Great review! I agree with every single point you made.
Downfall is definitley one of the most disturbing games I have ever played, and one of the very few I could really define as "horrifying" in both the (in-game) physical and psychical apsects.
If you like the genre, you really cannot miss this one; besides, even at full price it is very cheap!

Thanks! Your comments about Myst made me want to visit it again - I never did very well with it in the old days, but maybe it's time to make another stab at it.

I haven't posted in a while, so I'm afraid this might get a little bloated.

Rogue Legacy
Vita

A while ago, I put this on my "desert island" list. The shine's worn off a little, but I still think it's a great game, despite it's weaknesses. The basic premise is that you explore a randomly-generated, monster-and-spike filled castle, ultimately trying to kill four bosses, and then kill a final boss. Death is permanent, and the dungeon is regenerated every time you die, but bosses stay dead, and you collect gold, which you can use to permanently upgrade your characters on future runs. It works extremely well, in terms of pacing, and the controls are incredibly smooth. Some reviewers on GOG accuse it of requiring "grinding," but

1) "Grinding" means exploring the castle, collecting gold and runes, and, you know, playing the game. It's hardly JRPG-style walking back and forth in front of a town for hours.

2) He utilizes glitches which have since been patched, but come on, look at this crazy person beat the game in under twenty minutes. You grind as much as your skill level requires.

Unfortunately, its weaknesses become apparent the more you play. Low enemy variety, including the bosses, is a killer. The idea of randomly generating heroes to choose from falls down somewhat; the idea is that you'd adjust your play-style for each character, but gold is scarce, at least early on, and with different characters requiring different upgrade paths, I got myself locked into a situation where playing as mage characters was basically an instant death sentence (and with mana restoration being such a rare event, I'm not convinced that the base class is particularly viable no matter what you do.) And since enemies grow in power without limit as you beat the game again and again, whereas you have limited upgrades, it's less re-playable then I initially thought.

Also, on the damn Vita, it kept trying to connect to the PSN when I didn't have access to wireless, even after I told the stupid thing that I didn't care about cross-saving, and the game would pause while it did that. Argh.

I got a good twenty to thirty hours out of it, and give it a thumbs up, but it's crying out for a major, Wrath of the Lamb-style expansion.

Guacamelee!
Vita

Vita owners never did get the "super special edition that has important balancing changes but we're not going to patch the game or anything, just buy it again, will you, there's totally enough new stuff to justify buying the same game twice" version of this game. Not that I'm bitter about the way they handled that or anything (I am totally bitter about the way they handled that).

I thought the combat was frustrating and dull. I mostly liked the platforming parts, although there were places where it seemed like I was supposed to have three hands to input the right button combinations. The badguys were a lot of fun. The writing was pretty good.

Verdict: it was OK

Flying Hamster
PSmini

It's some stupid little sidescrolling shooter thing. I'm not sure why I bought it; I guess it was fine?

Disillusions Manga Horror
Vita/PSN

I bought this knowing nothing about it, except that it was apparently a horror game and cost a dollar, and why not?

Everything about this game is completely, hilariously incompetent, but it n a way I found frankly kind of endearing. It tried hard, bless its soul.

Sam and Max Hit the Road

Oh, an old PC game on a site dedicated to old PC games. Fancy that.

It was good. Not laugh-out-loud funny, but consistently amusing. Endearing characters, and (this is the important one) puzzles that almost always made sense (for an adventure-game value of "sense"). When I did get stuck, the hint book was super well-designed, nudging me to the solution without just telling it to me. Some modern adventure games have a built-in hint system to serve the same purpose, I think.

(On the other hand--PUZZLE SPOILER--rings aren't actually magnetic, right? Why would you wear a magnetic ring?)

My main complain was that I thought it had pacing problems. The way I played, at least, I spent the entire game getting and solving everything, without any clear reason for any of it, and then you get to the end of the game, and it was "Oh, I already have the four items I need, I guess that's that, then." I think the totem poles would have been better introduced earlier in the game to provide a little better structure.

I'm currently playing Grim Fandango. In terms of puzzles and controls, Hit the Road is clearly a better game. In terms of writing, although I found Hit the Road amusing enough, it's a massacre in the other direction.

Recommended to adventure game fans if you haven't played it already, certainly. Probably a good jumping-in place for non-adventure game fans as well, due to its relatively accessible puzzles.

Yeah, there were definitely some very hard and tricky parts. Games like this one I play in short bursts, sometimes with months in-between. A basic platformer of this kind is pretty easy to come back to and play for a little while, attempting to progress a bit further, since you there's no need to remember complicated controls, combos, etc.

Consider that I started playing LoP in October, but only have 13 hours attributed to it on Steam - at least one of which was probably idling for cards.

Runner 2

An occasionally decent platformer in the form of an endless runner, if you turn the difficulty up to hard and purposefully avoid in-level checkpoints.

The controls are responsive enough, and the music is all right, if a bit on the minimalistic, ultimately dull side considering the high-speed pace.

The visuals might be seen as interesting, or painful to look at, depending on who you are. For me, it was the latter.

