Developer: Calligram Studio Publisher: Calligram Studio Year: 2024 Genre: Adventure
Phoenix Springs is a neo-noir point-and-click adventure game where you play as a woman in search of your missing estranged brother. I knew very little about this game going into it, other than it being developed over a long period of time, but picked it up based on really liking the art and it ended up being one of my favorite adventure games from 2024. It’s hard to explain more about the story, partially to avoid spoilers but also because it’s a very surreal story told in a non-traditional way, but I actually liked that a lot. I was talking about the game on Mastodon and Andrew Plotkin (who liked the game) described the game as “Philip K. Dick took the good acid,” which I think is a good description of the game’s story. Some people on Steam were critical of not full understanding the story but I liked that.
Since the game is a detective story, the game has a really interesting mechanic where you are basically using ideas and memories as inventory items. I loved that you’re using these “items” in a way that you would like an inventory item. There’s a lot of interesting side investigations as well that don’t advance the main plot but do reveal more about the world. There’s also a lot of red herring thoughts that aren’t used and get crossed out once you’re out of an area that is no longer relevant.
If I do have any criticisms, I do thing the last section of the game is too big and aimless. I had felt like I was doing the adventure game thing where I just try every item on everything and repeating that a bit. It was a little frustrating since the rest of the game moves as a pretty fast pace. The game even includes a builtiin walkthrough which I think is nice.
I think the voice acting also deserves a shoutout. It’s all narrated by the same woman and it has kind of a more deadpan or monotone delivery, but it works really well. Even the dialog from other characters is voice acted from the viewpoint of the main character.
I just think it’s a really solid mystery and think it’s worth a look if you want an adventure game that is willing to experiment a bit more.
Developer: Bioware Publisher: EA Year: 2019 Genre: RPG
Anthem is an online action roleplaying game where you play as Freelancers, basically adventurers in big metal suits with jetpacks, that must stop some evil folks from taking controls of the Anthem of Creation, which is a mysterious force that has created most of the advanced technology in the world. I started playing this one after EA announced the game was going to be shut down for good at the beginning of 2026, however it turns out that the game was no longer for sale and only accessible through EA Play, where it was only available for the next month.
I kinda didn’t know what to think going in. It was my first Bioware game in something like 15 years and I think my first AAA game in a while too, outside of Nintendo’s stuff. Bioware doing multiplayers shooters is also just not what I want from them and why I never bothered with ME3, since at release that relied on you having to play those bits for that best ending or whatever was going on.
The game is a bit of a mess but for the most part I had a good time. The flying and shooting feel great. I don’t know if I’ve played a game with a better jetpack. It was technically very impressive to me too. I think some of the design of things in the world falls a bit flat. None of the designs of things like the suits were really that interesting to me. But the effects and creation of that world look nice when you’re zooming around in a jetpack and the modeling and facial expressions are all well done. I forgot how expensive video games can look since I usually don’t play that many expensive ones, so it’s a weird change for me to play one where you can feel tons of money being dumped into one and for things like famous actors who pop up just to voice a couple lines.
The shooting feels good too. It all feels good! It’s just that it all becomes pretty repetitive. Generally you fly to a place, shoot all the bad guys in an area, and repeat. Sometimes you grab some Important Things in an area and bring them to the glowing thing in the center of a region. This is generally how the missions go. I’m making this all sound kind of awful but I still enjoyed it. I think this is where the “It’s a 7/10 game (complimentary)” thing comes in. I actually think there’s two types of 7/10 games. There’s the kind that are your experimental games, like early 90s French DOS Games that takes lots of fascinating swings that don’t always work, and the other kind being pretty safe games that are kind of messy or boring at times but can still be fun to play. I felt like Anthem falls into the latter. Once you’ve played for a few hours, I feel like you kinda “get it.” But I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. Well, maybe it is if you bought it at full price for $60. But I didn’t mind as a one month of EA Pass thing. Sometimes I just want kind of a mindless shooter that has a nice jetpack.
