I'M SO EXCITED!

I've played a lot of wadjet eye games but not the blackwells, how are they compared to primordia, gemini rue, resonance, shivah?

Fantastic.

if you were to rank the wadjet eye games, where would the blackwell titles be?

Primordia, Gemini Rue and Resonance were made by different developers and only assisted and/or published by WadjetEye games. The Blackwell series compares best to The Shivah which was written and developed by the same author, although the Blackwell games are technically and graphically a bit more advanced and also a bit longer (but the single episodes are still shorter than the three games listed above, about 2-3 hours each, only the fourth one is significantly longer). The episodes also differ a bit in style, since Dave Gilbert had different pixel artists working on each of them (personally I liked that, YMMV).

It's tough to directly compare the Blackwell series with those other games and rank them, because they're so different. If you liked all of the above, you will like the Blackwell series, too, though. And if you don't want to buy them unseen, you can check out the demo versions on WadjetEye's homepage, e.g The Blackwell Legacy.

After how difficult and unintuitive the fourth game was (to me anyways) I think I might pick the game up just to complete my collection when it's on discount... Course if GoG adds it to the blackwell bundle free of charge then I won't have to worry about that...

Why was it difficult and unintuitive to you?
I'm always curious about those things when it comes to adventure games. I'd love them to be viable for everyone, but still pose a certain level of challenge, because more adventure gamers = more adventure games :D
I thought Deception hit that sweet spot (not counting one or two silly puzzles).

Maybe it's because I started playing, then went to bed before completing it, but several elements of the puzzles required you to freshly know or remember small details. 'My business cards glow!' for example, if it's not fresh in your mind you will just eventually get aggravated before looking up the walk-through to find out the little hint or details you needed to move on.

I'm also finding I'm not someone who enjoys Point & Click adventures, not only are they too linear but half the time if you don't understand how the author/devs were thinking for a particular scene it turns into 'click everything with everything I have'. The hints were a little TOO subtle sometimes. That and a couple portions of the game ended up being 'answer all the questions with all the perfect answers or start over', namely the dancing and the very end while she was being drained to make her fight back. sighs

Hah, that's the one puzzle that everyone remembers. It definitely wasn't telegraphed well enough.

Eh, at least they let you repeat them if you get them wrong. I quite liked the dancing puzzle, because it required a lot of detective work, but I get how it might have been irritating too. The end fight I don't remember all that well :D Though it's always problematic when point & click adventures do action scenes, I agree.

Anyway, thanks for explaining your position. I definitely see your point.

I've played The Shivah and part of Gemini Rue. But I doubt any of the rest will come close to Blackwell for me. It's a matter of theme or writing : Blackwell is ery focused on characters, on life stories, it's grounded in our everyday world with everyday dramas and waste of lives (just put in perspective by the post-mortem angle allowed by the ghosts narrative device). So, its stories, characters, background touch me more, I relate more. I appreciate more the emotional situations they are, the tone of late regrets (caracteristic of ghost stories), the relationships whose complexity is a big element there.

So, there is something subtle, sensitive and delicate, in my eyes, in the Blackwell stories and character writings, that appeal to me differently than the very "material puzzle" and pragmatic obstacles of usual adventure games (including gemini rue). It's like a book from a different kind of writer, more introspective, more "psychologising" - it's more of a character study movie than an action-adventure movie. To some degree.

And that's quite rare in videogames, and well done here (it's more than a gimmick, it's quality work). Plus, the characters are often attaching, even when conflicting. And... the whole atmosphere is... jazzy, bluesy ? Is it a thing ? If so it's a thing I like.

So there. Now :

"What about GOG?
GOG's policy is that they do not give out codes to distribute, so if you prefer playing/buying on GOG then you will have to make the purchase there when it becomes available."

Aw. Gog gog gog gog gog. *shakes head*

Anyway, preordered at Wadjet's.

Great, no downside just start all over and do it until you get it done... sighs after 2-3 times you just want to give up or say 'skip it' and move on. That honesty isn't very interesting unless you know what subtle answers/hints they are giving you to use; I've been told I'm dense as a brick so...


Yeah, reminds me that in order to get her to dance you had to put on music she liked and you get a short hard to remember reference to a band in her room, along with other bits of what she is like and what courses she has taken it would be nicer if I could make notes in-game rather than having. I mean 'ephalactic fish'? Easy to misspell, easy to dismiss, hard to associate that's what you need. The only way to get it right is to manually write it down since likely you couldn't just look for 'fish' and find the band in question...

Just lots of little things that are annoying...

What about Phoenix Online? :)
I got a GOG key right after Cognition landed here.

In case anybody else waiting for this isn't signed up for the newsletter:
"Hey - no box this time?
Sadly, we were unable to make the physical edition work either logistically or financially this time. When Blackwell Epiphany launches, we are going to look into making a limited edition five game set of the series."

Sadly I don't remember which puzzles I had difficulties with*, but I also perceived Deception as the most diffcult or unintuitive of the series due to them. It might have been the first Blackwell game that required me to look up things in a walkthrough. Then again, it's also considerably longer than the other episodes.

* But that dancing puzzle was definitely among them and maybe the most problematic. The problem is I figured out the concept on my own and I thought I knew all the answers, but I had apparantly missed one very small and inconspicious piece in my pixel-hunting or backtracking.

Same with Driftmoon and Defender's Quest. Seems like either Dave Gilbert is misinformed, or it's just GOG being accommodating on a case to case basis without wanting to commit to it, or they changed their policy ...