The Random Adventure Game News Thread

[V_K]

So this has been released today and is, for whatever reason, free.

 

[WallaceChambers]

ABOUT THIS GAME

Saint Kotar: The Yellow Mask is a free prologue of the full game Saint Kotar. It follows the mysterious events that precede a macabre series of murders, allegedly related to devil worship and witchcraft.

You play with two fascinating characters, Benedek Dohnany and Nikolay Kalyakin, to unravel a captivating and branching story set in the small rural town of Sveti Kotar.

Your actions and words affect the storylines you experience and the characters you meet in this dark place tormented by agony and sorrow.

• Free prologue to the full game Saint Kotar.
  
• Dark psychological horror adventure set in the small rural town of Sveti Kotar.
  
• Glimpse of a vast and foreboding world to explore.
  
• Two fascinating playable characters, two captivating storylines.
  
• Decisions are fateful and affect the storylines.
  
• Mysterious and gripping branching plot.
  
• Hand-painted distinctive art style that fits the game’s mood.
  
• Fully voiced.
  
• Eerie original soundtrack.
  
• Modern twist on a classically inspired point and click adventure gameplay.

 

[Zann]

At this point, each time I read this "modern twist on classical point&click" blather, my brain translates as "no puzzles whatsoever" and "the designer yearns to make movies instead".

I'll probably play the prologue anyway though, addiction is a bitch.

 

[V_K]

So this has been released today and is, for whatever reason, free.

Played almost to completion (almost because in the last chapter the game suddenly turns into a very clunky shooter), took me something like 4,5 hours - although some of it was replaying stuff due to bugs. So it's a short game, but not coffee-break short. For the most part if follows sort of Phoenix Wright formula: you have investigation phase, where you're looking for clues and evidence, and trial phase where you present what you've found. The major differences is that trials are much more simplistic, with no witness interrogation, while investigation phase has Zelda-style gameplay (sans combat for the most part), where you explore an open world from a top-down perspective and solve puzzles. There are unfortunately only two cases to solve (plus the actiony final sequence), and the first serves as a sort of tutorial, so it's easy and straightforward. The second one, however, is pretty good, with a few somewhat challenging puzzles to solve. It's somewhat buggy and very unoptimized, but for a free game that appeared out of nowhere you could do much worse.

 

[LESS T_T]

Dude, Where Is My Beer?

Can you help the character to find his favorite beer, using nostalgic interface from the golden age of adventure games?
Talk to West Coast IPA and American Black Ale drinking hipsters and solve beer related puzzles at different stages of drunkenness; explore locations like a sports bar, a microbrewery, a dive bar and a rock bar in the city of Oslo, in your quest of finding a pilsner.

Download “Dude, Where Is My Beer?” today and get a free beer*

*beer not included

Key Features:

• Nostalgic interface from the 90s

• Beer-o-meter, our own invention, helps you keep track of your level of inebriation.

And remember: Drink responsibly!

 

[Darth Roxor]

I feel a very deep sense of kinship with the maker of this game; or at the very least, with the main character.

 

[WallaceChambers]

ABOUT THIS GAME
In the dead of night a fierce storm rages across North Wales. Miles from any town, Chris Selwood seeks refuge in a remote roadside cafe. After a brief moment of respite, Chris finds himself venturing into the woods blindly following the distressed screams of the Cafe waitress.

Explore the untouched wilderness of rural Wales as you uncover the forgotten remains of a government cover-up where a mysterious phenomenon caused time to stand still.

Inspired by 80s Sci-Fi horror and contemporary surrealist cinema, Chasing Static delivers a unique take on the narrative adventure genre through new audio driven gameplay mechanics and non-linear exploration.

Features:

• Sonic Exploration - Audio driven gameplay mechanics have you hunting anomalies with an experimental Shortwave Displacement Monitoring Device.
  
• Lo-Fi, Hi-Fi - Crunchy low poly visuals reminiscent of PS1 classics with AAA sound design and a modern approach to gameplay.
  
• Non-Linear Gameplay - Explore the world of Chasing Static at your own pace, uncovering it's secrets in any order you please.
  
• Bite-sized Terror - A self-contained story with an average playtime of 2 hours.

New game from the Guard Duty dev.

