LucidDream

I very much enjoyed this game. It has a very interesting story, great graphics and fairly challenging puzzles including some quite creative ones. The story is told through emails, letters and diaries found in the game, so a lot of reading is required. This may put some players off but I enjoyed this format of storytelling, in particular since it allows the story to span several different time periods. Besides, the writing is good and I found that the diary of a former inhabitant of the farm in particular was a real pleasure to read. Many of the puzzles are based on hints given in the reading material and sometimes require combining information from several different sources to figure out the solution, something that I found made for an interesting challenge, but which will again put some players off, in particular if they are relatively new to the genre (or subgenre). The sound effects were good and added to the atmosphere of the game. There is not much music in the game, but the music that does exist is good and it is used at appropriate occasions. The graphics are excellent, both in terms of the level of detail and the visual design of the locations (for example I found that the 15 year old girl's room looked just right given the information about her gained from her diary). At first I found the navigation system a bit confusing, but I quickly got used to it. In the end, the main weakness I found with the game was that the automatic notes which provide a useful reminder of your current objectives sometimes also provided unwanted hints, giving away things that I would rather have figured out on my own. Also, since it is only possible to pick up objects when you need them, it was sometimes easy to guess the use of an object based on at what time it became possible to pick it up, providing another source of potentially unwanted hints. Without these minor problems the game would have provided an even more interesting challenge.

n my opinion Drakensang the Dark Eye is a good RPG that could have been great. There are certainly some great aspects to it. In particular, the skill development system is one of the best I've seen. Not only is there a large set of varied skills to develop, but not so many that I found it overwhelming, the game also takes a somewhat unique approach by letting you spend experience points to raise skills at any time and not only when reaching a new level. Instead your level limits how high you can raise skills. I thought this was a very good approach to skill development. There are also several other nice touches to the game, like for example how you early on get your own house where you can store items, easily travel anywhere on the map and you can install workbenches to use for crafting. The game has a good crafting system and there are some items that can only be obtained by crafting them. Other nice touches include the ability to use perfume to temporarily raise your charisma and some unexpected humorous moments the details of which I won't reveal. Unfortunately there are also some negative aspects to the game that keeps it from being the great game that it could have been. In particular, there is too much dull filler combat. While there are a few interesting and challenging battles in the game it mostly keeps throwing the same enemies at you in gradually increasing amounts. A bit more variation would have been appreciated and it only rarely felt like battles had been designed to require a bit of strategical thinking. I also found it unecessary that locations where locked after finishing everything related to the main quest there making it impossible to return to them. This just made the game feel somewhat more linear without adding anything (but perhaps it was required for technical reasons?). The combat system is similar to that in the Baldurs Gate and Icewind Dale series. Combat takes place in real time but with the option to pause at any time to issue new commands to your characters. There is also an autopause option that essentially makes combat turn-based. This works fairly well in general, but I found that the autopause option sometimes made combat feel slower than in most other turn-based RPGs. The story is a rather standard unoriginal fantasy RPG story, although it does have a few fairly interesting twists along the way. The intro and ending felt totally unoriginal, though. I did not find this to be a major problem, however, since I don't play this kind of game for the story anyway. In conclusion this could have been a great game if the combats had been more varied and better designed. As it stands, I found it to deserve a (somewhat weak) eight.

Baron **** is a solitary exploration type puzzle game in the spirit of Myst, where you have to explore a building, solve puzzles and search for items in order to make progress. The game has a slightly creepy atmosphere and a few almost scary moments, but is not really a horror game. There are some clever puzzles but most of them will be familiar to experienced adventure gamers and the game relies a bit to much on requiring you to search the building very carefully for clues instead of requiring logical thinking. All in all it is an okayish Myst inspired adventure game, but I would not really recommend it since there are plenty of better options out there.

Puzzle platformers tend to be platform games with a few easy puzzles. Braid is a puzzle games with some easy platform elements. The puzzle mechanic is one of the most innovative I have seen. It involves time manipulation and challenges you to think in new ways to predict the consequences of manipulating time in various ways and use this ability to achieve your goals. It starts out easy and the difficulty ramps up at a good pace. Towards the end the game is challenging even for experienced puzzle solvers. The game is also non-linear in that you don't need to solve everything in one part of the game to progress to later parts, if you get stuck on a puzzle you can go somewhere else and come back to tackle that puzzle later. The game has an artistic style that feels completely natural and fits well with the unique style of the gameplay. Graphics and sound contribute further to make the game atmospheric. The story is told in various ways, including texts you can read at the start of each level but also, in a way, through the pictures that you need to assemble to complete a level. All in all this is the best puzzle platformer I have played (unless you count Portal as a 3D puzzle platformer) and highly recommended to anyone who likes puzzle games.

