Ratings and Reviews by Rovarsson

The train got you to New York right on time as scheduled... Which means you now have an entire afternoon's worth of time to kill before your friends get off work. Seeing as you're now a bit of a stranded tourist, why not make the most of it?

Lady Liberty seems like a good place to start. After poking around a bit (as adventurous tourists are wont to do) and standing in line for way too long, lo and behold, you find a portal to the past!

Lost New York is a time traveling sightseeing game. There is no pressing urgency, no impending city-threatening catastrophe. The essence of the game really is wandering around through New York in different eras of its construction.

That doesn't mean there are no puzzles. Oh my, but there are puzzles. Many depend on carefully remembering buildings or NPCs from different time zones and traveling back and forth with the necessary items. The majority are well integrated and quite intuitive for the helpful and inquisitive tourist PC you are guiding along, but there is no larger motivation to solve them. Indeed, from outside the game the puzzles mostly seem put there to force you to explore thoroughly and see as much as possible of the city the author has recreated in the game.

For the best experience, it is not recommended to focus too much on solving the obstacles as quickly and efficiently as possible. Instead, hang around, spend some time in interesting places. Well written and fascinating scenes are bound to unfold. This does mean that you will probably die on multiple occasions, or end up an adventure zombie at the least. Make sure to have a few save files at the ready. (Dying or quitting prematurely compares you to a New York mayor. The accounts of their accomplishments and fraudulence are worth dying for.)

The exploration of the history of New York is where the heart of Lost New York lies. A few smaller areas are mostly there for variety and mixing up the puzzle-solutions. The meat of the game is in traversing and comparing the two big maps/years: 1880 and 1905.
The sideways encounters with some historical NPCs made me curious enough to do some research into the lives of Emma Goldman and Robert Moses among others.
The most impressive character in the game however is the city of New York itself. The author has lovingly recreated a miniature Big Apple with lots of famous and infamous locations. The traffic and hassle on the streets, the descriptions of buildings and parks, the shops and saloons,... They all call forward a city bustling with life and productivity.
The differences between time zones add to the impression of life and growth. A construction site here, a half-finished bridge there, the transition from above-ground railways to subway tunnels,... All paint a vivid picture of a city in flux, constantly on the move, hurrying toward the future.

While there is no suspense involved in your sightseeing trip through the past, there is much excitement to be found in the exuberant and detailed descriptions of New York. Even the parser gets in on the action by replying to a failed command in a typical brusque NY manner (>GET PAINTING "Get real!")

The love and fascination of the author for the city of New York shines through in every paragraph, even when describing the more shadowy sides of its history and geography.

A beautiful, entertaining, captivating historical tour.

An aspiring Druid nearing the end of your apprenticeship, you stand before a final daunting task. You must imbibe the dream-potion and leave this world to go on a Spirit Trek.

In the Dream World lies your Druid Way, and you cannot return until you have found it.

An original premise for a text-adventure, a framing story I found very attractive.

The setting of the Dream World helps to defuse some common sources of disbelief. Various improbable, even physics-defying things can happen here, and it's not that weird to find a desert three steps from a glacial mountain flank.
On the other hand, although the setting unites vastly different ecologies in one world, the map in general retains a very natural feel. The easy way, especially in an oldschool adventure with 23 rooms only connected by cardinal directions, would have been a geometric grid.
Instead, the author has left out many room connections and skewed the map in a slightly asymmetric form. This gives it an organic feel, a shape almost like a bush or shrub. The more I mapped the game, the more this form became apparent. It's subtle, but it certainly added to my appreciation of the game.

Rite of the Druid was developed to be compatible with oldschool limited-memory platforms. A lot of scenery is unimplemented, and a lot of commands are met with "You can't do that." This is to be expected and didn't bother me much. However, the limited memory comes with more grating issues.
When the player enters a command that would be useful in another room or situation, even a very general "Not now"-response would be a helpful nudge. Instead, it's impossible to differentiate between a failed command and a near-miss.
Sometimes finding the right verb to appease the two-word parser is a pain, but it comes with the territory. However, when I suddenly found, after fishing up and juggling every seemingly plausible two-word combination to form an intelligible command, that in certain situations the parser does accept a compound phrasing... Let's just say that an unspecified amount of hair previously on my head is no longer there...

Apart from these issues I had with Mr Parser, the puzzles are delightful. There is a nice flow to the sequence leading the player from one solution to the next object to the next puzzle. Many solutions require that undefinable little snuff of moon-logic that makes for a nice "Aha!" once you find it.

When booting up Rite of the Druid, the first thing that catches the eye is the superb pixel art. Truly beautiful. But this is a text game.
I am very happy that the sparse descriptions do not fall behind. Whereas he pictures are luscious and vibrant, the sparse, stark white-on-black text pinpoints the salient details and carries the magical mood in well-chosen sentences.

I liked this a lot.

You love your big brother Anton very much. Wouldn't know where you'd be, how you'd survive without him. That said, Anton's not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer. Closer to a spoon, to be honest.

Just now, he turned away from the handleless rooftop door that he was supposed to hold open while you were working. It clicked shut, leaving the two of you stranded on top of the building with no way to get down again.

I booted up this game without reading a blurb or a review beforehand. From the intro, I gathered that Toph (the PC) and Anton were a pair of chimneysweeping brothers, or maybe smalltime burglars with a hide-out on the roof. Until I reached the end of the starting room description and it turned out we were gathering spider silk. Or "spizz" as Anton calls it, however nastily suggestive that may sound...

