in a darker and lazier direction with its focus and I appreciate the game because as careful as it was.
And on a more superficial note, I just think the graphics are neat. The game was built with Gamemaker: Studio, which is an engine that’s not really meant for 3D games, and the Itch page goes into the weirdness on doing something like that.
There’s not a whole lot to say about this one. Treating my blog as a journal of all the commercial (and sometimes freeware) games I’ve played means there’s sometimes really short entries like this. It’s just a nice short game and I would recommend it if you’re fine with paying $2 or more for a short walking sim (complimentary). I also recommend hexcavator’s other games. B-Sides is a nice point-and-click adventure and Stay Home Vol. 1 is a toy where you play around with objects in a room and I wish we got more of those.
I Don’t Think I’ve Walked This Stretch of Road Before is available on Itch.io
Developer: Grundislav Games Publisher: Grundislav Games Year: 2004 (Deluxe version: 2006) Genre: Adventure
I just installed ScummVM on my new MacBook this weekend and have started loading as many games as I could on it. After seeing how many early AGS games I put on there, I thought it would be a fun excuse to revisit some of the games from that era since I have some nostalgia for that time. This includes the first game in the Ben Jordan Paranormal Investigator series. The first game just turned 20 last year, which is also a bit weird to see. I played the Deluxe version, which came out in 2006. I thiiiink it’s the first game by Grundislav Games? You play as a dude named Ben Jordan on your first case as a paranormal investigator and check out a series of murders of park rangers by a creature known as the Skunk-Ape. It’s a horror comedy series, which I don’t think you see too often in video games either.
It still holds up! The puzzles aren’t too difficult but don’t feel like a waste of time either, and it’s only about 60-90 minutes so you can easily do it in one sitting. Some of the puzzles make him seem like more of a sociopath than I remember, but I guess that’s kind of the whole deal with this style of adventure game. Plus it’s a comedy so it works in the game anyway. Obviously the developer would go on to do bigger and better things but I think some of the fun with revisiting these early AGS games is seeing how they got started. Even if they didn’t go on to make commercial games, early AGS games are fun to check out because you get to watch a whole community figure out how to make these after Lucasarts and Sierra collapsed, and the lack of polish in the art and voice acting is really charming to me. That doesn’t mean that I think it’s bad, it’s still lovely stuff and I think it’s worth playing outside of its context, but it’s a different kind of nostalgia than what you would get from revisiting a Lucasarts or Sierra game.
Ben Jordan: Paranormal Investigator Case 1 – In Search of the Skunk-Ape is available for free/pay-what-you-want on Itch.io
Developer: Studio Fizbin Publisher: Thunderful Publishing Year: 2021 Genre: Arcade
Say No! More is an arcade game where you are a new intern at a company where everyone says “yes” and must use your ability to say “no!” to change the world. I just played through this one with my oldest and had a good time. It’s a pretty straightforward game. You walk on a linear path, push a button to say “no!” whenever someone interrupts your path to ask you to do a mundane task, and continue moving. Sometimes you must charge your “no!” to clear your path but that’s mostly it in terms of “gameplay.” But I think where the game really shines is everything outside of that. The game features a gorgeous aesthetic influenced by PS1 graphics. I’m also always happy to see anti-capitalist and pro-union messages in games.
I’m also kinda doing the game a disservice by saying “you just push no and then keep walking.” In a very reductive way that’s true, but there’s so many custom options, including what language you say no in. It’s also just a lot of fun to watch the lengthy cutscenes as well. The game only took me about 100 minutes to play through but I think it would be exhausting if it was longer than that. I had a good time with it and it’s fun finding weird, short stuff like this in my backlog that I can play with my daughter
Developer: Mixtape Games Publisher: Mixtape Games Year: 2025 Genre: Arcade
Vaporwave Pinball is a new game from Mixtape Games. It really is what it says On The Tin. It’s a collection of pinball tables wrapped in a vaporwave aesthetic. I don’t know if there’s a whole lot more to say about it than that. It’s only $5 and that gets you 5 tables that are both fairly straightforward but also have layers to them. It’s good!
Ok, fine. Maybe I do have some more interesting thoughts on the game other than that. This is probably my ideal version of what a pinball video game should be like if it’s not attempting to be as accurate of a recreation of a real pinball table as possible. I enjoy the recreations of real pinball tables in Pinball FX but really bounce off their original tables, partially because they’re mostly grounded but then have a few fantastical elements. If you’re going to make up a table for a video game, go wild! This game has elements like the ball being teleported and the table morphing as you play.
The most recent episode of Quest Quest actually has a lot more interesting thoughts on this (cohost Ben approves of the game!) that I can’t really build on because I’ve never played Pinball Construction Set, but it apparently has a lot of similarities to that. Ben also pointed the line on the Steam page that says “Less for pinball simulation fans and more for chill, flow state pinball fans.” Which I think is a very accurate and fair description of the game. I wouldn’t recommend it for hardcore pinball fans but if you just want to chill out while playing pinball, I think it’s a solid recommendation.
Vaporwave Pinball is available on Steamand Itch.io. The post is based on a key sent from the developer.
