In 2009's Flux Family Secrets: The Ripple Effect and its sequel, 2010's Flux Family Secrets: The Rabbit Hole, we met the mysterious Flux Family and its plucky scion Jesse. We helped Jesse solve famous people's problems and watched in suspense as internal strife threatened to utterly destroy her influential, time-traveling clan. This month, the ultimate fate of the Flux Family is finally revealed in the series' final chapter, Flux Family Secrets: Book of Oracles. Unfortunately, playing it is time you'll never get back.
Night in the Opera places you in the role of a faceless detective, called into an Opera house after one of the traveling opera singers is murdered in her quarters. You'll be asked to investigate the dressing rooms of the deceased and her fellow opera singers, but calling Night in the Opera a hidden object or even an adventure game would be giving the title too much credit. Ultimately, this is an odd mix between match-three levels and the far too rare hidden object scene that is flawed right from the start.
The sleepy mountain village of Houndspoint is full of dog lovers, so when a streak of crimes starts killing off the townspeople and dogs look to be the culprit, it's almost too much for this canine-friendly town to take.
After playing through The Walking Dead: Episode 2 - Starved for Help I can confidently say this is Telltale's best effort to date in telling a story. There's a quality to the pacing of the adventure that makes it feel more like an interactive show or movie than a game. At one point while playing it last night my wife looked up from her book to ask me what show I was watching because it sounded good. Needless to say, she was impressed when I told her it was a game.
The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav is not a great adventure game. But it is a great adventure story, backed by gorgeous, hand-painted backdrops and dreamy music that all comes together to create a gripping, magical fantasy tale.
It wasn't so long ago that the folks at Penny Arcade announced they wouldn't be pursuing a third game in the Adventures series, due to lackluster sales and then-developer Hothead Games being occupied with working on DeathSpank. But life found a way, and here we are with Episode 3. It may seem like quite the departure at first, but it maintains all of what made the first two games so great.
Nothing seems harder when making games, than coming up with unique concepts. That's probably why so many developers avoid the struggle entirely and prefer to dip into the collective repository of well-known motifs. Now and then however, something different comes along, and this time it's Infected: The Twin Vaccine, a new hidden object adventure by Canadian developer Gogii Games.
Black Pants Game Studio is a brave collective of developers. If Tiny & Big: Grandpa's Leftovers, the first release from the studio, had turned out to be a bit rubbish, reviewers up and down the interwebs would be branding it "pants", having a good old snigger, then moving on to the next potential indie gaming craze.