Reviews by jakomo

A huge, puzzle-filled adventure through multiple domains of the "deep web" - a metaphysical aquatic/internet/innerspace ocean, as you try to recover your memories and piece together your identity, while looking for a way home. This is a stand-alone game set in the same world as Open Sorcery, but no knowledge of previous games is required.

This time you play an actual "open sorcerer" rather than an elemental spirit, so as well as the traditional "matter/motive" element-based puzzles there are spell-casting and inventory puzzles, word-search puzzles, rearranging blocks of text into the right order, changing descriptions to make them consistent with each other, navigating complex dialogue trees, card games, alchemical crafting, and so much more, with almost every puzzle having multiple possible solutions.

A basic completion run takes over 15 hours, and that's without trying to get the numerous achievements, and skipping a ton of optional content. This is combined with a great story and great writing, veering between very funny, thrilling, and deeply sad with aplomb. It also looks and sounds great, with music, sound effects, occasional graphics, and beautiful typography throughout. A commercial game well worth the money, though if you just want to try it out, A Murder in Fairyland is a small-ish chunk from the middle of the game released for free.

Open Sorcery feels like the last thing on earth you could possibly spin into a Christmas-themed story, yet here it is. And it works. A direct continuation from the original, JINGLE BEL/S is not just a brilliantly clever title (BEL/S is the protagonist of both games), it also delivers a new type of puzzle (finding and giving the right gifts to the right recipients) and further character development, all in a DLC as big as the original game was.

Possibly the most original concept in all of gaming. Heck, all of literature. You're an elemental spirit meshed with computer code, employed as a kind of ghostbusting security system, monitoring locations and keeping people safe from supernatural entities. Even the primary puzzle form is dizzyingly original: deducing the "matter" of the intruders (what element they're made of) and their "motive" (the element that controls how they behave), from brief text descriptions and context clues. There's nothing else like this (apart from the DLC and sequel).

A free sci-fi Obradinn-like mystery deduction game, playable in a browser. Like its forebears (The Roottrees are Dead, Her Story, Family, Type Help etc), extremely addictive and compelling. Find a bunch of missing spaceships somewhere in the solar system. Were they destroyed by an alien attack fleet?

Primary gameplay loop is uncovering new co-ordinates: use a telescope for a "visual analysis" of the location. This might uncover new clues, for example, electromagnetic data, which can then be analysed with spectrum analyzers, which might reveal unique ship EM signatures, or, if the location has the facilities, allow you to talk via "ansible" faster-than-light communication, which might unlock new co=ordinates, or new tools to use, or trigger a new message from Fleet Intelligence HQ. Fill in the details of each of the missing craft to progress.

The story itself is no great shakes, lacking the mind-blowing twists and turns of its genre-mates, and the UI is occasionally clunky, but the gameplay carries it, you will absolutely want to solve this puzzle to completion (it took me half a day, using the in-built progressive hints only a couple of times).

Enjoyed Overboard!? You'll love Expelled! The formula is the same: a time-loop where scholarship girl Verity Amersham must save herself from being found guilty of (attempted) murder by the end of the day. It works perfectly well standalone, but playing Overboard! first will provide some surprising connections. The girls' boarding school setting, reminiscent of St. Trinian's, works great as a place where egos collide, dark secrets lurk, and ambition can lead to (mild) violence. Dialogue and action choices are dynamic, encouraging rambunctious, rule-breaking, gleefully immoral behaviour. Expelled! ramps up the silliness from it's predecessor, with goofy detours into comedy and horror, but the tone stays consistent, and the writing is always on-point, complimented by fantastic era-appropriate tunes and a dazzling art style.

Puzzle-filled mini-text adventure seemingly set in the Little Match Girl universe but without any reference to Ebenezabeth, Scrooge, or any of that series' regulars. You are a female vampire looking to get onto the board that governs urban vampire society by persuading each interviewer to vote for you. Naturally this involves solving basic puzzles for each member: dealing with nuisance noisy kids, bluffing your way through playing chess, navigating a maze, finding a secret word, etc. An in-game item provides guidance in the form of crossword puzzle clues, which can get very devious.

