I see GOG "fixed" where you could buy add-ons for items you don't own as gifts. A bit of a bummer.

Huh. For me it was the opposite. Beautiful Desolation was a bit all over the place storywise for me (and had way too much backtracking), whilst Stasis and Cayne were good consistent storytelling.

Besides I think Brotherhood's forte in storytelling is having a horror element.

I usually hate point & click adventure games but this one looks surprisingly good and has a strong presentation and voice-acting from the reviews I've watched, so I might try it.

It's far better than Beautiful Desolation already (I'm almost to the end of Chapter 2, I think). The voice acting is indeed solid, the cinematic sequences are decent enough, and the puzzles aren't too far into the realm of moon logic (though it follows the same STASIS tropes of giving clues in plain sight). In fact I've only peeked at ONE clue online because I missed something stupidly obvious (and I'm a bit of a moron when it comes to these games). All the atmosphere of the original STASIS is back. Highly entertaining. Definitely on the easier side of point & click adventure games.

I'd recommend playing Stasis 1 and Cayne. They're all set in the same universe and Cayne is free.
Beautiful Desolation is unrelated.

What's the average play time of these games (Stasis, Cayne, Beautiful Desolation)?
I always wanted to play them, but I am always hesitant when it might take too long to finish them.

Stasis is relatively short and very linear, 8-10 hours probably, maybe less if you're speeding. Cayne is short "companion piece" for Stasis, 2-4 hours.

Beautiful Desolation on the other hand is quite massive for adventure game, took me over 20 hours. But the game is much less linear, has pretty big open world (and frankly moving between locations alone takes quite a bit of that time), choices with different outcomes for quests which might encourage replaying or retrying, alternative solutions - more and less time consuming. It plays more like an RPG without combat (except one optional minigame) and character development than typical point & click adventure.

In point and click games this of course is really hard to say since different people find different puzzles difficult or easy and progress depends on how fast you solve those puzzles. I would say 8-10 hpours (Stasis, Beautiful Desolation), maybe a bit more if you struggle with some puzzles or if you are planning on finding everything there is beside the main story. Cayne is much shorter and more like a bonus - maybe 2 hours for that one.

Thanks, that seems to be manageable. I was afraid of much higher numbers.

These might be the next on my list. First I gotta finish Beyond a Steel Sky however.

Devs, don't string out gameplay with overuse of dialogue. Initially Bone Totem was paced well, but when you hit Chapter 4 you start to get areas where unnecessarily drawn-out dialogue frustrates a player wanting to continue playing apace (it's skippable, but that's only suitable for those who already know the plot). Dialogue and exposition is good, but if it obviously pads out the game or delays navigation or interactions too often you will ruin its impact.

Especially... when your voice actors... pause... to often... for dramatic effect. Or have "moan and groan" dialogue or whine too often. We get it, they're out of breath/distressed/in pain. But you're putting your player in agony waiting for the story to continue if you overdo it, so please: pace your dialogue appropriately.

I don't know... Kotor 2 could sometimes have over 10 minutes long spontaneous dialogues with companions out of the blue (That's with the player character being unvoiced too) and I loved every minute of that game.

Well, they're a bit different in design I wager. It's less about the amount of dialogue and more how it affects the pacing of gameplay.

Blocking you from interacting with things or travelling to the next room while the person sobs or gasps over the microphone, in a life-or-death situation where time is supposedly critical and no-one is safe ... you've got to either design the game to allow simultaneous interaction & dialogue or alter the dialogue so it doesn't interfere too much. Bone Totem has a lot of long pauses in dialogue punctuated with heavy breathing. Eventually it moves from being impactful to just plain frustrating. The urge to skip dialogue even if you lose something in exposition becomes very tempting, especially after spending hours getting to that point.

Some people hate forced pauses in games during dialogue, but honestly it's not much worse than how this is designed. I'd wonder whether getting the character to pause and animate them standing & gesturing in-sync with the dialogue might have been more acceptable than having your character left waiting idle at the next door waiting for the clickable prompt to appear in order to let you move on. This is most obvious when you have some hallways designed for nothing more than to facilitate dialogue segments.

Congratulations to THE BROTHERHOOD for this amazing release, I'm going to draw some numbers to see if I can afford it right now, in other case it will arrive as soon as I can.

I tell you what, play Totem and get back to me then. There's a limit to what I call good use of dialogue and what I call overuse which affects pacing. Totem's dialogue is good, don't get me wrong, it just needed to be tightened up in places so it's not unwelcome.