Oh wow, that short break from posting about completions took … 2 years already … huh.
4 hours playtime
16 of 16 achievements
When I first learned about this game – I’m not sure anymore, but that might have been when I “researched” whether or not to enter the giveaway – I had my doubts. Everyone was all about how great the writing was, but omg that art style.
Let’s start off with a semi-related rant. I have nothing against synthetic pixely looks. I mean, 320 by 200 was bleeding edge when I grew up. I really have a soft spot for games that summon the nostalgia. If they do it right. If. Because … those pixels … they don’t rotate. And they don’t scale. That just doesn’t make sense. If your game has “pixels” of random sizes turning freely and moving in smaller-than-grid steps, then you are doing it wrong and you are a bad person AND I HATE YOU. Seriously, that’s not an art style. That’s just a bad looking excuse for being a lazy artist. Also, FFS, if you decided you wanted to be a retro pixel guy, don’t wuss out and add high res stuff in places.</rant>
So, there’s obviously a reason for that rant. This game does all of that. The high res version of the main logo (that you can see on the thumbnail) was seemingly too much work to not use, so it’s plastered over a pixely background in the main menu. The “standard pixel” in the game is HUGE, no way to have readable text with that, so all text (and all UI stuff, iirc) is half-pixeled. And on 2 occurrences “pixels” were freely rotated (rain falling, photographs laid out). Now you might say “huh mandrill, calm down, it sounds like they did it right for the most part?”. And you are right, they did and I’m overly sensitive. Because they were really close to drawing a work of art but then signed it with a penis.
Because this game is actually great. There are so many bad Lovecraftian horror games – this one does its Poe/Lovecraft really, really well. The storytelling is great, the music is great, and the atmosphere is all there. And flaws aside, the art style really fits, too. The point & click gameplay is on the easy side, with unsurprising and logical “recipes”. When stuff fails, you get actual explanations why – those make it too easy at times, but I like that better than either failing silently or just working when it really shouldn’t (trying to cut wall carpet with broken mirror piece: “you can’t do that, you’ll cut your hand”). I might have played too many HOGs.
Oh and because having 14 out of 16 achievements bothered me, I cheated a bit and read one of those guides on Steam. Finding that one missing secret (and collecting the other achievement on the way) took 5 minutes – if you’re not too holy to cheat, I’d actually recommend doing that. Because that secret I missed answered an open question … with another question … in a cool and spooky way. :)
Ahh I hear you on pixel graphics. I have huge respect for games that do a genuine retro feel, down to chip tune sound and small download size. And a well done pixel style has a timeless feel to it. But a lot of modern games do ‘pixel’ art as a style and the impression I get is more that they didn’t have the time or money to do their own style and the mish-mash they came up with was a cheap way of making a game. Not appealing at all.
And I don’t think using a guide is really cheating, especially if the devs have gone out of their way to hide collectibles in random places. I generally play through a game once, blind, but if I’m replaying for achievements, you better believe I’ve got all the guides open, making sure I don’t have to redo it a third time.
It feels like forever since I’ve read something you wrote :o
Aparently cause it has been
Yeah :| But so much stuff has happened since then … well, let’s see if I can do better :)
Yeah, I never could quite get myself to play that game…still sitting in the backlog. Then again, I probably don’t like pixel graphics as much as you, even well-done pixel graphics. I remember playing these pixel games back in the day, and wishing they looked better / more realistic / etc. Now that that’s possible, I don’t tend to like to go back.
And yeah– looks like that game probably needs a guide for 100%. Glad it only took a few minutes. Nothing worse than having to replay an entire game because you missed one collectible in Chapter 1.