Ratings and Reviews by jakomo

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.