A cool "Vampire The Masquerade"-esque setting, an excellent player-character who hopefully takes the stage in further games, and a delicious cast of NPCs. Blood-sucking fun.

A collision with an alien spaceship leaves you stuck on a planet, your ship destroyed, the alien ship still semi-functional. Explore it, figure out what everything does, and find a way to be rescued. Helpfully, everything on their ship is labelled, Adam West's Batcave-style. Unhelpfully, it's all greek to you. Alien-greek. A giant translation puzzle, like a scaled-up Ritus Sacri, or a scaled down Heaven's Vault, but with added gadgets and gizmos. It's extremely player-friendly: An on-screen map, built-in hints, external invisiclues, hyperlinked words: click on one to either examine it or try translating it... All your translations are available in the excellent "Vocab" section including where they were found and other objects that also bear the same words.

A compelling experience, technically polished and enjoyable. Difficulty marred the second half of the game: some of the logical leaps between (Spoiler - click to show)activating and using the teleporters and figuring out (Spoiler - click to show)the scanner is transmitting to the aliens seemed to be underclued (even in the invisiclues): it's difficult to deduce if you haven't already fully translated everything by that point, and it's very possible to just stumble into that situation without having a full grasp of the vocabulary.

One-room romp where you play a fairy, giving suggestions to a mysterious stranger to fix an ancient machine while two more NPCs fend off a band of goblins. You're too small to be heard or perform any actions yourself, but flying to an object will attract the stranger's attention to it, and if he's holding something suitable, will try to use it on the object. Basically, "USE x ON y" with extra steps.

It's "limited parser", so gameplay is purely typing in nouns, which leaves room to really fill out the fairy player-character's personality, and she's delightful and hilarious. The Dunning-Kruger effect writ large, confidently clueless about everything around her: "As soon as you first laid eyes on him, you knew that he was destined to fall obsessively in love with you and die of a broken heart, so once again you flutter enticingly into his gaze. But, when he swats you away like an annoying insect, you are reminded that this poor, proud man is concealing his abysmal eyesight from his companions."

Being clueless, she refers to items as "thingamajigs", "whatsits" etc, it's up to you to decipher what they are, help get the machine working again, solve the mystery of the stranger, and escape to freedom. A PRAY command provides hints, giving you "y" from "USE x on y", but could probably do with a second level that also reveals "x", to avoid occasional moments of lawnmowering.

The most SF-tilted Little Match Girl episode yet. Takes place largely on a spaceship about to destroy a planet-sized golden shell found in space. The bad guys, a team of bumbling comedic incompetents (a la Team Rocket from Pokémon), think God is hiding inside. Ebenezabeth has other ideas, so has infiltrated their ship to stop the countdown. She has some of her gear and abilities from previous games still present, so she can see in the dark, transform into a mouse, scan things, and of course, shoot her Colt Paterson. Looking into fire transports her to another place and time, both deliberately and accidentally, causing short excursions to the South Dakota wildfires, a coal-powered train, and more.

The real-time element is front and centre, with a big countdown clock at the top of the screen, and can net you a losing ending, but it's actually very generous. There's a lot of excellent flavour text that you will likely skip if you're rushing to the next objective, or you're a slow reader. The text message conversations between the bad guys are gold. Worth playing at least twice to take it all in. Another highly entertaining LMG adventure.

A return to the weird world of Castle Balderstone. Specifically, the "weird west" world, in this cowboy horror where the protagonist packs heat to take on a demonic invasion of a frontier town. It's a shoot-em-up with trivial levels of puzzle difficulty: the only real challenge is equipping the right gun for the right enemy (and maybe preserving ammo, but it almost grows on trees in this game). But this is story-focused IF, and the most important element, the writing, easily carries this to greatness: you can almost taste the sawdust and spittoons. And there are multiple, impressively lengthy bits done entirely in rhyming verse. Yee-haw!