This is just the first of many small and subtle but very intruiging bits of worldbuilding you'll find while searching the abandoned rooftop for a way down. They come together very effectively to paint a fragmented yet evocative post-apocalyptic picture of the near future, one that I would love to explore in a bigger game.

Roofed is a very small game, six locations in total and maybe 45 minutes of (slow and attentive) playing time. It feels like a small slice-of-life in the daily goings-on of the two brothers, and it makes me very curious about how they spend the rest of their time. There are hints about a rivalling gang, about their boss who buys the spider silk, about the completely organic architecture in the newer parts of town, and of course about the spiders who left their threads to be harvested...

The puzzles are simple but clever. Even though there are very little resources to be found on the rooftop and the objective seems straightforward, it takes a decent amount of experimenting and getting to know the surroundings to successfully find an escape. Of course your trusted big brother is there to spring to your muscular help should you require it...

The relationship between the brothers is endearing and lifelike. Each stands by the other's side and helps out with the skills nature has given him, be it brains or brawn. Helping them escape their predicament and seeing them walk off toward new adventures, little Toph atop Anton's broad shoulders made me smile.

Good game.

Magnificent!
Terrible!
Fabulous!
Abysmal!

It's a real pity that there aren't any good superlatives to descrive something that is really good at being plain good.

Old Jim's Convenience Store (see, the plainness begins with the title already...) assumes nothing, seeks no higher glory, has no ambitions I could discern apart from providing an pleasant semi-adventurous hour or so. It does so by means of an easy but rewarding treasure hunt in an underground tunnel/cave.

You see? It's the exemplification of adventure tropes. It's a cliché boiled down, condensed to its purest essence. Except that it's set in a convenience store instead of a spooky manor.

I had a lot of fun playing through this. There is comfort in re-exploring well known ground. There is pleasure in seeing the familiar treated with loving craft.

I'll settle for "Brilliantly Average!"

Someone over at Magnetic Scrolls must have though "Hey, if we can get the players on board with the most ridiculous premise right at the start of our new game, we can do pretty much everything we want to them once they're along for the ride."

So they did.

It's only through the mastery of text adventures that Magnetic Scrolls has that this doesn't dive off the deep end into utter baffling zaniness. Even then, Fish! cuts it really close.

Two things hold it together:

--The skill of balancing puzzles on the brink of logic. Oftentimes, I found myself doing stuff because that's what you do in an adventure. Only afterwards did the results fall into place and did things make sense. I blamed this on lack of clueing or lazy storytelling at first. I have to admit that at least part of the gaps were caused by my frequent use of the walkthrough. When played on its own terms, Fish! sends you back to your fishbowl upon failure (or just plain kills you later in the game). This means that before you solve a given chapter, you will experience it many times in different sequences.
Even then though, some of the jumps, hoops and timeloops the game expected me to not only find but also exploit in the right order were a bit too much of the try-die-repeat variety. ((Spoiler - click to show)How on earth one is to know when to go to the disco?)
At its best however, Fish! offers some long-term puzzles where it is a great pleasure to see the vague goal you saw from afar finally come into focus and click.

-- The skill of letting the story cover any holes. A mystery story with dimension hopping fish is bound to have lots of loose threads. Those are features, not bugs! Now, I don't want to accuse Magnetic Scrolls of doing this on purpose... much. Fish! is an immersive action-mystery. The dimensional loops give it a thought-provoking SF feel. The writers throw in their best goofball-comedy talents. It's really a very entertaining ride.
If a few clues and some plotlines got obfuscated for the sake of fun, oh well...

The PC in Fish! is sent to different areas by means of warps. Each area does not just contain a puzzle, it is a puzzle. You need to find the sequence to get to the proper ending, otherwise you are sent back, killed off, or zombified. Especially after the first three preparatory levels, thing get serious. There are explicit and implicit timers (you were told that you have a meeting at ten, but (Spoiler - click to show)no one said when and why they stopped selling plankton sachets in the restaurant...).

I found this incredibly difficult without the walkthrough, but, as I said, relying on the walkthrough too much will make you miss a lot of the story.

And actually, aside from all the frustration this game will surely cause you, the mystery-goofball-SF story is a big laugh I wouldn't want to have missed.

A bouncer looks down his nose at you. "So sorry to inform you, sir, but we do have a dress code here. If you would be so kind to adhere to it or shove off. Please."

Opening Night starts out with a straightforward puzzle: find a way past the bouncer and into the theatre. We meet our player character, who seems to be a somewhat obsessed fan of the lead singer/actress in the play this evening. His insistence upon getting in goes two ways: it garners sympathetic feelings for his obvious and honest admiration for the show's leading lady, but it also verges on the edge of creepiness.

In later chapters however, the need to get a personal meeting with the actress falls away as the prime motivation of the game as it transforms into another story altogether.

There are puzzles, but they serve mostly as a means to get the player more deeply involved with the story.Away to elicit a deeper emotional response as the game goes through its metamorphosis.

In the end, Opening Night is a short and compressed tale centered around the eponymous pivotal night in the protagonist's life. While the game shows us only scenes from the theatre and its immediate surroundings and never elaborates on the player character's personal life, Opening Night still manages to somehow imply the protagonist's entire life story. We are given just enough hints to let the imagination take over and fill in the blank years.

Very strong storytelling.