January 2025
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The Roottrees are Dead
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Myst III: Exile
6.6 hours playtime
no achievements
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Overloop
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Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
50.2 hours playtime
40 of 45 achievements
GAME
PASS -
Atlas Fallen Reign Of Sand
28.2 hours playtime
24 of 38 achievements
GAME
PASS -
Escape Academy
4 hours playtime
21 of 40 achievements
GAME
PASS
Didn’t beat anything in December; January is fuller in compensation.
- The Roottrees are Dead: A detective puzzler influenced by Obra Dinn and Owlskip Games, where you you search for, examine and cross-reference documents in order to work out the identity of 60 members of an extended family. I finished the base game and have still yet to play the included “Roottreemania”. There’s a free version of TRaD here as a demo. 8.5/10
- Myst III Exile: FMV puzzler, with a base world, three main worlds, and a finale world - each with their own flavour of puzzles. I liked the weird nature oriented Edanna, where I could “read” the puzzles, and not so much the electric and mechanical worlds. What compounded the difficulty somewhat was that there were a couple of places where you had to turn to see a path, and that old-school 3D rendered environments don’t cue near-distance differences particularly well. 7/10
- Overloop: A short game with reasonable puzzle/platforming, but which padded its runtime a bit early on with a bunch of story-walking. 6.5/10
- Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: Captured the Indiana Jones feel. The main areas are different to each other, with the initial Vatican City area the most solid and compact. Egypt and Thailand were both spread out – as they had to be – but all, and particularly the latter two, really could have done with a few more fast travel points for quality of life. More on collectables, etc, below. 8/10
- Atlas Fallen: Reign of Sand: Aerial combat and movement felt good. Lot of configurability for playstyle. More on collectables, etc, below. 7.5/10
- Escape Academy: Escape room puzzles - and not too difficult, in general (Timed, but redoable on failure – and partial solves tend to make the redo fairly quick). 6/10
Indiana Jones and Atlas Fallen both have way way too many collectables, particularly ones that require no particular skill/challenge to acquire, but each does something a little different in showing collectables. Indiana Jones shows collectables on the map, but only one type of collectable (and there are a lot of types) is visible at a time, and you have to look at the quest entry for that type of collectable. What this means is that the amount of extra work/backtracking you do in order to collect everything is much higher than it would be if everything were shown at the same time. Atlas Fallen doesn’t show collectable document locations, and only shows chests when at particular outlook points. Judging where a chest exactly is tricky, but near the right area it’ll show up until you are much closer at which point it vanishes, and in the right area you can get vibrations (but these are near useless). Chest hunting is a pretty miserable and frustrating experience. Document hunting would be a “use a guide” task. There’s also chests that are gated behind a fragmented picture, which require documents to be collected. In short: I thought I didn’t want the Ubisoft/WarnerBrothers “Show everything collectable on the map” in my games, but I may have been wrong. But even better would be far fewer collectables, and every one of them with meaningful gameplay associated.
Congratulations on your assassinations!!! ᓚᘏᗢ
I’ve been watching The Roottrees are Dead for a while and I’m excited to see someone else actually play it on BLAEO!! I played The Inheritance of Crimson Manor as well as The Painscreek Killings, so I’m hoping it’s similar enough.
- Crimson Manor looks more like a standard first person adventure puzzle game from the screenshots and videos (though the reviews suggest there’s an informational puzzler in there), and it’s not incredibly like Painscreek (although I only played that for a while because I missed finding a key and was wandering around unable to progress for ages – and there’s a lot of space to wander).
- There’s no 3d wandering in Roottrees - the puzzle is in working out the right searches and working out the right information from the resulting docs. The gameplay you’ll experience from solving the first 3 identities is the game
- Owlskip Games, which have a bunch of free games as well as a few paid games, give you the documents and recordings upfront without making you search for them.
- Return of the Obra Dinn does have 3d wandering but it’s all fairly compact… and you haven’t played it yet??! Go in as blind as possible – though two minor warnings ( is there a better way to spoiler?):
** The game is a little misleading in its advice about needing to make determinations with “incomplete information” (Hover for spoiler)
** The 60 named people in the manifest are the only ones you need to identify (Hover for spoiler) - The works of Sam Barlow (Her Story, Telling Lies, and Immortality) are similar but even more abstract - the first two you access new clips by keyword and the last via people and objects on screen, etc… however there’s nothing in the game to “fill out” – any “completion” and most of the gameplay is in your head and whatever notes/spreadsheet you compile. The first two games you have the option to end it at a certain point. The last you get the ending after you see a certain number/composition of clips. Depending on what you have seen, you can end up with a rather different understanding of things (you can go back and look for more clips after completion in all – though 100% completion in Immortality is a chore). I find them simultaneously terrible games and wonderful game experiences.
Congratulations! Some very nice games in there. I’m very intrigued by Roottrees.
Thanks - it looks like it might be in your wheelhouse =)