J.U.L.I.A. Among the Stars

I purchased this during the insomnia sale in 2016, and I have just gotten around to playing Julia. J.U.L.I.A is a rather enjoyable point and click adventure, with detective work and puzzles done in a way that awakens my brain and makes me feel more engaged with the experience. The included hintbook assists you in solving puzzles that you may find difficult on a step by step basis. to reduce spoilers as much as reasonably possible. The voice acting is of a reasonably high quality, with the characters immersing me in the game world and making me believe I am actually there in the place of the protagonist. I would recommend purchasing this , if you want a point and click sci-fi adventure that will challenge and awaken your brain, at a reasonable price.

One of the best point-and-click games I've ever played. That this was pretty much made by two guys with a budget of a few thousand crowdfunded dollars is incredible. I took a risk buying this game. I like space settings, but know that point-and-clicks is hardly a hotbed for groundbreaking games, but this exceeded expectations. This is a remake/update of an earlier game, which form the looks of it was a bit crap, but here no shortcuts were taken in making this a proper game. The standard is way more professional than it has any right to be, the graphics are yummy, the voice acting and writing isn't as awful as you'd imagine. Even the few comedy bits inserted in notes or conversation were funny. Most of the puzzles aren't ridiculously hard, but still challenging. One of the endings ends abruptly without satisfaction, and the plot goes a bit (ok, a lot) weird and maybe drags a bit, but overall this was an enjoyable experience of making futuristic screens go bloop bleep.

Honestly, I really enjoyed the first hour or two of this game. I won't spoil the story, but after the initial planet the story really goes off the rails. It really shot my expectations and what I wanted from the game. That said, it was still a fun game and I definitely recommend it. It's a little on the short side though.

I have tried to enjoy this adventure game, the landscapes and environments are inviting and look great graphically but the interface, obscure puzzles and captioning ruin the immersion of the game. It would have been better to skip the AI of the rover and let the player click on objects themselves, reading flavor text etc without the annoying voice acting and mandatory captioning to take over during exploration. There is no way to turn it off so you have to listen to the AI both in Julia the onboard computer and the robot rover talk the flavor texts. Game mechanics also get in the way of pleasurable exploration as I was constantly trying to find my way to 'inventory', mandatory readouts of objects scanned, traveling to planets, none of which is easily used. Game grinds to a stop while I fumble around trying to find that obscure report needed or plant id or object. The game itself plays out more like a test of what you explore and you have to do weird mini games where you story board the plot in minutae for no purpose at all that I could find out. Puzzles themselves range from find objects to complete actions to such obscure puzzles a walk thru is mandatory and even with the exact answer often the puzzles dont solve due to some minute color change or name insertion (where there are multiple identical names to choose from). There is a hint function for each puzzle, which lays out a bare bones description of what is to be done, but once again the instructions are extremely vague to be worthless. Voice acting is subpar, you wonder why such intelligent and skilled astronauts could be so unprofessional, gossipy and lack any mannerisms due to scientists. Julia herself is pretty worthless as a ship computer, unable to even turn off power and release fire fighting capabilities on her own. All in all, its a bit idiotic. The story is intriguing and flying to planets interesting. I just wish they let us do that and skip the dumb interfaces.