Ratings and Reviews by jakomo

Control a friendly robot on alien world collecting specimens. Requires a thorough exploration of everything in the environment to dig out all 24 specimens before you can blast off. The planet has a day/night cycle, with both diurnal and nocturnal species to collect, so you'll be exploring most locations twice. Some specimens are harder to collect than others, requiring some simple inventory puzzles to be solved first.

This is from the author of Reflections and has the same high implementation standards and child-friendly simplicity. There is even some cool optional content: try talking to the robot, or finding the HUMOR option in its settings. I reckon the final launch code puzzle is too difficult for the target audience: I had to resort to the walkthrough there. It also doesn't display too well on a phone (the instructions for the electrical panel puzzle don't show up). Nevertheless, this one's well worth playing.

You play as Mickey Spillane's character Mike Hammer P.I., but the concept is abandoned as soon as you take a taxi to the English countryside. Apparently New York gumshoe Mike Hammer has relocated to England now? Naturally, he ends up meeting the Queen, who for some reason is now also part of the Snow White story, and wants Hammer to check who the fairest of them all is. Never mind that the magic mirror is literally in the next room (remind me why she needs a P.I. for this?), and her guard won't let you visit it, even though the Queen explicitly asked you to, in his presence. So of course you need to start a fire in the castle kitchen to distract the guard, because why wouldn't you? This all makes perfect sense.

Adventure Extraordinaire is so wildly surreal it becomes really charming, and the lovely art further adds to the effect. Unfortunately, it's also virtually unplayable. There is no way a normal human being could make any progress in this game without copious amounts of LSD, or by following the cheat sheet (thankfully available from the game's web page).

Graphically impressive D&D-styled dungeon-crawl for beginners. The English is not perfect but understandable. The turn-based combat is straightforward (you can find better weapons and armour and health-restoring food as you explore the dungeon). Puzzles are logical and fun on the whole. I couldn't figure out how to retrieve the thing from the well, nor how to fix the gate lever, and finally the werewolf on the bridge was too much for me. " If you don't understand something, ask an adult" the webpage says. Hm. As long as that adult isn't me, sure, go ahead.

In the very first location, the word "wooden" is highlighted in red. Normally you would highlight interactable nouns, not adjectives, so I was already off-kilter. Heading down into some tunnels below the shack, the word "hole" is in blue and "smelly mud" is in red. This time, you can interact with the mud, so that confirms the "wooden" highlight is a bug? The game is very inconsistent throughout in its use of red and blue highlights, which is a big problem for a game with such a thin implementation. It needs a ton of additional verb-synonyms and noun-synonyms to be implemented before it's even close to playable: even then, there is zero story to speak of, and the graphics are straight-up bad: why is a mole drawn as a stick-man?

An Android adaptation of the Lone Wolf "New Order" subseries (books 21-32): if you're looking for books 1-20, Lone Wolf Saga is what you need. Lone Wolf New Order currently covers books 21-29: book 30 (Dead in the Deep) is still available for sale in paper format and not covered by the Project Aon licence. Dever died in 2016, so the future of unpublished books 31-32 is unknown.

You play as a new protagonist, a student of the original Lone Wolf who sends you out on missions around Magnamund to fight evil. The app is not quite as polished/bug-free as Lone Wolf Saga but still works great, a must-download for anyone who wants to see further adventures after completing the original Lone Wolf's story arc.

Tiny Twine scifi-horror: well-written, with very effective descriptions of the 'kills'. The twist in the tale has been done before, 20 years ago in fact, but remains pretty effective in 2020.