Recent reviews by Cvamped

This is a pretty good podcast game, but it's to shake the sense that it could be better podcast game.

Sunday Gold is a thrifty mash-up of point & click adventure gaming and turn-based RPG. It's dripping with style, with striking visuals, snappy combat sequences, a soundtrack that'll get stuck in your head and voice acting that brings the game's cast of big personalities to life. Those are the highlights. The bad news is that Sunday Gold also manages to combine the most frustrating parts of adventure games with the most annoying parts of turn-based RPGs.

The only thing more frustrating than being stuck on a puzzle is having your attempts to solve it interrupted by random battle sequences. More than once, I ended up in a frustrating loop where I'd lack the action points to solve a problem, hit the end turn button, get a random battle, and come out of that battle without enough action points to move forward in the sequence. At that point, I'd have to hit the end turn button and roll the dice on another random encounter. There's a fun skill tree for you to customise your party as they gain experience, but I hit the level cap around the end of the second act - which made the combat encounters in the back part of the game feel increasingly tedious.

I really wanted to like this one more than I did, and for what it's worth I did end up finishing it despite the frustrations I ended up having with Sunday Gold. I'd still recommend to anyone who finds the comic art look or pitch of the game enticing, but I wouldn't hesitate to throw in a few caveats.

Retrace is top-down adventure game that draws on grisly visual novels like the Zero Escape series but differentiates itself with an emphasizes on queer romance. Freya - the main character - is caught in a time-loop and forced to solve a series of fiendish puzzles where failure yields lethal results for her and her friends.

Retrace isn't particularly long, with the game's middle-act feeling like the most fully-realised of the three. I reached the credits in about three hours. Still, most of this felt like time well spent. The atmospheric soundtrack works wonders when it comes to getting you in the mood and the evocative character art invites you to invest yourself further still. The game does an excellent job of motivating you to save Freya and her friends.

Most of all, the thing that sticks with me about Retrace is the thoughtfulness of it all. The puzzles, the writing, the visuals and the sound all feel very considered and deliberate - not just in how they function alone but also how they play off each other.

Overall, Retrace a sweet, if short, adventure that I can absolutely recommend to fans of the genre - especially if they're excited by the promise of something that doesn't awkwardly mishandle or shy away from same-sex relationships.