 

[Ludwig von Eisenthal]

ABOUT THIS GAME
In the dead of night a fierce storm rages across North Wales. Miles from any town, Chris Selwood seeks refuge in a remote roadside cafe. After a brief moment of respite, Chris finds himself venturing into the woods blindly following the distressed screams of the Cafe waitress.

Explore the untouched wilderness of rural Wales as you uncover the forgotten remains of a government cover-up where a mysterious phenomenon caused time to stand still.

Inspired by 80s Sci-Fi horror and contemporary surrealist cinema, Chasing Static delivers a unique take on the narrative adventure genre through new audio driven gameplay mechanics and non-linear exploration.

Features:

• Sonic Exploration - Audio driven gameplay mechanics have you hunting anomalies with an experimental Shortwave Displacement Monitoring Device.
  
• Lo-Fi, Hi-Fi - Crunchy low poly visuals reminiscent of PS1 classics with AAA sound design and a modern approach to gameplay.
  
• Non-Linear Gameplay - Explore the world of Chasing Static at your own pace, uncovering it's secrets in any order you please.
  
• Bite-sized Terror - A self-contained story with an average playtime of 2 hours.

New game from the Guard Duty dev.

Sounds interesting but I'd prefer a game in the graphical style of Guard Duty. GD was terribly short but had some great and lovingly crafted pixel art and animations.

Today The Hand of Glory part 1 will be released on Steam. A lovely game, I played the demo in december and was surprised by the polished gameplay and original aesthetics, voice acting and atmosphere. Feels like Broken Sword.

 

[WallaceChambers]

Experimental and jazzy point and click adventure from the recent streams.

ABOUT THIS GAME

You play as No Man, a watch peddler caught in a love triangle with other cosmic beings, Miss Mass and Golden Boy. When your affair turns into a bitter confrontation, you will witness a gunshot fired by a jealous god—otherwise known as The Big Bang. Jump into the expanding universe and search for a way to prevent or destroy creation and save your love.

With a focus on tactile puzzles and exploration, you’ll experiment with objects in small slivers of the universe to discover how they can be manipulated to progress your journey. Dial a rotary phone; destroy a civilization; plant a garden; improvise with a musician; create life—all in your search for a way to save Miss Mass.

The Big Bang isn’t just the birth of creation as we know it, it's also a gun blast frozen in time, with the bullet speeding towards the love of your life. You’ll jump into pockets of time, explore moments throughout the lifespan of the universe, and search for a way to change the course of destiny.

You’ll observe moments in the history of the universe, from the first microseconds of Life to trillions of years in the future. What will you learn about these new creations, in your search to destroy them?

 

[Boleskine]

The listing is still active, now at $1.8M instead of $2.3M.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/40367-Goldside-Dr-Oakhurst-CA-93644/19142951_zpid/

Maybe we can get enough Codexers to pitch in and use the house as a timeshare.

 

[J-Cray-Z]

Hey, I just signed up here so I could stop by this thread and thank everyone for everything they've posted. I've trawled through every single page and found a whole bunch of games that I likely wouldn't have found otherwise.
THANK YOU!

 

[Erikkolai]

Westmark Manor has just been released on Steam. Lovecraftian adventure & puzzle game.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1158970/Westmark_Manor/

 

[Tramboi]

A new adventure game for "C64, Plus/4, CPC, ZX Spectrum (+3, ESXDOS, Next), Amiga, Atari ST, DOS and modern PC" !
https://8bitgames.itch.io/rabenstein

 

[MRY]

The listing is still active, now at $1.8M instead of $2.3M.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/40367-Goldside-Dr-Oakhurst-CA-93644/19142951_zpid/

Maybe we can get enough Codexers to pitch in and use the house as a timeshare.

Every room contains an arbitrary death trap that only the Williamses knew about in advance. For instance, fail to pull that strand of red chilis and the floor drops out from under you when you reach the landing at the top of the stairs. But if you pull the chilis without gloves, you die from touching your eyes.

You can find the gloves by looking inside the toilet resevoir -- but for god's sake, don't brace yourself with the towel bar when standing ont the toilet lid to reach it, it breaks!!

You might wonder about the little door under the stairs. Yes, you can get in, but you need to shrink yourself first. You'll need to drink the right potion here:

There's a hint in the sign to the right of the alcove; but the key is not to do what the sign says. Pour the potion it tells you to drink into the ceramic spittoon. The ghost will then tell you which of the remaining ones to drink; just read his dialogue backwards.