I can’t really blame people for being critical of it in reviews though. There’s never that much roleplaying that happens or a whole lot to mix it up, which is kinda why people go to Bioware games. Once in a while you do some dialog choices but they aren’t especially interesting and I found some of the characters to be irritating too. The game’s plot at a high level is an interesting idea but it never goes to any directions that I was really into. The small storytelling details are great though. I liked things like the codex and in-game mailbox where you get emails from other people and spam mail. You’ll also find little bits of story by exploring the world and maybe finding little things like a list of passengers on a crashed ship, shopping lists, or a recipe. I loved all of this! It sounds like fluff but this is the kind of stuff that makes the world feel more like a real place. You’ll occasionally overhear bits of conversation between two people while walking around the world, maybe in an alley or hanging out on a balcony, and I wish there was more of this too. The hub world you walked around between missions really could have used more of this to give it more life.
I think I’m frustrated by this game because it never develops a strong enough identity and doesn’t justify being an always live game to me. I think a lot of people would feel very differently if it was a single player game with instanced coop. The game never allows more than four people in the world in an instance and never in the hub area either, so it all feels extremely unnecessary other than to say “Well, EA wanted a live service game so here it is I guess.” There were only a few times where I would come across another player, who would stop for a moment and help me shoot stuff, but that was it. There were times I got to play with friends but again, that could have been handled in a way that doesn’t make this a live service game.
The game was delisted from EA Play yesterday, meaning it’s no longer available to play for me. This is a bizarre decision to me because the game is still playable to people who bought the game until January. Why not let people subscribe to EA Play for the next few months for an exclusive game and make some more money from that while the servers are still up anyway?
My understanding is that the production was a bit of a mess, with a lot of bad decisions being made at the executive level. It’s so unfortunate because you can tell that a lot of care went into this game by the people working on it and were hampered by these bad decisions. There are moments of brilliance that come through when it’s not fighting against all the directions the game was being pulled in during development. I still had fun playing it and it’s so unfortunate that it will no longer be available for folks to play in a few months unless people figure something out in the next few months. I know StopKillingGames is a whole thing but this game came out years before that started and why I think that movement is poorly thought out is a whole other mess.
Anthem is no longer available for sale and not playable anywhere.
Developer: House of Tomorrow Publisher: Netflix Year: 2018 Genre: Interactive Movie
Bandersnatch is an interactive episode of Black Mirror where viewers make decisions at key points to determine the outcome of the story. The episode is about a young man who is developing an adaptation of a novel but feels he is starting to lose his grip on reality as he develops the game. Through various points in the story you are offered a choice between two options and each one will lead you down a different branch. I wasn’t very impressed with the options offered and felt very railroaded during the whole thing. That’s probably part of the point of this thing and the story it’s telling, but it also just kinda meant I became bored with the idea of it all pretty quickly. Often when people criticize Black Mirror, it’s for making really basic statements like “what if technology was bad?” I don’t think this is always the case but it certainly felt like it with this episode, while feeling very smug at the same time. I’m not a fan of Black Mirror in general though so this may have been something I was never going to enjoy. There are many other games that do a much better job having meta commentary about choice in games that you can play instead. However, it does get some points for the Jeff Minter cameo.
I guess it doesn’t really matter that much about how I felt about this game. It was delisted earlier this year and as of this writing, I don’t believe any of Netflix’s interactive movies are available anymore. It’s a big shame because I’m not opposed to the idea of them and I heard some of them were good, but Netflix will dip its toes into games and then get distracted and decide it’s not really worth the focus. It feels like they’re going through something similar with their mobile games offering and dropping a bunch of games from their service on there as well. I can’t imagine it helps that no one knows Netflix even offers their games.
It’s not all doom though. People have figured out how to preserve these interactive movies and with some searching online, you can find the preservation efforts pretty easily. Even though I didn’t enjoy Bandersnatch very much, I’m glad it was preserved and will be available for people to check out for years to come.
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is no longer available on Netflix but is easy to find through your favorite search engine.