Gemini Rue is an old-school point and click adventure game with some action elements. The game has an involving story and unusually good use of pixelated retro graphics but is somewhat on the easy side. The game is set in a dystopian future and features a story that starts our mysterious and gradually reveals more about what is going on. The story has philosophical aspects touching on the relationship between memories and personal identity although it doesn't really explore the subjects in any great detail. The story is the best aspect of the game and is helped by the fact that there are two branches of the story unravelling at the same, the two of which later converge. I found the story very appealing and it kept me wanting to keep playing to find out what would happen. The pixelated graphics suit the atmosphere of the game very well and the visuals are nicely done. I think pixelated graphics have been overused in recent times, but here they are used to good effect. Sound effects are adequate but nothing special, voice acting on the other hand is considerably above average and matches the personalities of the characters well. The actual gameplay is the weakest aspect of the game. Puzzles are somewhat bland, not all that creative and mostly a bit too easy. The action sequences are nothing special and don't add much to the game. You could perhaps argue that in a strongly story driven game like this, having easy puzzles may be a good thing, as harder puzzles would only be frustrating when you want to make progress to find out how the story continues. Whether or not you accept that arugment I think that the somewhat lackluster gameplay pulls the game down a bit and keeps it from being the really great game that it could have been. All in all this is a highly recommended game for all point and click adventure enthusiasts, ar least if you think a good well-told story is at least as important as good gameplay.

Eschalon book 2 shares many of the same strengths and weaknesses of the first game. I will not repeat everything I said in my review of the first game but in short I thought that character creation was great with many different skills and attributes, including place of origin and religion, which all make a difference. The weakest aspect of the game is still the combat, which still tends to require patience more than strategy for the reasons I explained in my review of the first game. There are also several aspects of gameplay that have been improved compared to the first game though. In particular, non-combat skills are more important than in the first game since there are many traps, locked doors, chests etc. that require use of non-combat skills. All these can be dealt with in multiple ways. The addition of optional hunger and thirst and deterioration of weapons and armor as well as a foraging skill to find ingredients to make potions from also contributes to making this a better game than the first. The story is still nothing special. The introduction of sci-fi elements to the story does nothing to improve it. The best aspects of the game are probably the detailed character creation and the process ofl levelling up your character and developing the many skills that are available. I would recommend the game to anyone who liked the first game and to old-school rpg fans who have already played the many better games in the genre.

I usually like old-school turn-based RPG's, in fact it is probably my favourite genre. Since this game is exactly that, I expected to like it. Unfortunately I was rather disappointed. The graphics of the game are not really all that good by modern standards. The music on the other hand I found to be quite good and the sound effects are adequate. One good thing about the game is that it can be quite fast paced despite being turn-based, thanks to the fact that enemies move at the same time as you move. This means that you can take as much time as you want but you can also play as fast as you want. The main problem with the game is related to battle design and level of challenge. A really good RPG will every now and again throw fights at you that are so hard that you can only beat them by making good use of your characters strengths and your enemies weaknesses and finding a good strategy (tricking enemies to clump together and then throwing a well placed fireball is a classic) while also having easier sections to let you feel like you are making fast enough progress. In Eschalon you only ever control one character which reduces the amount of possible choices you can make in combat and therefore finding a good strategy plays a much smaller role than in games where you control multiple characters. Also, it is generally very hard or impossible to beat all the enemies in an area at the same time, but you also don't have to, you can take some of them out, run away, rest and come back later (or you can use a lot of potions but these are expensive so this may not be the best option). You never have to face that challenging fight that really tests your skills (and as I said the lack of possible choices during combat means skill isn't that relevant anyway), instead the game has you fighting a few enemies, resting, fighting a few more and so on. This quickly gets old and is not all that fun since it requires more patience than skill. The story of the game is nothing to special, in fact I don't remember much of anything of it. The main motivation to keep playing is to complete quests, and thankfully there are a fair amount of optional quests as there should be in an RPG, and level up yout character. Character creation is the best aspect of the game, the game really let's you create the chacter you want, including giving your character a religion (or no religion or undecided about religion) an origin (i.e. where you grew up) and of course a class, skills and attributes such as strength, perception, etc. and all these things make a difference. This makes leveling up your character more fun than it would otherwise have been and keeps the game just about motivating enough that I found it worth playing to the end. There are much better games in the genre though, so I would only recommend this to hardcore turn-based RPG gamers who are starved for another game in the genre to sink their teeth into.

