About a Boy

I love point and click adventure games, and the trailer on this one shows everything I like and want from it. The art is good and the characters are whimsical. It starts with a slideshow setting the plot, and even though it's vague and confusing, I kind of get it. However, the dialogs throughout the game are unrelated to the plot, and soon enough I realized there is no actual story. The game mechanics are basically: go to location, optionally talk to character, and solve puzzle. There is nothing in between, so it feels like an empty shell. All characters have nothing much to say, with 1 or 2 predictable lines about the puzzle. The graphics are pretty, but there is nothing to click, except for the path to the next character and respective puzzle. The text narration and dialogs are timed, so if you couldn't finish reading, too bad. The character walks slowly, and if you double-click, he now "runs" as slowly as before. Even with minimal dialogs, we still get misspellings, and plenty of gibberish just to tell you where the next puzzle is. The protagonist always asks the same (weird) thing, which seems related to that plot that never happens. There is no story, and some of the puzzles made no sense to me. You start a puzzle, but they don't tell you what you are supposed to do. At some point we realize it doesn't matter if we talk or not to the characters - this game is all about solving puzzles, and then the next, until... game over, roll the credits - and it happens in less than 2 hours. You could choose to click a character, just to be told to go solve a puzzle. What is a point'n'click adventure game without a story or meaningful dialogs? Considering no story, empty dialogs and game over in under 2h, even $9 is overpriced. The bottom line is that what you see in the demo video is 90% of all the game has to offer. If you are Ok with that, buy the game.

Exits to Windows after the first screen and cutscene (Windows 10).

I love this game