Tag Archive: “adventure games”

Review of Ultreïa

Posted in entertainment by Adam

8 September 2022

The classic story of a robot out for revenge.

Ultreïa is a science fiction point-and-click adventure game in which you play a robot named Nymo on a pilgrimage to Ultreïa, a satellite of whatever rock you’re native to, to learn the secrets of life and death.

The most obvious draw for this game is the graphics, which are very nice in 2.5D, but even better are the cutscenes which are 3D animations. A few of them suffer slightly from what I assume are compression issues (they look noisy to me, anyway; possibly done to keep game size smaller or for rendering reasons), but aside from that they add a lot to the feel of the game. The whole game has a cool post-apocalyptic future feel which makes you want to adopt that robot you’re always seeing salvaging spare parts from behind the computer store, the one that was stranded in a time-travel accident from the year 2525.

At its base, Ultreïa is a fairly standard point-and-click, with an inventory and click-on-the-active stuff to select an action. That modern control scheme is easy to learn and stays out of the player’s way, and the game offers a super-brief tutorial to teach it for new players. That’s a solid choice for any adventure.

There are a few rough edges. At least a couple inventory items don’t do anything (that I found, anyway), which violates the principle of Chekov’s gun—if you introduce a rubber chicken in the first act, it must have a use by the conclusion. Significant items are too easily acquired, which feels more like the need for Chekov’s gun control: if an item is useful, it should be behind at least one obstacle. Also, the quick-travel map for the city, Mount St-Troy, could use labels and perhaps larger thumbnails.

The overall story arc is great, built as a combination of noir and Eastern philosophy. While most of the character interactions are fleeting, it fits the story well enough to be forgiven. The puzzles are mostly logical, and none felt too hard. There’s even a nice (optional) card game you can play.

It took me about four hours to complete the game, including all achievements. I enjoyed my time, and if you like the robotic, post-apocalyptic aesthetic and adventure games, take a look.

Review of Embracelet

Posted in entertainment by Adam

1 September 2022

Legend has it there’s a birdwatcher on Slepp.

Embracelet is a casual 3D adventure game centered on a magic (telekinetic) bracelet and a teenager on the edge of adulthood who is given a quest by his grandfather to go to a remote, depopulated fishing island, Slepp, in northern Norway to return the artifact.

I had previously played Milkmaid of the Milky Way, by the same developer. That was a short, more traditional point-and-click adventure about a rural milkmaid who boards a spaceship to save her abducted milk cows. Both are built around kind and humanist narratives.

I played it via Proton/WINE and used an old console controller (per the game’s recommendation to play with a controller). When I first booted the game, before I opted to use a controller, the mouse cursor wasn’t showing up, so maybe controller is best? The joystick controls were manageable, but I think I would have preferred to play with mouse and keyboard, as I found using a joystick to move the cursor mildly annoying.

The graphics are simple, but pleasing and consistent for the style. One flaw there was a semi-subtle global reflection applied to the world. I didn’t like the look of that, and I’m not sure why it was there, but from time to time I noticed it and felt it was a distraction from the overall aesthetic.

The principle action of Embracelet takes place on Slepp, with several different quests to be found as you explore. The gameplay and events are fairly spectacular, and the game does a good job of keeping its pacing between exposition and simple puzzles. The only pain points for me were the follower events where you have to follow NPCs, which always feels a bit annoying.

The least explicable part of the game is the lack of any accommodation for the main character on Slepp. Where does he sleep? Does he eat? Is he actually a robot?! The game never gives up the goods on those key questions. (Minor un-spoiler, the game never truly explains the origin of the magic bracelet, either.)

Embracelet shares many aspects of a traditional adventure game, it attempts to do so within a semi-open-world design. I am glad to see this attempted, and I hope it will be attempted more in the future. While there will always be a place for 2D adventure games, the basic elements aren’t particularly tied to that format, and I continue to believe the format can have a broader appeal with 3D environments, either as thirdperson (in this case) or firstperson.

While this is a short game (it took me about eight hours (three playthroughs) to complete it, including all the achievements), it was a nice look at a world touched by magic. If you like traditional adventure games or coming-of-age fare, this one is a low-key story game that’s worth a look.

Review: The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark

Posted in entertainment by Adam

18 August 2022

Not actually an American football simulation at all!

The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark is the sequel to The Darkside Detective, a point-and-click adventure game. It is divided into cases, as was its predecessor. The case-based adventure game has become a subgenre of sorts, though I am not aware of its origins. (Oniria Crimes (diehealthy.org: “Review of Oniria Crimes“) and Nobodies spring to mind. The latter is a different spin on point-and-click, in that the goal is to quietly dispose of corpses.)

Whatever the cause of the trend, it is a reasonable way to break up development and still create a cohesive game, as shown by The Darkside Detective and this sequel. Like the previous game (and like the others mentioned) there is usually some connection between cases, which makes each case feel like an episode rather than an isolated story to itself.

Here you play as Detective Francis McQueen, now-formerly of the Darkside Division of the Twin Lakes Police Department. The darkside isn’t a reference to the yin-aspect of the Star Wars force, but to an alternate dimension or parallel universe where things are kind of screwy (in a different way than they’re normally screwy). The darkside itself doesn’t feature as heavily or directly in this game as in the first one.

Each case follows the same basic shape that detective stories have since Sherlock Holmes first solved a case. There’s the exposition, in which we find out the nature of the case. There’s the rising action when we uncover clues as to who’s responsible or, in the case of point-and-clicks, we cobble together inventory items into solutions to puzzles. And finally, there’s the denouement, when we pull the disguise off of someone and they complain about us and our dog foiling their scheme.

Case locations include an older-peoples’ home (the grandmother of your sidekick, Dooley, lives there), Ireland (not the whole island, but a castle there, the ancestral home of your sidekick), a carnival, a pro-wrestling event, and your highschool reunion. There are also two bonus cases (with a third planned, according to the case selection screen). The first bonus is a nice time-travel case for Christmas (loosely after Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol), and the other is occasioned by your sidekick’s nephew being missing.

The writing has good humor to it, including some absurdity which I always enjoy. It does tend toward memery in places, but it’s not terribly online. The writing is British English, which is kind of strange at times given the game takes place in America. But it’s not really America is it? It’s a fictional America where British gamemakers have replaced America with a British imagining of an America—bizarro America—where supernatural things happen. In any case, the puzzles tend to the easy side, and are mostly logical.

It took me about 14 hours to complete eight cases and all the achievements. If you want an easy-ish, pixel-graphics adventure game, particularly one with light elements of supernatural themes, give it a look.