Even when you're shrunk, you'll need to key to the door. Just turn the well crank; the key is in the bucket. (AFAIK, there's no clue for this, but obviously when you see a well crank, you turn it.)

Unfortunately, you can't reach the crank once shrunken, so DO THIS FIRST!

One thing you might notice in this area is the stick on the rock:

DO NOT TAKE IT.

When the deer's head tells you to "take all the bottles at the minibar," the trick is not to miss the white spray bottle under the counter on the left:

The colored bottles are mostly there to draw your eye away from the white one.

Yes, these work just like in KQ2:

The guard rail will break if you lean on it, so don't even try!

 

[Don Peste]

 

[Erikkolai]

The Innsmouth Case has just released on Steam.

Bizarre-looking comedy-horror text adventure game.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Boreal Tales

A strange psychedelic but interesting Twin Peaks-esque adventure (steam, itch.io)

 

[Don Peste]

 

[Boleskine]

Sounds interesting but I'd prefer a game in the graphical style of Guard Duty. GD was terribly short but had some great and lovingly crafted pixel art and animations.

Today The Hand of Glory part 1 will be released on Steam. A lovely game, I played the demo in december and was surprised by the polished gameplay and original aesthetics, voice acting and atmosphere. Feels like Broken Sword.

Here's a nice video on the game's inspirations and development:

 

[lightbane]

Boreal Tales

I half expected a meme game about Commander Boreale from Dawn of War. Alas, no dice.

 

[Infinitron]

The Digital Antiquarian on UNDER A KILLING MOON: https://www.filfre.net/2020/07/under-a-killing-moon/

Under a Killing Moon was greeted with a brutal review in Computer Gaming World, courtesy of Charles Ardai, that magazine’s resident curmudgeon as well as my favorite gaming scribe of the 1990s. His take-down is odd not least because he had previously given Countdown and Martian Memorandum fairly glowing reviews. Nevertheless, his review of Under a Killing Moon makes some very valid points, so much so that I want to quote from it here as the flip-side to my positive take on the game.

With the plot about the cult and the crusade for genetic purity, [the developers] appear to be trying to tell a serious story, with serious threats and grim implications. Yet every time the story threatens to go in an interesting direction, they cut it off at the knees by throwing in lame, inappropriate jokes and cheap slapstick, such as scenes that involve Tex falling over in his chair or walking into walls or getting captured by villains who do Three Stooges-style eye-poking shtick.

This undisciplined willingness to sacrifice the story in order to stick gags in where they don’t belong is typical of amateur writers, and it is deeply unsatisfying. Jones and Conners seem to be hoping that they can make a single game be both a serious thriller and a goofy comedy, both Chinatown and Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, and it just doesn’t work.​

Ardai isn’t precisely wrong about any of this; the game’s tone really is all over the map, in that way all too typical of adventure-game writers — and, yes, amateur writers of all stripes — who lack the courage of their convictions, and seek to head off criticism of their productions’ manifest weaknesses by suddenly playing them for laughs. Normally, this sort of thing irritates me as badly as it does Ardai.

In this case, however, it doesn’t; I recognize the game’s disjointedness, not only in terms of its fiction but in the disparate gallery of techniques and interfaces it uses to present its story, but I’m just not that bothered by it. For me, Under a Killing Moon is a shaggy beast for sure, but also a thoroughly lovable one. When I ask myself why this should be, I find myself tempted to fall back on those vague platitudes that are the hallmark of the amateur critic: that the game has “soul”; that it is, God help us, “greater than the sum of its parts.”

Since that will obviously never do, let me note that it has at least three saving graces. One is a certain cultural sophistication which peeks through the game’s pastiche, telling us that its creators were a bit older than the norm and had a taste for things beyond Dungeons & Dragons and Star Wars: the street where Tex Murphy lives is called Chandler Avenue after the beloved crime novelist; the central Mcguffin of the game is a bird statuette, a nod to The Maltese Falcon. Another is its bold spirit of innovation, its willingness to try not just one new thing but a whole pile of them, despite working in the terminally conservative ludic genre of the adventure game, which usually departs from the tried and true only with the utmost reluctance. And a third — probably the most important of all — is one that I’ve already mentioned: its exuberant likability. Just being nice — being the kind of person that other people enjoy being around — will get you a surprisingly long way in life. If Under a Killing Moon is any evidence, the same is true in games.

