Recent reviews by giommm

I love Wadjet Eye''s games and always look forward to playing any new releases. Old skies doesn't disappoint. Great story, very good character building, good puzzles (neither too hard nor too easy). It's one of those games that will stay with me for a while after finishing.
Only criticism I have is that there's a missed opportunity to have a way to go back in time and make different choices. Of course, we can use savegames for that but it would have been fun to have a branching tree interface of some kind where we'd be able to explore each choices we made and go back to them to see what would have happened if we made another choice. Sort of a personal time machine for the player.

This game has some good things going on for it. I love the retro vibe, between the CRT effects, the lighting, the sprite animations, it's a gorgeous game. It's short (6 to 10 hours) which I actually like since that means I can actually finish it :) . The developer did a decent job creating a lot of dialogue lines for NPCs which makes the world feel alive. The combat system has some good ideas.

There's an important tip for anyone playing if you want to actually enjoy the combat system. You're given the option to reduce enemies encounters. Do it, if you keep the normal encounter setting, you'll be overleveled and all enemies will be way too easy. For example, around the end of the game you're told by the game that you level 21 is recommended to continue. I played this at level 17 and it was easy. If you were to play at level 21, there'd be no strategy needed to beat any of the bosses.

There are some faults though. The story is not that great and rather clichéd. The world is interesting but the world building is lacking leaving me with a lot of unanswered questions. The combat system tries to be cyberpunk inspired but it's just a typical fantasy based system with different names (with one nice addition: the install system)

I'd say it's a bit of a wasted opportunity, with a great story it would have been a masterpiece. Instead, it's a beautiful game with good atmosphere but that leaves feeling a bit disappointed at the end.

This both innovative and fun. Are all the songs great? No and honestly sometimes the lyrics really leave much to be desired but it's such a refreshing concept, the story is a fun mythological whodunit, there's plenty of branching choices (more than the vast majority of visual novels) that's well integrated and it was engrossing enough that I finished the game in one go.

If you like mythology, musicals or visual novels and enjoy trying something new, it's well worth playing.

I was really looking forward to this game but ended up hating it. The story sounds nice but I absolutely hate the mini-games, they completely interrupt the flow of the game, are intensely boring and tedious and contribute nothing to the game. I don't have good reflexes so I have to retry multiple times for the strength mini game. The lockpicking is equally frustrating. It takes talent to create a lock picking mini game that's even worse than Kingdom Come Deliverance but they managed it.

The fighting is bog standard jrpg fair but also interrupts the story without bring much to the table.

Like all the others from this author's series, it's a lovely game that I really enjoyed. Character development has always been that developer's forte and this episode shines.

It's 2023 now, and I still come back to check the discussion forum from this developer hoping for another installment to this series. This is how much I love the game and the entire series.

So let me say first off, that I like this game. I really enjoyed the story and most of the cases and really recommend it. It was a fun few hours playing and then trying different endings and I really recommend it for anyone who likes point and clicks, mysteries or enjoyed the excellent Lacuna.

I'd rate the cases as being on the easy side (maybe even easier than Lacuna) but sometimes I'm in the mood for easier cases and sometimes I'm in the mood for harder puzzles.

I do have a few nitpicks though. First, there's a lot of QOL elements that would make the game nicer (I know that they're being worked on):
- Evidence should really be sorted, it's really annoying trying to find someone you met in the list when they're not organized alphabetically. I somehow always remember the names rather than their face so I keep clicking on a few faces to see if it's the correct person.
- I wish it was possible to toggle running, pressing shift with wasd hurts my hands for no reason. There's never a reason in this game to walk instead of running so why not allow me to toggle running all the time?
- It would be great to be able to skip the monologues. When trying to test different endings, it's rather annoying to have to wait for a monologue to finish when you've already read it multiple times.
- Related but a way to fast skip previously read dialogue (like some visual novels) would also be great
- Like Lacuna, I wish after finishing the game it was possible to go back in time and try different things. Right now you can only replay since the last save just before you submit the last evidence. I don't want to give explicit spoilers but there are some decisions that I would have liked to explore the consequences of. For example, the impact of not helping a person earlier in the game. Or, to see what happens if you decide not to forgive someone.
- I would love a way to locate where crew members are, I spent so much time just walking around trying to find one specific character.

Lastly we come to the main criticisms I have:
1. Overall, I feel that the game would have been better with more writing and more dialogues. Right now, the discussions with most characters is very limited, after a single time talking to them the only remaining interactions are through showing them evidence. They often don't even react to the evidence you show even though they should. I expected rose to have something to say about fertilizers even if it's not relevant to the case. I expected Eric's son to have something to say about his father and vice versa... Because of this, the world doesn't feel as alive as it should. Even the feeling of betrayal that the main character feels towards some people is muted because there's very little interactions between them. We get to know that they are friends but there are barely any casual interactions.
2. Similarly, when you walk around, you never hear other people's conversations. This is a bit of a wasted opportunity because it would have made the world feel more alive while at the same time showing the growing discontent.
3. The intro's pacing is too fast, I think having some slice of life elements after the funeral would have helped with character development.
4. Lacuna had more relaxing moments dedicated to introspection when smoking, when talking to his wife or relaxing on the sofa. Neil felt more real thanks to them.

Again, while this might sound like a lot of criticisms, I genuinely like this game and think it's very good. It's just that it could have been amazing if not for those faults.

Lovely game. Couldn't put it down and enjoyed every minutes of it. If you like innovative games with mechanics you haven't seen anywhere before, games with heartwarming cute stories full of imagination, look no further.

This game is one of my favourite adventure games when it was released.
For context, it was in late 2000s, it was the terrible drought of point and click adventure games, then, like a ray of sunshine, those games were released. Are they the best adventure games ever? No but they have a good sense of humour, fun puzzles and imaginative story. They're also a lot better than pretty much any other games released during those years.

I do not normally review games on steam but this game series is really good and deserves to be much better known. It's a point and click adventure game made with rpg maker. The first episode showed of lot of promise with a short but good story and good characterization. But where this game series shines is when looking at the entire first game with the 4 episodes (Space Pilgrim episode 1 to 4) as each episode improves and eventually tell an epic story with great characters. The writing is spot on and if you like story driven adventure games with some good puzzles, this is the game for you.

The next game in the series, Space Pilgrim Academy (Year 1-3 and Reunion) is even more epic and is a great sequel. Those games are really one of those rare underrated gems that are much much better than most games out there.

A bit difficult to rate. The environments are gorgeous, the controls and gameplay are just fun and it just feels natural. But the very silly and bad story is a huge let down. At the beginning I gave it the benefit of the doubt and thought the story might be decent but they keep overusing clichés, the characters are not well drawn out (even after collecting as many recordings as you can)and everyone keeps passing the idiot ball around. I’m very surprised this was written by Terry Pratchett’s daughter and hope it’s this bad because of committee writing and not due to her lack of talent.

Once I got to the ending, I just no longer felt like replaying or exploring unexplored caves because the story had killed it for me. This was the first tomb raider I actually played more than 30 minutes so I’m not sure if awful stories are just a characteristic of the series.

I would rate it 4/5 for the first few hours and then 2/5 once finishing the game due to the story. Basically the awfully stupid story made me feel like I wasted my time.