Review of the game (too long for storefront, what is this...Youtube? We need more words!)

Become a detective in IKEA-Land!


Quick scoop: This is a quality adventure game with almost 10 hours of gameplay so about twice the length of Blackwell Deception, excellent value for price. Get it now, and if you’re too broke/stingy then at least put it on your wishlist and buy it later. If you enjoyed games such as Fate of Atlantis, Broken Sword, The Longest Journey, Resonance and the Blackwell series, you'll feel right at home here because this game has a little bit of everything.

Presentation: The background graphics are wonderfully made as you can see from the screenshots, sprites and animations are solid and the music is fantastic, low key and enchanting without putting you to sleep or becoming unnervingly repetitive. My only gripe is the voice acting but since this is an indie game that received less than 20% of the measly 3500$ of crowdfunding it asked for, it would be unreasonable to expect Grim Fandango level voice acting. Even so, the voice acting is on par with the Blackwell series which had a significantly higher budget. All in all, the voice acting is quite acceptable and never bad enough to ruin immersion altogether so no points deducted for that.

Gameplay: The difficulty is light to moderate but still satisfying, comparable to Resonance. The puzzles are more meaty than the Blackwell series, more of the classic point & click detective variety and less about dialogue although psychology does come into play story wise. Most of the puzzles are creative yet logical and for the most part properly clued. Too well clued in fact, because the game often involuntarily suggests the solution to you before you are even presented with the problem. This is an unfortunate old issue even with the genre’s best, and it occasionally brakes immersion because you’re thinking hey I wanted to figure that out by myself, not accidentally find out what I need to do because I clicked and looked at items and hotspots in a different order than the game had planned, thereby triggering the game to reveal too much info too early. There are a couple slightly annoying timed puzzles in the latter part of the game but if you’re tolerant enough to endure dying by trial on those few occasions, it’s not a game breaking deal.

On the bright side, there are no major glitches or bugs worth mentioning and overall The Samaritan Paradox has strengths that more than compensate for any of its shortcomings. For one, I was never bored at any point. Nor did I get stuck for too long or frustrated due to convoluted game designer logic. It was an engaging experience from beginning to (somewhat unexpected) end, a very good medium length adventure with balanced difficulty that deserves at least 4 solid stars, closer to 5 if you are a sucker for this type of game.

PS: This game features an obligatory prison escape scene but here it’s done very creatively, short and effective. You’ll see :)

This game sparked my interest when I first read about it a while back, didn't expect it to be released this quickly and on GOG! When I tried the demo I had to tinker a bit with the settings in order to make it work on my netbook, but after that it ran smoothly. So my question:

Does the GOG installation still give me access to AGS' winsetup.exe, so that I can change the resolution to 640x400 and the graphic driver to DirectDraw?

I know it has already been posted in the main game forum but here are some links to the AGS site & a direct link from the official website where you can download the demo.

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/1797/

http://www.screen7.co.uk/games/download/TheSamaritanParadox_Demo.exe

Yes, you can alter the settings same as the demo. You can find it in the start menu folder & you can find it in the game folder manually or by right clicking the desktop exe shortcut and selecting open folder location.

Cool, thanks!

Also, Danger Mouse rocks! :D

huh? i remember deception taking at least 6-8 hours.

just started the game and working at the three wells puzzle at the moment. makes a pretty good impression so far, not on par with gemini rue or resonance, but better than most AGS freebies.

I played all the Blackwell games in a row (got the bundle) so by the time I got to Deception, progression was fluid with no major hangups. Clocked in at somewhere between 5 and 5.5 hours and I didn't feel like I had rushed it. Usually, I get terribly and completely stuck in adventure games (often for hours at one spot, even if I try to brute force it and then I get quite frustrated), even in games that aren't considered hard but Blackwell Deception didn't give me any grief, at all. Greatly enjoyed the game, better than the first three parts combined.

As for The Samaritan Paradox, over the years I've played quite a bunch of AGS adventures and aside of Wadjet's games, this is the most professional one I've ever seen. It certainly is the one I enjoyed most. This game does not need to hide behind even Gemini Rue or Resonance. Even though it was done on a tiny budget and largely by one single person (!). Check the developer's blog, this guy is amazing. A true renaissance person. This is on an entire different level than any AGS freebie I've seen, I'd be seriously surprised if there are better ones out there?

PS: Please not that these are personal assessments, if you finished Blackwell Deception in 6-8 hours and The Samaritan Paradox in something under 10 hours or less then the latter game would of course not be twice as long. However, you need to also factor in that Samaritan has way more locations and while some people enjoy the heavy emphasis on dialogue in Blackwell, I'm even more happy when I get more locations and more item puzzles. They make me stick around in each screen for a longer time because I'll tinker around and experiment and look at the scenery more. With dialogue, I tend to go through things more efficiently, not always exploring every single option. Hence you potentially might not end up getting exactly twice the hours of total game time with Samaritan as compared to Blackwell Deception, but imho there is twice as much meat in Samaritan. Both games are 100% worth it, especially now that Blackwell 1-4 are bundled.
For a single game that's newly released, Samaritan offers top notch value for price, hands down no complaints from me.

