Publisher: Julia Minamata Developer: Julia Minamata Year: 2024 Platform: Windows, Mac
Rating: 8
For those of you who have been eagerly awaiting for years to play The Crimson Diamond: Yes, it’s as amazing as you were hoping. Go get it.
For those who have only more recently become aware, The Crimson Diamond is the labor of love from Julia Minamata, first-time indie designer from Toronto. This murder mystery is an homage to EGA Sierra titles, sporting a 16-color palette, a parser interface, and a design highly reminiscent of Roberta Williams’s classic The Colonel’s Bequest. Taking the best features of those nostalgic 80s adventures and supplementing them with modern conveniences, Julia has successfully created a charming and engaging game that ranks right up there with the best Sierra had to offer.
Publisher: Postmodern Adventures Developer: Postmodern Adventures Year: 2024 Platform: Windows
Rating: 5
As I sit down to write this review just a week after finishing An English Haunting, I realize that I cannot call to mind the name of the protagonist or even how the game ends. My rapidly aging brain surely shoulders much of the blame, though I suspect it also cuts to my feelings about my experience. The second pixel art adventure by Spanish developer Postmodern Adventures, a ghost-hunting yarn set in early twentieth-century London, is certainly a pleasant enough experience buoyed by above-average production values and a satisfying level of gameplay challenge. Yet an unmemorable cast of characters—replete with enough exposition to make a Bond villain blush—make it difficult to give it an enthusiastic recommendation.
Publisher: The Brotherhood Developer: The Brotherhood Year: 2023 Platform: Windows, Switch, PS5, Xbox One, XBox Series
Rating: 8
After not particularly enjoying the highly awarded Stasis or its follow-up Cayne, I was skeptical when Bone Totem was released to universal praise and accolades. My doubts faded quickly and never returned as The Brotherhood demonstrated they could learn from their mistakes and produce was one of the greatest sequels in adventure game history.
Publisher: Spooky Doorway Developer: Spooky Doorway Year: 2017 Platform: Windows, Mac, Linux, Switch, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series,
Rating: 7
After playing a bunch of serious games in a row, sometimes you just need something that’s stupid fun. The Darkside Detective, a buddy cop adventure about paranormal detective work, is the perfect remedy.
Upon starting The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, you are told that this horror-lite narrative adventure will not be holding your hand. And boy it ain’t kidding. While I can squint and see a reason why the designers made this choice, it honestly put me off the game for years. But after looking up a brief tutorial on-line, everything clicked and I breezed through the game in one day and I quite enjoyed the experience.
Narration opens the game as you, paranormal investigator Paul Prospero, walk out of a tunnel into the fictional mining town of Red Creek Valley, Wisconsin. Paul says he’s there to help out a young boy named Ethan Carter who had been writing to him for a while and has asked for his help. And that’s as much as you’re told before you’re set free to fumble around.
Red Creek Valley is realized in full 3D from a first-person point of view. The game is open world as you explore the woods, a broken rail, dilapidated homes, a graveyard, a mine, and a hydroelectric station. While the graphics won’t blow your mind (which, per the designers, was intentional), the town is immersive and genuinely feels like a real place (indeed, it is based off a real Polish area in the Karkonosze Mountains). The soundtrack by Mikolai Stroinski is fantastic, each section of the game having its own mysterious, haunting, monster of the week track. Individual moments are not punctuated with scares; you’re allowed to just be in the mood of the music.
Reviewing the rest of the game without spoilers is impossible, so if you plan to play blind as the designers intended you should hit the road (with Paul Prospero).
Publisher: Bandai Namco Developer: SupermassiveGames Year: 2019 Platform: Windows, PS4, PS5, Xbox One
Rating: 4
The Dark Pictures Anthology is a series of four relatively short games (so far) in Supermassive’s usual formula of narrative-based horror. The first game, Man of Medan, does a decent job at providing action and scares, though ultimately left me unsatisfied thanks to a poor script and mediocre story.
I don’t much care for poetry, and most uses of allegory annoy me. That’s not a critique, but rather my bias I carried with me as I played Unleaving, the first game by indie developer orangutan matter. But despite my predilection to avoid artsy stuff, I couldn’t help but be drawn in by how gorgeous it looked. A puzzle-platformer in the vein of Limbo, this short and relatively easy adventure, while clumsily struggling with pathos, should please fans of the genre with its stunning art style and eclectic puzzles.
Publisher: Klabater SA Developer: Warsaw Film School Year: 2022 Platform: Windows, XBox One, Xbox Series, Switch, PS4
Rating: 1
Best Month Ever!, a product of the Warsaw Film School in Poland, tells the story of a single white mom in the 1960s USA who, after discovering she has a terminal diagnosis, decides to quit her job at the diner for a road trip to help reunite her eight-year-old black son with family who will take care of him after she’s gone. This utterly gorgeous game has some fun mechanics that work well enough in delivering a narrative; sadly, this specific narrative could have been a poignant tale about trauma and love, but instead approaches its adult themes with the subtlety of a sledgehammer and makes several missteps in its handling of racism.
A Tiny Sticker Tale from Ogre Pixel is a colorfully child-friendly fable about Flynn the donkey, whose father has left him with words of wisdom and a world to explore with help from a magical sticker album. While a very short and a very relaxed experience, the intuitive gameplay and clever puzzles elevate it above your standard casual game. And besides, you get to play with stickers! Which was a decent lure for me but a major draw for my six-year-old daughter, who has gleefully played this game to completion five times in the past month.
Just a couple of years after Her Story, another full-motion video murder mystery with a typing interface was released. The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker, the first game from D’Avekki Studios, is a murder investigation under the guide of providing psychotherapy. While I wasn’t overly satisfied with the structure of the mystery, I still found it to be engrossing and a worthy play for fans of the genre.
Death By Troggles 
You must be logged in to post a comment.