Retromania

I think most games in todays update fit somehow in the retro theme with just one notable exception.

• Snail Trek - Chapter 1: Intershellar
  

  59 minutes playtime

  6 of 6 achievements

• Snail Trek - Chapter 2: A Snail Of Two Worlds
  

  61 minutes playtime

  6 of 6 achievements

• Snail Trek - Chapter 3: Lettuce Be
  

  2 hours playtime

  8 of 8 achievements

• Snail Trek - Chapter 4: The Final Fondue
  

  2 hours playtime

  9 of 9 achievements

• Orwell
  

  14 hours playtime

  27 of 27 achievements

• Ocean's Heart
  

  12 hours playtime

  21 of 21 achievements

• The Corruption Within
  

  2 hours playtime

  10 of 10 achievements

• Milkmaid of the Milky Way
  

  2 hours playtime

  6 of 6 achievements

• Crystal Caves HD
  

  33 hours playtime

  32 of 32 achievements

Snail Trek - Episode 1-4: I did duck away long time from purchasing this, simply because I would have preferred this to be one game instead of four separate ones. Well, you can’t have everything. Snail Trek awakes long distant memories from my childhood. What you have here is a simple and extremely short (all episode together take about 4-5 hours to beat if you don’t use guides) adventure game. The gimmick? It is a text parser game. No clicking involved. Just moving your character(s) with the keyboard and everything you want to do, you have to do by typing the correct words in the command line. This means that the first thing you do in a new screen everytime is typing “Look around” to get some descriptions. From there you have then to start figuring out the finer details and solve the existing puzzles. On the “modern” side, if you stand in front of something and type “look” or “press button” it will consider that you mean the thing you stand before. It also has a word suggestion and completion function which helps a bit. But all in all, it still feels different to the classic P&C since you don’t know what items is actually of importance and your “possibilities” are larger (in realitiy more restricted as the developers usually just foresee very specific commands. Story-wise I expected a light-hearted adventure about snails and puns. What I got was expression with a unusual dark theme hinted at in episode 1, giving you the first wtf moment at the end of episode 2 and culminating in episode 4, betraying everything you usually expect from you P&Cs. The puzzles themselves are mostly fair although there have been parts where I was stuck a while, especially in the second episode and also the fourth episode which is the most complicated. But I figured nearly everything out myself in all episodes outside of some specific achievements.
All in all, I enjoyed the game and would like to try some more text parser games as long as the theme seems interesting to me. After all, Hugo’s House of Horror (and the two sequels) have been games which helped me learn english in my childhood. Who knows those here?

Orwell: Gameplay-wise this doesn’t fit the retro theme today. Although if I want to stretch it is heavily based on 1984, so there’s that :P I think this was free at one point so most people should be familiar with it. You are playing a citizen outside of the nation hired to engaged with the new Orwell system in order to monitor some suspects concerning a terror act. This means reading all their private data and upload what seems important to you and hence influence the decisions of your supervisor and the outcome of the game. The story is divided in different chapters, where each chapter describes a certain event. How the event takes place is in your power though which makes it feel like you have influence. The overall story though does progress anyway. At times the game feels exhausting with all the text, even if the upload chunks are specifically marked. It also doesn’t make sense that the give informs you about conflicting data chunks for data you have not yet found :P But overall, it was an interesting read and experience. It was pretty clear from the beginning that the game tries you to convince that monitoring citizens is bad and shouldn’t be done. Although it also takes time to make you understand that there was some benefit. So overall, it tries to draw a balanced line although it favours the first scenario. I liked how the whole games did fit together but - although not exactly predictable - a lot of the happenings where horribly cliched, especially in the last episode.

Ocean’s Heart: Looks like Zelda? Plays also like Zelda. Although you don’t have the rigid 8 dungeons structure, you earn new items over the course of the game which helps you to reach new areas. All of this is mixed with a lot of optional sidequests and exploring and for the most part being very fun. There is also some story about pirates and the protagonists father and all that. Not much to add here. Colourful, some puzzles, lots of exploration, the possibility to make the game harder or easier in-game. As said, liked this very much, so it seems strange to me that I can’t write a lot about it ^^’

The Corruption Within: Another short (about 2 hours) adventure game in retro graphics. A P&C adventure with a dark theme and undertone sometimes even feeling a bit unsettling. You play a man on vacation with his family which then disappears. And you go searching for them, asking for help in the nearby mansion. Classic puzzle adventures and for the most part very fair. Only thing a bit unusual is the usage of a lot of NPCs acting as dynamic element. You have access to most of the areas in the game right from the start. But you often need to talk with people first, so that you can interact with certain stuff. They also sometimes change places and making space so you can visit previously occupied or non-interactable rooms. For the most part interesting but very short (not that I wanted it to drag on longer) for the price. Also contains five decision points which will give you different ending messages.

Milkmaid of the Milky Way: And another P&C adventure betraying my expections. I expected a light-hearted tale about a Milk Maid and some space stuff in rhyme form. I got a tale about a girl having lost both her parents, following her kidnapped cows to an alien race with a tyrannic queen. Same as before, the puzzles have been mostly fair outside of the final one. Graphic is nice enough and the rhymes are a fun difference to the usual. Still didn’t expect this to be for the most part so dark and hoped for some conclusion concerning a specific matter which has not been given by the game.

Crystal Caves HD: This has been imported straight from the nineties of the last century (and millenia). Although imported is wrong. It has been completely remade in Unity but still plays absolutely identical to the original (so take the HD addition with a bit of salt). At least I think so because I can’t remember how it played, just that I played it. Simple platforming fun and going for high scores. Comes with some achievements, a save function, leaderboards and a robust level editor with currenty about 700 custom levels. I also made some, so if you have the game, play and vote for them! So yea, it seems Apogee is back and some other games received an update too. However, they don’t seem to hold the IP rights on Commander Keen and Duke Nukem which is a shame.

Strangely enough I haven’t written much about achievements today O.o If you have quesionts concerning them, just ask. Oh, I also have a Steam Deck and try to figure what to best play on it.