Developer: Christina Stone-Bush Year: 2019 Genre: Solo TTRPG
THIRST and HUNGER are two tabletop rpgs created back in 2019 for a game jam where the rules must fit on a business card. Both games are erotic solo ttrpgs about a vampire biting a human, but each game is played from a different perspective. The games are played with a deck of cards and something to write your notes with. You answer some prompts at the beginning, and each card that is drawn is another prompt to describe what is happening or how you are feeling. The game ends in a way similar to blackjack, you must keep drawing cards if your total is under 14, if it is over that then you may stop. If it over 21 then the game automatically ends. The two ranges where the game ends also have different prompts. Both games are very short and should only take a few minutes to play, but can be replayed many times. The layout of the games is great, with everything cleanly organized to fit on a business card without feeling cramped. The rules are very concise due to the business card limitation, which makes it very easy to pick up. As everyone knows, vampires are hot and this game succeeds in its goal. In addition to the games being effective at being erotic, I just think it’s mechanically interesting to use the Blackjack limitation of 21 for a ttrpg. It inspired me for my game Navigator, so it’s also very important to my own creativity as well.
While they have been delisted on Itch, THIRST and HUNGER are still available for download on Itch.io
Developer: Because Because Games Publisher: Because Because Games Year: 2020 Genre: Adventure Game
Detective Boiled-Hard is a traditional point-and-click adventure that came out in 2020 that I was also curious about but didn’t get around to playing until now.
You played as Detective Boiled-Hard and must investigate the death of someone to see what happened. It’s a very breezy adventure game. The puzzles are easy and it took me just under an hour to complete, but I had fun playing it. I had been motivated to play it after playing a lot of Reality-On-the-Norm games lately and this always reminded me of the early 00’s AGS freeware era. That could maybe sound like an insult to some people but I really mean it in the nicest way. I love that everything, including the voices for all the characters, was done by one person.
Since the game itself isn’t difficult, most of the fun comes from all the jokes packed into the game. There’s plenty of dialog choices that are just there for additional jokes and plenty to interact with in the game. It’s just a very light and silly adventure game that I think is worth a look if you want an easier and more relaxing adventure to playing in an evening or have a fondness for that AGS era I mentioned. I also just found out there’s a free mini-case of all new material if you want a demo or played the original game and want more, so I’ll need to check that out next.
Detective Boiled-Hard / Case File – Death of the Space Dino Hunter is available on Steam and Itch.io
Developer: Jason Godbey Publisher: Jason Godbey Year: 2019 Genre: Adventure Game
Discolored is a 2019 first person adventure game created by Jason Godbey that I recently picked up because I saw the recently released sequel pop up on a few sites and was in the mood for a Myst-like game. There isn’t much of a plot, you are told that a diner in the middle of the desert has lost all color and you are sent to investigate. This is essentially all the plot you come across in the game and just exists to get you to the puzzles as soon as possible. Fortunately the puzzling in this is very good. The game starts off with having no colors in the world, but through various poking and prodding, you add some to the world and they allow you to interact with more objects in the game. It’s a nice way to keep you from feeling overwhelmed when you are first introduced to the world but it also keeps the small environment interesting to look at as you keep seeing it in new ways as additional colors are added. The game also features some clever puzzles using perspective.
The game has two modes for controls, free-roam and point-and-click. Usually the point-and-click mode in first-person adventure games feels like an afterthought but I thought it felt very good to control and actually used it quite a bit since I have been having some wrist pain lately and needed this control scheme to play it.
It’s a short game. I completed it in two nights but each session was very short and the puzzles made me think but I was never stuck for very long or frustrated. The game even has a built-in hint system if you want help with a puzzle. I said at the beginning of the review that I was in the mood for a Myst-like but it really wasn’t a Myst-like game at all. This isn’t the developer’s fault as they never claimed it’s like Myst, but I will explain what makes a game a Myst-like anyway since this is my website. A Myst-inspired game to me actually has quite a lot of storytelling being done through the environment and this storytelling is tightly integrated with the puzzles in the world, where this game just felt like an excuse to have a bunch of good puzzles related to color and perspective. Nothing wrong with that at all and it’s just not what I expected going in due to my assumptions with first person adventure games.