There was definite difficulty seeing obstacles properly throughout most of the game, and the character seemed to blend into the background until I unlocked a costume that put them into an hot-pink homage to Little Mac.

Note to developers - if I have to put my character in a neon Pepto Bismol-colored sweatsuit so I can see them properly?

You've screwed up.

There's a fair bit of content for a straight platformer, but more than a bit of that comes from the expectation that the player will want to go back after unlocking keys in order to complete paths that lead to more costumes, or that the player will want to go back through all the levels in order to find secret retro levels.

But if you're a player who doesn't care about such things, you're going to blow through levels even faster than I did.

Level rehash to pad out a game probably isn't the best idea when you're charging fifteen dollars for the product, but it's obviously their hope, given that an achievement for the game is completing a triple perfect plus for each level.

I had no idea what the hell that was, but after looking online I found that it means going through the entire game, on all three difficulties, and getting completely perfect runs.

This game is not compelling enough for that. Not by a long shot. I beat it ten minutes ago, deleted it, and now I'm writing about it.

Also, if you do for some reason run through it all on hard, getting every bit of gold, every costume and going down every locked path, you'll find the last two levels to be more than a little insulting when it comes to quality and difficulty.

With Meat Boy, you get a Cotton Alley nightmare.
With Runner 2, you get a level and a boss fight that should come with video in the corner of the level designers shrugging their shoulders at you.

And all this for a ten second cliffhanger ending.

I am not impressed.

How's the gameplay? Can you compare it to any other adventure games? Is it like more Walking Dead or Fahrenheit or Dreamfall or Murdered: Soul Suspect or what else? Are there any action elements? Quick time events? Puzzles? How long did it take to beat it?

So far this is the only chapter out, and it takes 3-5 hours to play through, possibly longer if you want to get all the achievments. The game focuses on choices you make, very similar to The Walking Dead. If you are a fan of The Walking Dead you will enjoy this one. There are no puzzles in the game or action elements. It's more about the consequences of your choices ;-)

Actually Downfall was made before Harvester Games partnership with Screen7 so it was made by just one person (including the song at the end - that's the dev singing :))
Well, OK, the soundtrack was made by another person :)

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Years ago I beat this with the Indy solo path, not realizing at the time that the game branches midway through, so this time around I beat it with the team path. I don't think I'll bother with the action path because the fist fighting isn't very fun.

It's still a great, epic point-and-click adventure. Does a pretty good job of capturing the Indiana Jones flavor, although for the CD version, I think the guy doing Indy's voice sounds a bit off. That's just nitpicking, though :)

From the credits, I gathered that it was two brothers who did the whole of the thing; one did most of the heavy lifting, and the other did music and had some other credits, if I'm not mistaken. But I didn't do a whole lot of research, so I'm not sure.

Teslagrad

I used to live and still have lots of family in Norway so naturally have a thing for Norwegian games. Teslagrad is done by a small indie studio in Bergen. Was following the development quite closely, but got to play the game only now. And must say I don't really care for it. The puzzle platformer used to be my favorite genre, but just can't get the same joy out of these anymore. Teslagrad does lot's of things right. Like for example the art-style and the music is really charming. Also, the way the story is told is really interesting. No text or hand holding here. The game has reputation of being difficult, which I sort of agree. It is not the bosses that gave me hard time, but the certain tricky jumping sequences. Here the controls just didn't feel as tight and there was a strange random feel to the jumps. While the boss fights were somewhat easy to memorize it still was annoying with the instant death and having to go through the whole sequence again. Yes games used to be like this back-in-the day, but it doesn't mean its still fun after 20 years. So yeah, did not have fun with Teslagrad sadly. And this might be a big no no for some of you guys, but I did not technically finish the game even. I got to the big end gate and could not go through without having 15 scrolls. I think I got like ten scrolls. Heck it was only half way through the game when I realized that there were even such things to collect. When games to these kind of things it just feels cheap way of extending the length. Yes I could go and backtrack through the levels and collect five more scrolls, but as I said I was not enjoying the game. So Youtube to the rescue. And it was pretty clear straight away that it would not have been enough anyway. Right after the gate there is wall painting indicating that there is a proper ending if you collect all 36 scrolls. So, I watched the normal ending and don't seem to have missed a lot. Just the end boss fight and little bit of story. There is no way I can and afford to use any more time on this game anymore. Maybe it is actually Super Meat Boy that has ruined this genre for me since I can not seem to play another game from this genre with comparing the controls.

Thanks!

Yeah I have and yes the controls on in are just as good. What I remember off it was that it was just about getting the best high-scores and beating your friends times.

Feb 16 - Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure (All adventures)

First time playing this fun EGA platformer. The suction cup hands were a neat idea. Robert Prince's music is great as usual. The graphics are good for that time period. The enemy types were varied and interesting. The boss battles were pretty easy though once you know the trick. Levels varied between linear left-to-right to complex and non-linear and some were quite challenging to finish.

Scores:
Adventure 1 = 1,752,100 pts
Adventure 2 = 1,543,000 pts
Adventure 3 = 1,602,050 pts