Back in the first half of 2012, a little point and click adventure by Waffle Friday Studios appeared on Kickstarter. The funding was quite the success and today we have Duck Quest?. Yes, with a question mark. Because... why not? Duck Quest? is built like an adventure game of old, and when we say old, we mean a dozen colors on the screen and characters so pixellated you can count their edges old.
What comes to mind when you think of Spain? Bulls? Matadors? Décor that's obsessed with serpentine designs? Street Fighters named Vega clambering up fences and then leaping down on you, claws bared? In reality, Spain is pretty much like any other place in the world. But nobody wants to play a hidden object game (HOG) about any ol' place in the world, which is why ERS Game Studios is bringing us Grim Facade: The Cost of Jealousy, a PC HOG that presents a romanticized version of Spain—but that's what makes it fun.
I used to have this reoccurring dream that I was being chased around my house by a giant black dragon. I never understood why, but I always thought it was strange that he never managed to catch me, considering the dragon was about the same length as the upstairs hallway he always chased me through. Leave it to Dreamscapes: The Sandman, a nightmarishly brilliant and haunting adventure game, to dredge up these memories.
The perfect Sherlock Holmes adventure: does such a thing exist? Can we ever feel completely immersed in the Baker Street detective's puzzle-solving prowess? Developer Frogwares has been working on this conundrum for the past decade, offering near-solutions like Sherlock Holmes: Secret of the Silver Earring, Sherlock Holmes vs. Arsène Lupin, and last year's exceptional The Testament of Sherlock Holmes. The upcoming Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments may be the closest they've come to solving the riddle of the Sherlock game.
House of Hell was unquestionably one of the most unusual and memorable of the original Fighting Fantasy gamebook series. First published in 1985, its modern-day horror setting stood out amongst a sea of generic fantasy and science fiction stablemates. That's likely in part why Tin Man Games has chosen to make it this, tenth in the original line-up, the second of their Fighting Fantasy iOS releases.
When you've played as many adventure games as I have, you just about do a dance of joy when a developer makes one that's not about ghosts or fairies or Victorian Times. You also want to do a little jig when they employ logic in their design and don't rely on unlikely contrivances. In making Nightmare Adventures: The Turning Thorn, Ghost Ship Studios has given people like us cause to happy-dance the night away by giving us a tightly-constructed adventure game that's fresh in setting, story and execution.
A funny thing happened about halfway through the second installation of Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller: it stopped being terrible. I actually almost started to think that I could possibly end up maybe kind of enjoying it. It was still clunky, overwrought and flat-out silly, but somewhere off in the distance I saw a glimmer of something I honestly did not expect: hope.
I probably wasn't the right person to review The Cave. When I first heard that Ron Gilbert was doing a puzzle platformer, my reaction was lukewarm at best. While I'm all for new ideas, Ron Gilbert is the man that gave us Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island. If he wasn't doing a new point-and-click adventure, I just wasn't interested in learning more. As it turns out, that was a really ignorant prejudice on my part.