I really enjoyed my time with this game and I’m looking forward to playing Jason’s other games. I already own The Search from a charity bundle on Itch.io and Discolored 2 looks to be much more ambitious and seems to have more of a story and adds more characters.
Developer: Ben Croshaw Publisher: Ben Croshaw Year: 2001 Genre: Adventure Game
In the early 00’s, adventure games were in a weird spot with Sierra imploding and Lucasarts pulling away from adventure games. There were still a few commercial adventure games being made but with the advent of tools like Adventure Game Studio, the adventure game community decided to make their own adventure games. One of the most interesting projects from this time was Reality-on-the-Norm, a community effort to create a shared universe. This universe ended up having dozens of games, with the most recent being released in 2019. Anyone can still make a RON game, you just need to follow the rules that have been established over the development of this universe, created so one game dev doesn’t step on the toes of another dev by doing anything drastic like killing an established character.
I had never actually played any of these before, so I thought that it would be a fun opportunity to check out the series through the Adventure Game Club (see link at top), starting with the first game. Lunchtime of the Damned is a point-and-click adventure released in 2001 and created by Ben Croshaw, who went on to be the YouTuber Yahtzee and makes a lot of videos that I don’t think are any good. This one has you accidentally creating a zombie and then stopping him before he can murder more people.
So, what did I think about it? It’s alright! It’s hard to be critical of it because it’s a game created by a community that was not only learning how to make adventure games, but also learning a new tool. It’s got obtuse moments with some puzzles being implemented in a clunky way and it’s doing the adventure game trope of an area not having anything interesting, but then leaving and coming back revealing something new to interact with. Some of the humor is dated and edgelordy but it’s still way better than I expected. There’s still something about it that’s charming to me though. I didn’t play any of the RON games at the time but I did play some of the other ones created by the AGS community, so the MS Paint art and lack of polish really works for me. I also think parts are genuinely funny and while there are some bits of puzzles that have issues, most of it is perfectly fine. It makes me wish I had played more AGS games at the time, because I think I would have really loved following along with these games and playing them as it came out. I also wish I didn’t spend more time figuring out how to get it to work, but that’s not the game’s fault. ScummVM does support AGS but I don’t believe it supports anything this old at the moment, so I ended up using a Windows 98 VM because DOSBox wasn’t working for me either.
It’s hard to have a Would I Recommend? thing for this because it’s only 15 minutes long and so much of it hinges on if you have been playing adventure games for a long time since it’s a little tricky to get this working. I can tell you I had fun playing it though. I would definitely recommend going back and just exploring the early AGS games if you’re a fan of the genre. Not just because I think it’s historically interesting and you can see where a lot of today’s adventure game designers came from, but also because there’s still a lot of good stuff in there.
Developer: Id Software Publisher: Id Software Year: 1993 Genre: First Person Shooter
I’ve done another playthrough of the classic Doom as my comfort game for dealing with everything going on lately and what can I say, the game still slaps. There’s nothing really unique I can say about this game that hasn’t been said before. It’s all been said before a billion times because it’s the most heavily discussed FPS on the planet and people are still making levels and mods for it.
I played the Ultimate version through Bethesda’s rerelease so I guess my only real criticisms are as follows:
That 4th episode that was added in Ultimate Doom? Meh, it’s an episode I guess. I don’t find it particularly interesting and my preference in Doom levels has always been shorter ones, which this starts to pull away from. It doesn’t add anything new so it’s just there. More Doom levels are fine, it’s just not that interesting beyond that.
The more time I spend with the recent Bethesda rerelease, the less I like it. I keep running into bugs where it crashes and that mod browser has so many issues since anyone can upload a mod, screw up the crediting, and it may not even work! Who knows how much moderation is even happening. It just feels like a way for Bethesda/Microsoft to try to build walls around a community when Doom just should be free since it’s 30+ years old anyway and no one who worked on the game is still at ID Software.
There, those are my Doom hot takes. Still a great game though and holds up very well.
Doom is available on Steam, GOG, and basically everywhere else.