Here, then, is the ultimate difference maker between Under a Killing Moon and a game like The 7th Guest: the former is generous to its player while the latter is stingy. Although Under a Killing Moon gleefully employs every piece of trendy technology its developers can get their hands on, it’s all done for the purpose of making a fun game of the sort that said developers themselves would like to play; it’s not done merely to make a statement about the alleged multimedia zeitgeist, much less to rake in beaucoups of cash. The money, one senses, was always secondary when it came to Tex Murphy. (Why else invest millions into risky interactive movies at all instead of wallowing contently in the ocean of guaranteed profit from the Links franchise?)

There’s an open-hearted joy about Under a Killing Moon that makes up for a multitude of acting and even writing sins. It’s still bursting with that excitement which Jones and Vandegrift felt as kids — “We’re making a movie!” It’s just that now it’s an interactive movie. Under a Killing Moon is a wonderful tonic in a cynical world. If that sounds odd, given that the game takes place in such a dystopian setting, it serves only to point out how special its personality really is. The game tells us that the best parts of us, the things we sometimes call our basic humanity, will always survive. Chris Jones:

Okay, this world’s worn-out and ugly and partially destroyed, but people are people. People still have their sense of humor. People still have an outlook they can hang onto. Even if the world’s going to hell, it’s the only world they’ve got. To be dragged down in the mud attitude-wise or [imagine] things never improving… well, maybe they will never improve, but there’s got to be some hope that they will.​

Somehow I wasn't aware until now that Access Software were a bunch of Mormons from Utah.

 

[MRY]

For what it's worth, I've harbored a long grudge against the "lack the courage of their convictions" or "sacrifice the story" type arguments, since they were deployed against Primordia on the theory that Crispin ("a tonal wrecking ball") was inconsistent with the story's mood and themes. My objection to the argument is that it's perfectly fine to say, "The game's story sucks because you can't mix oil and water, and the serious moments and comedic moments constantly undermine each other." But the inference that the author wrote that story that way because he "lacked courage" or whatever is stupid.

Chris Jones wasn't an "amateur writer" at the time Under a Killing Moon was released. He was a professional writer with multiple game releases under his belt. Of course, he wasn't the writer of Under a Killing Moon -- Aaron Conners, whom DA describes as having saved the series' writing, had that role. But Jones wouldn't have let Conners undermine Jones's character, story, or franchise. At the time, Jones (and Conners) were more accomplished writers than Charles Ardai, who actually was an amateur fiction writer (though he'd go on to be a professional, too).

The tone in Tex Murphy games isn't an accident or a compromise; it's a deliberate authorial decision made by highly successful professional writers, who works gained a serious following. Moreover, the serious stuff is no more the "real" mood in Tex Murphy than the slapstick stuff is.

The reality is that a mix of goofiness and seriousness has been a mainstay of the adventure game genre for years. Unavowed deftly employs Looney Tunes style humor in the scene where the dryad keeps spawning behind the genie and stabbing him in the back a dozen times and has various other pratfalls -- and Dave is a very successful professional writer, too. Gabriel Knight has its Naked Gun style disguises. Pretending that all of these highly successful games, made by experienced professional writers, are the product of lacking the courage of grimdark convictions, rather than a conscious desire to have silliness alongside darkness, strikes me as bad psychoanalysis.

 

[V_K]

Yeah, I would even say that the very nature of Adventure gameplay mandates a certain amount of silliness, to accommodate the counterintuitive character of the genre's puzzles (and they have to be counterintuitive, or the game would be too easy).

 

[Tramboi]

Yeah, I would even say that the very nature of Adventure gameplay mandates a certain amount of silliness, to accommodate the counterintuitive character of the genre's puzzles (and they have to be counterintuitive, or the game would be too easy).

Yes, this, the puzzles, and overall the suspension of disbelief about the inventory, the exploration, the dialogs, and everything that happens so that it becomes a game.

So guys, what is the adventure game with the best "seriousness * quality" value ? Genuinely interested.
"Interrogation" was pretty serious, recently. "Observer" too. Both don't have inventory puzzles.

 

[Maxie]

What really sets the tone for the genre for me is the sheer chutzpah of adventure game designers letting the player character carry inordinate amounts of items without the tedium of weight limits or inventory tetris, making for absurd visual jokes like the animation of George Stobbart producing all sorts of awkwardly large items from his jacket