Recent reviews by Wirdjos

Ambient sound often does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to building tension and it's no different in The Whisperer. There's no music, just the howling of the wind to keep you company as you wander the snow shrouded woods, looking for clues.

And I got to hear plenty of that wind as I spent most of my time lost. Finding all the interaction points in a scene was more of an issue here than it is in most point-and-click games. Though the solutions themselves weren't that esoteric once you knew the options.

Ultimately, the only mystery is spelled out right after the prologue and that mystery is solved without much distraction, making for a short experience. The twist is considerably more obtuse, but I suspect that's the intention. It's clear what's happened to the brothers. The particulars of our protagonist, however, those can be left to wonder.

You don't need a lot of time or any money at all to have a good time in The Good Time Garden.

Relax. You don't need instructions either. I'll show you what to do. Use N and M. Yeah, that's nice. Now throw in a Space Bar. Ooo. Move a little? Try W, A, S, or D. Oh, just like that. Esc for the quick finish... Yes!

I had a good time. Did you have a good time?

Animation has always been the selling point of The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo and boy, did they deliver there! It's all hand-drawn and you can really see the love in every single movement. The mix of different art styles and mediums helps keep all the wordless slapstick visually interesting for the two or so hours it'll take to complete the game the first time around. Just like any point-and-click adventure, figuring things out is what takes the time. My second playthrough, after I knew the solutions to every puzzle, only lasted around 40 minutes.

The challenges Mr. Coo faces operate less on the dreaded moon logic and more on cartoon surrealism. The logic to a puzzle may not be immediately obvious, but that's because it involves reasoning based around things becoming other things or not being what they seem in the first place. All of that usually becomes clear by clicking around and when that fails, the hint book is never far away.

Most of The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo's puzzles went down engagingly smooth. Though the first section did have a noticeable amount of clicks that only moved the animation along, asking nothing from the player, and the final puzzle introduced consequences to its solving in the form of repeating the entire sequence if you got it wrong or were a little too slow. Those two faults aside, it's a perfectly competent game along with working as a fantastic piece of animation even without all the pointing and clicking. Sans that last frustrating segment, I enjoyed every second I spent in Mr. Coo's world and I can't wait for the next opportunity to visit it again!

For a game that boasts about its lack of text, there sure is a lot of talking in Shapik: The Moon Quest. Characters will chatter at you with nonsense sounds and indecipherable scribbles standing in for the written word appear frequently. But the main tool this game uses in the place of text is animated thought bubbles directly showing you what the character needs to say. None of it's necessary to solve any puzzles, but the thought bubbles are the main way Shapik tells its story, so interpreting those slideshows are how you get more than puzzles out of the game.

The Moon Quest is separated into 22 discrete levels which it allows you to replay at any time after you've completed them. This solves all the usual point-and-click worries about having to backtrack to find what you've missed however many screens back or which items in your inventory are still useful. A couple of the level transition even take the time to show why you've lost any equipment collected on a previous level.

The premise may be grim, but Shapik: The Moon Quest has a sort of fairy tale logic to it. The intentions and motivations of its characters would be morally complicated if the game was interested in exploring them. Instead, you're simply a tender hero like any in those old stories, facing the challenges in front of you one at time.

Everything about Post Void encourages you to rush more than you should. The short looped music, the time pouring out of the skull in your hand, the full screen flash for every shot fired, even death kicking you straight to violently populating stats, none of it is as fast as it appears. But they all build on each other to send you down the next corner of the endless wobbly corridors blind to the bullet waiting for you.

And it feels so good!

I spent most of my Post Void playtime complaining about things that didn't seem like they should happen: shots that seemed to be aimed at exactly the same place that they were last run but missing the essential headshots this run, enemies surviving more shots than they surely were last run, upgrades that were definitely worse this run. But as soon as the run ended, I'd barely finish cursing the game, cursing my luck, cursing my skill, before clicking that "Restart" button.