Developer: College Fun Games Publisher: College Fun Games Year: 2024 Genre: Adventure
The Protagonish is a recently released adventure game by College Fun Games where the twist is that you control everyone in the story but the protagonist. You follow him around on his quest but whenever he interacts with another character, you control their actions and influence his journey.
Each playthrough of the game features the protagonist interacting with NPCs in four scenes, with each scene lasting about a minute or two. The playthroughs are about five minutes long and you’ll want to replay the game a few times to see how your actions can affect the story and see all the endings. The animation and voice acting in each scene were top notch and made the scenes pleasant to watch, even on repeat playthroughs.
If I did have any criticisms of the game, I wish it were longer. I think the concept works very well and it would have been interesting to see what a game like this would be like if a playthrough was at least twice as long. It took about 20 minutes for me to get through everything in the game and it felt like a satisfying experience, but I think it could have also been longer without wearing out its welcome. I don’t feel like that is a bad deal for a game that’s $4, but that’s very subjective and I personally don’t feel very comfortable about telling you how much entertainment per dollar you should be ok with since we all value this stuff differently.
That all said, I had a good time playing The Protagonish and would recommend it to others if you want to see a game experiment with the tropes of the adventure genre. I would love to see a sequel that expands on the ideas in this game.
The Protagonish is available for $3.99 on Itch.io and Steam.The review is based on a key sent from the developer.
Developer: ICOM Simulations, Inc. Publisher: Mindscape Year: 1985 Genre: Adventure
This month’s game in the Adventure Game Club discord is Deja Vu: A Nightmare Comes True so I have finally played through that for the first time after it sitting in my backlog for forever. It’s the first MacVenture by ICOM and man, weird game. I’ll mention the stuff I was frustrated with but it’s difficult to get too mad at the game when it’s one of the first point-and-click adventures ever, it’s short, and the Macintosh art really holds up!
The premise of the game is that you wake up in a toilet stall and must find out who you are, what happened to you, and why. In addition to that, you have also been injected with something and have a limited amount of time to find a cure. That’s really all there is to it! You walk around a city and various buildings, occasionally taking a taxi to different regions to do some more exploration, but luckily it’s a pretty small world, since you will need to restart a few times from softlocks and optimizing your path because of the time limit. The time limit is also the source of most of my frustration with the game. It’s not that aggressive of a time limit but every single action takes time off, making it feel like you’re being punished for basic actions in any adventure game like examining objects. That’s right, even looking at an object means time is removed and I have to reload to get that time back. I’m generally a hater of time limits in adventure games anyway because to me, part of the appeal is an adventure game is that I usually have a world to explore and now the game wants me to focus instead on creating an optimal path instead of focusing on the world building. Oh well.
Eventually you do find a cure and can explore more freely. Even without the time limit though, the game still feels a bit tedious because of the verb system. I honestly don’t mind it that much, but there’s parts where it feels like a slog, such as having to pay the cab driver in quarters. But this is where you can tell it’s an early graphic adventure and they’re trying to figure out how to adapt that.
Another part of the game I really disliked is the occasional racist joke and frequent fatphobic jokes. The game cannot get enough of making fat jokes and it really sucks!
What did I actually like about the game? Well, the art is great. Black and white art on the Macintosh is incredibly charming to me and what you see here is great. The versions on the Apple IIGS and NES with color art aren’t bad either. I guess it just comes down to what you like more. The puzzles aren’t usually that difficult either, it’s just a time limit you fight with and busy work with the verbs. It’s also short! That sounds like I’m making fun of the game but I do like short games.
Eventually I want to play the rest of the Macventures. I’ve poked at Uninvited and Shadowgate before and knew of the time limit in the latter, but I guess every Macventure has a time limit? Come on man, just let me vibe and look at the great art.
So who would I recommend this to? I guess adventure game history nerds? It’s not actually painful, especially if you are ok with peeking at a walkthrough, the art is great, and parts of the writing are charming too.
Deja Vu: A Nightmares Comes True is available on Steam and includes the Macintosh and Apple IIGS versions.