Faeire Solitaire lets you play solitaire on the computer. Why would this be better than playing solitaire with a deck of cards? It is probably not, but it is easier. Why would it be better than playing the free solitaire that comes with Windows? Because it offers more variation. There are various different goals, various different placements of the cards and various additional features such as frozen cards that only become playable after a certain other card is turned over. All of this works fairly well, because the game is fun to play. As is real solitaire, with real playing cards. The game also has a story. Basically a story about a kid in a magical land with fairies that seems to be written for pre-teens and which lacks any real creativity. It is not helped by the horrible voice acting which is over-dramatic to the point of being ridiculous. Frankly I felt that the game would have been better of without any story at all. The normal difficulty level is much to easy, and the next harder difficulty level is almost a bit too hard sometimes. It would have been nice to have another difficulty level in between. The music is okay, but not nearly varied enough. Sound effects are minimal. The graphics are adequate but nothing special. All in all I don't really see any good reason to play this game instead of a free computer based solitaire game or even better real solitaire with real playing cards.

Titan Quest is a Diablo style Action RPG meaning that it is neither a proper action game nor a proper RPG. There are action elements but not really a major need for fast reflexes and there are some RPG-like elements, i.e. leveling up and quests, but comparatively little of character customization and detailed statistics compared to most turn-based RPG's, very little of strategical choices in combat which is mostly just about clicking on enemies, and of course no actual role playing. What is the strength of the game then? Epic battles. You will slay hordes and hordes of monsters. This makes the game enjoyable in the same way that e.g. action movies and classic shoot 'em up games like Raptor are enjoyable, the carnage makes it fun. And Titan's quest gets the Diablo-like elements just right. You level up at a good rate, not so fast that levelling up becomes trivial but fast enough that there is a constant sense of progress and something similar holds for number of monsters you kill, enough to create the right epic battle feel, but not so much that killing an enemy always feels like a trivial accomplishment. The game has impressive graphics. There are other games in the same genre, such as the Torchlight games, that are superior technically, but Titan Quest has more variation with a wider range of different looking locations in Greece, Egypt and the Orient and they all look very good. The sound is okay, but nothing special. The music is appropriately majestic and none to bad, but is is not particularly varied nor is it really chosen to be appropriate to the different locations. The sound effects works as well as in most other games of the genre but don't stand out. The story is completely uninteresting, as it usually is in this kind of game, and there is not too much story development as the game progresses. The interface is typical for this kind of game and works fairly well but doesn't stand out. I found it annoying that you cannot choose a difficulty level, but instead you unlock the next difficulty level when you beat the game at one difficulty level. This feels like a cheap way of trying to add replayability. I would have preffered to be able to choose a difficulty level from the start. All in all, Titan Quest is an enjoyable entry in the Diablo-like genre of games with good graphics that I would recommend to fans of this genre. I enjoyed it even though I am not in general a fan of the genre but prefer turn-base RPG's.

Legend of Grimrock is an RPG inspired by oldschool games in the genre and in particular the Eye of the Beholder games. While it gets many things right it also has what in my mind is a major flaw, the combat system, which is one of the most important things in a game like this. But the good things first. Graphics are unusually good for a RPG of this kind, but still true to the oldschool origins of the game. Level design is in general good with some puzzles to solve, optional challenges to get powerful weapons and other goodies and traps where you can for example suddenly find you closed in inside a small room together with a couple of monsters. Sound effects and music are adequate but nothing special. The story of the game is nothing special, you have been thrown into a dungeon and you have to escape. You also have dreams giving hints about what is to come, but none of this is very interesting, the story is not the reason why you want to keep playing the game. The main weakness of the game is the combat system, which relies on fast reflexes more than anything else. Any combat against any enemy which can only use melee attacks can be won by attacking, moving away before the enemy can attack, waiting until the enemy moves in front of you, attacking again and so on. The strategy is simply to move around in a circle and attack at the right times and with this simple strategy, if well executed (i.e. if your reflexes are good enough) any enemy can be beaten without getting hurt no matter how strong the enemy or how weak your characters. If there is more than one enemy to fight at the same time, the enemy has ranged attacks or there is no room to move around in a circle things are slightly more complicated but it is still mainly about having good reflexes. This means that giving your characters good skills and making use of the right skills at the right time just makes battles shorter, not really easier, which makes leveling up less fun. This problem was to some extent already there in the classics that this game is based on, but it is more of a problem here becausse of the faster pace of the game. Also, the skills you can choose from are not very varied. In particular magic is almost all about doing damage from a distance and it does not matter much which elemental school you choose to specialise in since they all have basically equivalent spells. Still, even though this is as much an action game as it is an RPG it is still fun enough that I found it worth playing to the end. It just didn't appeal much to the oldschool RPG lover in me liked it promised to do.