Do I want more upgrade types, more enemies, things to slow down a little bit so I can actually take in the visuals? Yes. Do I want to stop ever? No.

The concept of sifting through radio programs for clips to send to others and capturing their responses before the time loop erases everything is super interesting. But in practice, playing Alt-Frequencies is more like looking for a needle in a haystack... that keeps repeating until you find it.

Oddly enough, I left the game feeling better about the experience than I did while actually playing it. Alt-Frequencies has more than just the concept going for it. Though digging into the particulars of a nation-wide time loop is doing some of the heavy lifting here, watching radio personalities and their guests react to it is what was really captivating.

I can't recommended trying to solve Alt-Frequencies's puzzles. I got no satisfaction out of that. But if you're the sort of person that enjoys things in retrospect as much or more than you do in the moment, then this one's well worth the couple of hours it takes to muddle through.

I chose this silly lo-fi bug game as my first Souls-like. I figured such a short game couldn't be too frustrating.

I was definitely wrong about that; White Lavender finds plenty of ways to irritate. But the goofiness of playing as a bug wielding a long pin and wearing a pistachio shell as a helmet certainly helped cool the urge to rage quit after getting one-shot by a swing that happened several seconds ago... for the third time in a row.

Yes, there are plenty of glitches to go along with the fuzzy, simplistic graphics. But due to the latter, you're expecting the former, so it doesn't hit that hard. And again, the game's not terribly long. You can take forty tries to beat the big green bug with the twig, you're still going to be reading "thank you for playing" in under four hours. You're also probably going to be doing it with a leaf on your head and bobbing that leaf to a soundtrack that's better than it has any right to be. How could that not be a good time?!

Cute and cozy is what I was left feeling after completing A Short Hike. The experience is like the ideal of a summer vacation: hanging out with your friends, being silly, embracing whimsy and having the best day enjoying whatever new pastime you've invented together.

Mechanically, you've got a mountain island to explore, one new tool at a time. The screen spins as you make your way around the circumference of the island, keeping your destination of Hawk Peak centered towards the top of the screen. Each time the directions readjusted, I was disoriented again. It made the island feel bigger than it actually was.

More importantly, it made me feel like I'd grown up during the journey. Hawk Peak seemed insurmountable at first and the Provincial Park an entire world in and of itself. It was only after making it to the top that I realized the whole adventure really was just A Short Hike.

It turns out Another Lost Phone is just as exciting to unlock and explore as A Normal Lost Phone. Phones really do make the perfect little puzzle boxes, realistically filled with the slowly unfurling details of another person's life.

Laura's Story begins with a couple of warnings, and it earns them, including one addressing the weirdness of violating a real person's privacy in this way. Though, this time again, rifling through this particular phone does serve the owner's own ends.

Despite the necessity of increasingly spoilery, but voluntary content warnings, Another Lost Phone: Laura's Story is far more interested in the fallout of abuse than it is about depicting the abuse itself. There's plenty described that could trigger survivors of the situation depicted without getting graphic enough to create fresh scars. Education seems to be the main intention, just like it was with A Normal Lost Phone. But, in both cases, it's still a personal journey and it resonates as such, the extra dose of reality from the phone interface keeping the story grounded along the way.

As much as I enjoy an eye-catching walking simulator, and The Hunting God is indeed beautiful, this feels like an early draft. Sporadic narration accompanies you for the linear stroll(randomly altering to a sprint at unexplained times) through a narrow valley in day and night, culminating on an equally narrow peak. Sadly, the sights barely echo the story being told and the dramatic reading of the text lacks the emphasis of one that recalls the tale they're reciting.

So I'm left asking, why is this 45 minute long game not simply an animation? As if the game heard me, a few puzzles are scattered about. Collect this, avoid that, click the stone button. Not enough to engage me, just enough to slow me down.

The one tool The Hunting God does use effectively is music. Following particular story beats with a swell or a lull, paired with the stunning if repetitive visuals, had me dreaming of a better version of this experience, which frustratingly will forever remain out of reach.