Recent reviews by gothemasticator

I love this game. I have played all the games in this series. It's not really a HOG. It's more like the simplest RPG you can imagine. Instead of navigating, you just click on the screen. Instead of ineracting, you just click. It's a bit like having your grandmother create a cross stitch for you in an RPG style because she knows you like it, and then you take mushrooms and stare at the cross stitch and imagine all the adventures you could have in the cross stitch land your grandmother created for you. Wonderful!

A short visual novel-type game with some replayability due to some meaningful choices you get to make. My playthrough took 3 hours or so. I click through a lot of dialogue if I'm reading faster than the voice acting.

The first 5 chapters were very strong. The last two when you get to make some big choices and then see the ending are a bit weaker. But the ending is still satisfying, just more hamfisted than the rest.

I like the themes, the artwork (not anime), the sound design in general is very nice, the writing is high quality, so is the voice acting.

I recommend.

You have mysterious events in the apparent real world that are unsettling on their own. Then you have events that you think are in the real world that seem to be contradicted later by real world events. Then you have spells or episodes of hallucination or perhaps a flip into another dimension, or perhaps clairvoyance. Then you have a constant problem keeping track of who is dead and who is not. Then there is a woman who paints paintings that are somehow alive, or portals, or sources of power. And then you have encounters with otherworldly things that can actually kill you. All the while your character keeps stumbling ahead, trying to be a private eye working a case that no longer makes much sense. A personal sense of doom, hopelessness, and the fog of years of drinking color not only your perceptions of things but also your own motivations for continuing.

It really captures the feel of reading Lovecraft more than other works. Some games get the lore right, or create wonderful mechanics based off of sanity as a stat, etc. But this game gets the feel. The dreamy, fore ordained, otherworldly, overwhelming, hopeless, doomed irreversible sliding downwardness of it all.

As far as gameplay, it's broken up into 14 chapters. Some chapters are very movie-like, full of exposition. Some chapters are stealth. Some are kind of action-y. Some have lots of dialogue choices. Some are investigations. All in all it's an "action-adventure" - sometimes first person, sometimes third, lots of cut scenes. Story-heavy game.

There are some choices you can make that have some affect on how things progress. And then there's a whopper of a choice at the end.

Not every chapter plays equally well. Some are frustrating. And there's a bit of an RPG stat system to play with too. Although it's not all that important. Mostly it means more or less items appear in the world during investigations, and more or less dialogue options are unlocked.

I loved this game! It was great fun.

It's my favorite ARPG for the last several years. Complex, fun, well paced.
On veteran difficulty it is totally doable to play start to finish, learning as you go, respeccing a bit here and there. You won't run into a situation where you've totally screwed your game because you made a bad choice in stats back when you didn't know any better.
I have finish the Malmouth expansion and am half way through the Forgotten Gods. I totally recommend Malmouth. Forgotten Gods you could probably do without unless like me you are having so much fun you don't want to stop.

I have just finished the last of the Classic puzzles. I play this game usually for 15 minutes at a time. It is lovely. Wonderful sound design! The puzzles are logic. No tricks or anything. Just pure logic.

I recommend.

One of the worst games I've ever played. The writing is insultingly bad. The idea is novel, but not good.

The sheer amount and variety of high-quality mods available for this game have made it my most played game.