Trilled Meow

Acquisitions

  • Highway Blossoms

Challenge Me!

Challenge Post

60% never played
20% never played
20% completed
  • The Whispered World: Special Edition

    21.6 hours playtime

    20 of 20 achievements

  • Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

    4.3 hours playtime

    0 of 0 achievements

  • Asphyxia

    17.7 hours playtime

    8 of 8 achievements


Not a lot of progress in number of games completed because I've been playing Pillars of Eternity, too.

The Whispered World: Special Edition

This was pretty good. I wanted to finish it before starting Silence. The main character is named Sadwick, a clown who is always saying depressing things, which tend to be a source of humor. Literally anything you click, Sadwick will immediately ruin the mood. He screws everything up, and now finds out through a prophecy that he will destroy the world. A lot of people complain about his English voice actor (which to my ears sounds like a sad Cartman from South Park), but I think such a stupid voice is really fitting. He's supposed to be a kid anyway. I didn't listen to the original German voice actor to compare.

I had some issues with clicking in the beginning (which I also saw lots of complaints about on the Steam forum), but I guess I eventually figured out the rythm and stopped having issues (I think you just have to double click to bring the contextual menu up). The story is good, and I was interested in what would happen the whole time. The cutscenes remind me of stuff I watched as a kid. The music is surprisingly good too -- the main theme especially got me excited to play. Puzzle solutions are often depraved as I've come to expect from Daedelic and may require a walkthrough from time to time unless you're as sick-minded as they are.

The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

I had never read Robinson Crusoe, even though I read a lesser-known work of Defoe's (Moll Flanders -- highly recommended btw). I couldn't let some HOG spoil a book for me so decided to read it before playing. The book itself is...fairly uneventful, mostly comprised of Crusoe's descriptions of trying to make things and being paranoid. And it's probably best he was alone for so long, because he generally sounded like a blatant ass when he mentioned anything about other people. When starting the game, a couple of similarities and differences were immediately noticeable:

  • Two cats? Check. Dog? Check. Crusoe had a pretty large collection of "creatures" by the end, but Pol the parrot is noticeably missing from the game. Not that he came up more than twice in the book, but he was at least as important as the cats and dogs.
  • Crusoe is often shown shirtless, but the book leaves me to believe he was more like to go pantless than shirtless.
  • The story lends itself well to HOG-like tasks, being almost 30 years of Crusoe collecting and making things. As expected, the first task in the game is to collect items from your wrecked ship, but strangely we don't build our "castle" with its "cave," something Crusoe spent years doing.
  • He announces his main goal is to build a ship and return back home soon after the game starts. In the book, Crusoe leaves on a ship that randomly stopped on the island. Not one he built. He wasn't even trying to do that.

By the end, the story had come completely off the rails, which is forgiveable because the developers were obviously trying to give Friday more of a role. Friday is the native Crusoe immediately seeks to make his slave, btw. And the end of the book is boring anyway (not that the game's pointless ancient caves were any less so). Also the graphics were shit, and I couldn't tell what the crappy-looking items were. Crusoe's lesson against unnecessary folly played no role in the game, probably too "dark" or something for a cash-grab HOG.

In summary: Robinson Crusoe is alright, but just read Moll Flanders instead.

Asphyxia


This was a very timely Challenge Me! game, because I recently realized I had it and had been wanting to play it. I guess it was the art that drew me to it, with the main image on Steam (also the title screen) looking like a painting of Ophelia. To try to be non-spoilerly, it's a coming-of-age type game focusing on a troubled young teenager who is on a school trip to the Lake District in England.


This game answers a question that no one is likely to have asked before: What if several Romantic poets and their contemporaries were teenage schoolgirls? I was really excited when I started to recognize the pattern in the names and saw what the game was doing. There was Coleridge, Wordsworth, and a few others. "Alexandra" Pope and "Lady" Byron characters were there to mock, tease, and insult the others in ways that reflect the often equally petty manner in which the real poets interacted with each other. It was really unexpected. Fortunately, I had some familiarity with these writers and their works from school, but if I hadn't, the game provides brief bios on the real-life inspiration for the characters, and also a quick run-down on Romanticism. The girls' backgrounds and behaviors are similar to their real counterparts, and they'll stick with me (in a good way) when I read any of these writers in the future. It's also an effective way to remember facts about them and their context in the wider literary world. The games does this about as well as I could possibly expect it to.

I don't think I typed huge spoilers above, but since it's not revealed on the store page, I don't want to ruin anything for someone who plans to play it soon. But if it looks like something you wouldn't play, then maybe what I hid would change your mind. People into history and literature might appreciate it, even if you wouldn't normally play a visual novel with such cute art.

Vito

The Robinson Crusoe game doesn’t look too hot, judging from the store page alone. The book itself is rather boring and I agree, Crusoe is not the friendly type of person he is often portrayed to be in later adaptations.

I (mostly) like it, when you play a game and learn something on the side. Like when you say those characteristics appointed to the writer-schoolgirl characters will stick to you, that sounds great. Did it make you want to read any specific author afterwards?

Trilled Meow

I never thought the Robinson Crusoe game would be anything but less-than-mediocre to bad, but I think it’s fun to compare adaptations from books, and it helped me pick a book to read. I won that Agatha Christie ABC Murders game, so I’m going to read that next – that game looks significantly better, though, lol.

Asphyxia definitely ended up being the better literary “adaptation,” without me even expecting it would be. I feel enthusiastic about reading any of them after playing the game. The most memorable for me from school is Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” I’ve also never read Thomas de Quincey and Southey (not recommended apparently), and haven’t read enough Byron and Wordsworth. But I’d also like to read more about their “generation” of British writers in general.

Blue Ϟ Lightning

Ayyy

I’m happy you enjoyed it- aspyxia was alot Better than i thought it would be.

Kaleith

Don’t try to write complex words ever again

Blue Ϟ Lightning

:thinking:

Trent

Puzzle solutions are often depraved as I’ve come to expect from Daedelic […]

That gave me a good chuckle. =)