Probably the biggest criticism i have for the game so far: timed puzzles. Theres been a number of moments where you have about 1 second to perform a click. Its so brief that if you dont already know exactly what the character is trying to do you'll end up repeating that 1 second segment over and over. Even if you do know exactly what youre trying to do, it takes multiple tries trying to get the cursor to the target fast enough. The game isnt dominated by these.. but theres been at least several so far.

Fortunately, the game quickly resets you to a point immediately before you died so I didn't feel it was a big hassle. In all the timed puzzle situations, there are only a few limited hotspots that you can interact with and only few inventory items if any that come into question so it shouldn't prevent anyone from progressing at any point. There was only one situation close to end game where I had a little WTF moment but after I died 4-5 times, the solution suddenly dawned upon me and it made perfect logical sense. It was so simple that I had trouble figuring it out because I thought I had to do something complicated.

In all the timed situations, once you know what to do there is enough time imho to perform the action(s). There are only about 2 situations throughout the game where 'mouse agility' might be a minor problem especially if you're tired or playing on an awkward laptop trackpad on a rattling train during rush hour with no elbow space while the conductor shows up and wants to see your ticket and the snack bar cart is approaching from the other side.

On the other hand I just spent dozens of hours playing Diablo 2 again on hell mode
so this doesn't feel very stressful in comparison. But even compared to other adventure games such as Gabriel Knight 1, I felt dying was a lot less annoying here. I wouldn't deduct any stars for this rating wise and it should definitely not keep any adventurer away from this game, even the most laid back ones.

this totally looks like my cuppa tea. too bad they chose to release it this month, what with all the other big name adventures. will add to my wish list though.

The game is 2$ off until Friday, might be a while until it gets a steeper discount so you might as well get it now.
Time of release is indeed a bit unfortunate in the midst of all these sales and new releases.

However: 7.99$ for roughly 10 hours of play time is a seriously good deal.
The new adventure game releases on GOG are all more expensive than this game and the games under 7.99$ are older ones which you might have played already and go on sale time and again.

I found The Samaritan Paradox to be 100% worth its price and see no reason why this wonderful game should drown in the shadow of other new releases and whatnot.

Bought, although I do hate timed puzzles, just as zavlin pointed out.
It would be great to see this one translated into Swedish; after all, the story is supposed to take place in Sweden...

Just finished it. The ending twists were so strange it made me laugh. I think what i liked most about the game was solving some of the puzzles and riddles and having that "aha!" moment that i rarely experience anymore in adventures. Certainly is a nice value for the price. The timing puzzles were a glaring flaw, particularly the parts where *minor spoiler* you had to hide around corners, it was just kind of lame.*spoiler end* Also some of the voiceacting was pretty wooden and the translation did not feel perfect. And im really left scratching my head about the story.... but i still liked it. Neat game :)

EDIT: actually i cant stop laughing about the end... its soooo weird and soap-opera-ish :P

Timed puzzles where you have to position yourself in a very specific spot in time (for hiding or for other purposes) are a staple in this genre, Gemini Rue has it, Blackwell has it and an entire host of classics have it. I call this type of timed puzzles 'Grail Temple Puzzles' because Indy 3 (Last Crusade) was one of the first games where I remember having to do this. Or you might call them 'goat puzzles' for another infamous instant in timed puzzle history. It happens in the best of games.
Even after 25 years I'm still mildly annoyed by these puzzles but I've come to terms with the fact that they'll probably never go away. It seems like a cheap way of creating a sense of urgency and action in an an otherwise rather static game format but I've come to accept it. And unless it seriously hampers progression, I'd never deduct points for this in a game.

**semi- spoiler ahead, stop reading if you haven't played**

About the ending: It's weird indeed, I fully agree! It did make me laugh, as well - even though it really isn't funny in any normal sense of funny. More like very awkward tragic comedy.
But I liked that it was unusual and even though there are plenty of hints throughout the game now that I think about it, it was nevertheless unexpected because these kinda themes aren't exactly common in traditional point & click adventures.

edit: I think there are supposed to be multiple endings but I haven't tried to see what they all are , the one I got was probably the happy ending. 'Happy', given the circumstances.

***spoilers***
I'd be really curious to know what the endings are.. i didnt turn in you-know-who, but the only other obvious ending is if you do turn them in, and i cant see the ending being especially different in that case.
The ending i saw was also kind of happy... but the concept just puts a really weird spin on everything.

As for the timed puzzles hiding... i dont know, somthing rubbed me the wrong about them. Multiples of "stand on this side of the door or you lose". They can be done better.