Well I'm intrigued now, if nothing else. I'm a huge fan of creepy atmospheres, and I'd be interested to see if having to be constantly attentive to environments I'd been through would serve to make the game more involving, or just be frustrating. They key puzzle certainly sounds frustrating, and I expect it would break some of the suspension of disbelief. How long is it, btw?

I personally prefer to mix up the games I'm playing and try to jump between genres. So after finishing a game I (almost) always pick a game of a different genre to start. That way I hope to keep things fresh.

Now I played Thief 1 recently, good game, and have no knowledge of Scratches but if I were you I'd play Scratches and my reasoning for that is that it is my understanding that Dishonered is partly inspired by the game mechanics Thief brought to the table (haven't played it) so for now it might be a good time to switch playstyles.

Oh yeah, that's a good point. Don't want to overdose on stealth.

I would skip Scratches altogether if I were you. I actually played through it last week finally. I found it decidedly mediocre. I wonder why it got so much praise from people here. Not really scary, not even eerie for the most part. A lot of back and forth with one or two quite obtuse puzzles. The game wasn't horrible by any means, but it's nothing I would recommend.

Yes. After a while, when I was stuck later on, I found myself trying to phone my outside contact (because that often triggers plot advances), or trying to sleep (because that does so as well). It didn't feel as bad it sounds now, because I really _liked_ playing the game (due to the atmosphere and story), but without the walkthrough it would have been pretty frustrating.

Note that I specifically chose a UHS walkthrough, because it gives you successive hints instead of spoiling the complete solution. For me, that worked well.

One other thing to note is that Scratches plays pretty slowly. Getting from one part of the house to another takes some time (and will show several animations of opening dooes that I found no way to skip).

Yes, Dishonored is actually what got me wanting to play Thief again. But what people have been saying about Scratches has got me interested, if only because it's less of an obviously good game than Thief (and thus more interesting to play from a critical perspective). And the whole atmospheric concept of the game has always been cool to me.

I generally jump between different games, but lately I've found that it's made me enjoy individual games less. So I'm trying a new approach: limiting myself to only 1 or 2 games at a time, with some exceptions made for titles like Doom (there's always time to play som Doom, after all).
UHS?

You could also try Dark Fall. It seems like it's better respected than Scratches, although I don''t know much about it.

The key puzzle is the only "bad" puzzle in the game, the others were far more fair (though in Agustin Cordes' defense there were actually hints in regards to it, the puzzle just came too early in the game, before you had had the chance to learn how the puzzles in the game actually worked)

I can't say exactly how long it is, I did not time my playthrough, but it is not a super lengthy game. Depending on how good you are at adventure games, between 5-10h (if you are used to adventure games, but not an expert, expect it to take around 6-8h)

Well, horror is a complicated issue. Most horror games have a hard time creeping me out but Scratches totally got me.

Simon my man, please do an LP of Return to the Cathedral and Shalebridge Cradle :D

Universal Hint System.

The Wikipedia page has a link to a site which collects all the UHS walkthroughs (and tries to sell you their reader for money), and a link to another free, open-source UHS reader that you can use instead.

Or you can can simply view (and click through) the hints in your browser. The ones for Scratches are here.

**SPOILER**

*shrug* The only thing that got me is when you had to crawl into the furnace, and that shadow suddenly appeared. ... I still want to know what kind of dumbass would actually do that. "Oh, hey! I hear noises coming from this machine. Let's climb into it" WTF? *facepalm*

YES!

IMO adventures in general. I haven't played a single adventure yet where the riddles didn't harm the atmosphere or plot and some point.