Ratings and Reviews by Janos Honkonen

Violet was an awesome find - it manages to combine romance, slice of life, somewhat darkish comedy and one room puzzle action in a pretty impressive way. The prose and the tone of the "dialogue" and the descriptions is witty and a delight to read. The puzzles are pretty out there, but solvable, especially with the well implemented hint system. Both the puzzles and the story lead up to a pretty delightful and nutty ending.

Fragile Shells falls to the category of "escape games", where the aim is to get out of a single room or a small space by using the items that are available around the player. The locale and the backstory for this is rather more interesting than in many similar games: a half of a module from a space station, spinning out of control.

Fragile Shells is a puzzle driven game, and although the puzzles are very "adventure game convoluted" and stretch the suspension of disbelief beyond the breaking point, they are enjoyable enough and fun to figure out.

I would've hoped a little bit more from the writing, though. Apart from one piece of narrative, there really is no feel of claustrofobia or panic about being in... well, half a module of a space station that's open to the space on one end.

In any case, this is a solid brainteaser with reasonably good writing and background, and a joy to play.

The Warbler's Nest is a great mood piece, not really horror and not really drama, but something in between. The game itself is rather short and not very puzzley, which is a good thing for the atmosphere and the overall mood of this game.

If you like story and interesting narrative over puzzles, The Warbler's Nest is a must to play.

One Eye Open left me a bit torn on some issues - on the other hand it was a good and atmospheric game in the "deserted lab, biological horrors, piecing together the back story" genre of horror, and the game was skillfully written. Then again, I feel like I've done this a dozen times in console and computer FPS games during the last few years: going through labs full of biological monstrosities and looking for voice lo... ahem, I mean pieces of paper. The "concentrate on" gameplay was interesting, though, and a good way to build the back story.

In the end I played to the first ending, and then tinkered a bit to find some others but gave up. One reason for this was the feeling of having seen the genre too many times, others were some annoying disambiguation problems. If I mention the file cabinets and desks, I think people get what I mean.

This review might sound a bit too negative, since I did enjoy the first playthrough. For someone with a different gaming background this could be a four star game, easily.

The strongest parts of Floatpoint are the story and the setting, which owe far more to scifi short stories in the style of Ursula Le Guin than videogame scripts. The puzzles are nicely integrated to the story, which culminates in a decision that supposedly affects the whole game world.

Apart from one very irritating bug this was an enjoyable experience for friends of non-actiony scifi.