Recent reviews by LeftHanded Matt

Excellent little adventure game, clearly made with love and care. I adored the art style, especially for the character portraits. Cleo herself is an enjoyable protagonist, swept up in a fun treasure hunt with pirate characters. This is all very light-hearted but it has some effective moments of character and emotion, although they are very much background elements. The voice acting (English version) is simply fantastic and has a very professional quality.

It took me a little while to get used to playing an adventure game with WASD controls, I would have preferred traditional point-&-click. But the control scheme does allow for the game to have its own unique personality and allows you to engage with the game world in a different way.

Puzzle design is largely very good and I was able to work my way through most of the game unaided. There was some more confusing stuff in chapter 3 which I spent a while on but couldn't work out. Fortunately, the solutions weren't stupid and it was more about me missing clues. The one part I REALLY struggled with was the Kraken Fodder minigame, which seemed to be impossible to win for me. I had to go through at least a dozen slow rounds of losses before the random element of it finally went my way. This stopped the game being fun for a while and I wasn't keen on coming back to it.

The story loses focus a bit at the end, revolving around a few characters that we've not properly met and I wasn't quite keeping track of who they all were. But the game is short and absolutely gorgeous, genuinely feeling like a throwback to the games I loved in the '90s but updating the elements beautifully.

Myst is not an easy game to get into. It dumps you in a world with very little explanation of what to do. There are weird buildings and switches that don't seem to do anything.

But the time spent exploring is quite well rewarded. I was resistant to Myst for many years, but I think it's finally got a hold on me. This remake of the game definitely helped with that as the freedom of complete 3D movement is welcome. The graphics are very nice, retaining some of the atmosphere of the original pre-rendered ones and showing you worlds that feel magical. I encountered no bugs and the whole thing ran smoothly.

The terrible FMV segments are part of the charm and I love them. Puzzle-wise this is notoriously confusing, but everything here remains quite logical. It's a shame that reason for the puzzles existing is so buried in a murky backstory that is difficult to uncover. The sequels are better games for the most part, but this original is worth experiencing. It's a shame the ending is so crap.

I really enjoyed the authentic Trek experience, especially with it set in the 24th century era. The echoes of Telltale games are clear here but there's a good evolution with a nice variety of choices and interactivity, and even the brief shooting and stealth sections ended up quite fun. Ultimately there's a sense that my choices didn't matter overall, and that's common with games like these, but I'm okay with that if I like the characters and story. And I did here, especially Rydek, and felt that the writing worked for establishing strong relationships. It's a shame that visually it's disappointing for the most part, feeling like a game from the Xbox 360 era. A few crashes and stuttery frame rates at points, but not enough to make things unplayable.

This game is a real mixed bag, with things I liked and things that really got on my nerves. Obviously it's absolutely gorgeous, fully embracing a detailed cartoon style that manages to mix 2D and 3D while still having a traditional point-&-click feel. The environments are fantastic, while the 3D character models are integrated nicely and well animated.

But the higher resolution hand-drawn art causes issues that didn't exist in the old chunkier pixel art classics. The items you need to find are often so small and completely hidden as they blend in so well with the backgrounds. The game is an endless series of pixel hunts and even with a careful eye too many objects are easy to miss.

And the puzzles are all over the place too. I got through a good chunk of the game by myself but there are some really convoluted solutions necessary at times, several of which tested the limits of my patience. The game's interface is simple but even when I had figured out the basics of what I needed to do there were times where I couldn't work out how to let the game know I wanted to do it because it was waiting for a very specific action. Other puzzles were far too obscure for me and I took hints when needed.

You often need to look at things more than once to get all the required information. Additionally, the player character won't pick up things or perform actions until the story requires him to do so - this does make some sense, but it's very annoying when you've looked at something and been told there's nothing useful there, only to find out that you need to come back later and look again to find new items/clues. It's completely unintuitive.

Story-wise it's fine if unspectacular. A tale about accidentally getting involved in a crime and the mafia chasing you down. The real let down here is the bland main character who isn't interesting and often acts like an idiot. In fact this applies to just about everyone here. The whole thing is kind of messy, and by the final hour of the game it's really fallen apart; it began to feel very lazy, often telling me things without showing them and requiring me to do little more than watch other characters do things while I ferried objects between them.

A beautiful adventure game that could have been spectacular with stronger design behind it, but instead it's just mediocre. Die hard adventure fans like me will likely find some charm, but it's not a classic.

[8.5/10] Very compelling story with strong characters that I liked. If you want atmosphere then this delivers. A little bit of a rehash of Life Is Strange 2 with the siblings and their bond, but I enjoyed this game a lot more. Adored the snowy Alaskan small town setting and the environments are so gorgeous and filled with details. Compared to Life Is Strange, this is all noticeably smaller scale but that's not a bad thing. Soundtrack was lacking and I felt like the ending could have been fuller. Enjoyed the puzzles that were there, but wish there were a lot more.

Very enjoyable, relaxing and well designed. A really gorgeous aesthetic to the whole thing. The puzzles always have logical solutions, so whenever I thought the game might be being unfair it turned out I had just overlooked something.

A bigger game with the nicest graphics so far, but it felt the most simplistic. I missed the ability to combine clues and had zero trouble progressing through. It's very noticeable how little use your inventory is, I would like to solve more puzzles with items. It felt maybe a little bit long for what it was, I was ready for it to be over by the end. Don't get me wrong, it's an enjoyable game. I just think this is my least favourite so far.

Strong atmosphere and it looks great, but not much fun to play. The controls are awkward and always feel clunky, the camera angles always seem to change at the most annoying moments and the cast of characters are thoroughly unlikable. The story was also bordering on incoherent on our playthrough (played in movie mode with a friend), with nothing being explained and ending with nothing resolved. We must have missed a lot of things. The characters never reacted properly to anything that was happening, changing mood from scared to disinterested at the drop of a hat. I found the face animations really off-putting too.

I'm not sure if we just got unlucky with out playthrough, but not much here worked for me.

Essentially just a tech demo, but it is quite fun and has the usual fantastic storytelling that Valve is great at. It made me laugh out loud several times. And it's free. Can't complain too much even if there isn't much to actually do in it.

A satisfying and emotional end to the series. The draws here are really the story, writing and characters. I can't deny it's lacking somewhat in gameplay but there's enough other good stuff here to let me overlook that. I do wish it had some more proper puzzles throughout it, but I still could barely put this down. The choice-based moments work surprisingly well, and the worlds feel very well developed.

I highly recommend playing the previous two games first. While this gives you some recap and general backstory to help, all the small details become very important.