Cracktus Jack の最近のレビュー

...is a spectacle-fighter platformer. Starkiller, Darth Vader's secret apprentice, is sent on a quest to create a diversion that will take Emperor Palpatine's attention away from Vader's own plans.

You follow a specific story-driven list of levels, traveling to specific waypoints, jumping on platforms or following the path while encountering various waves of enemies. Attacks consist of your lightsaber, force grip, force push and force lighting attacks. You will often encounter mini-bosses such as a bull rancor, an AT-ST or a junk beast, which will first require you to deplete their life bar before finishing them off in a quicktime event. Each level usually ends with a boss fight such as a Jedi or a challenge of some sort.

Force points, which serves the role of experience points, are gained in different ways. You will get more force points from destroying enemies in a spectacular display of force. Completing secondary objectives will also award bonus force points. With each level, you gain force spheres for Force Talents (to increase your base attacks and defense), Force Powers (increasing their effectiveness which each rank) and Force Combos (to unlock increasingly powerful attack combos). Holocrons will also give you force points, force spheres, or lightsaber upgrades.

Assuming you take the time to upgrade your combos and learned them, you can do devastating attacks on entire groups of enemies. There are 27 combos to unlock, and many can chain up with each other. You may use a combo to launch an enemy in the air and shock them with force lightning, then a second combo to strike them multiple times mid-air, them another to slam them into the ground, and close with a force explosion that will send surrounding enemies flying to all corners of the area.

While the game's story was relegated to "Star Wars Legends", removing it from modern canon after the Disney acquisition of Lucas Art, it was a very interesting take on events taking place between Episodes 3 and 4, starting when Darth Vader was still hunting Jedi after Order 66, culminating with the founding of the Rebellion with some recognizable characters making an appearance. Minor adjustments to Rogue One would have sufficed to keeping it in the lore, and it still holds pretty good today.

Each level consists of a narrow corridor or path with little to no branching path, making the level extremely constraint and the game terribly linear. Usually upon reaching a waypoint, something will prevent you from backtracking any further, so it certainly feels like a series of small levels. There is little enemy variety per level, often consisting of pallet swap with an additional skill or power. Mini-bosses repeat over and over, and always end with the same one or two mandatory quicktime event.

There isn't much variety in visuals, either, as most locations repeat: Kashyyyk, Raxxus Prime and Felucia are visited twice, and most imperial facilities look alike. They certainly don't hold a candle to games like Star Wars | Knights of the Old Republic which was released years earlier. Time hasn't been too kind to it graphically, either, as the image quality shows its age. Furthermore, the game feels way too much like a port, with no mouse control in menus.


Don't get me wrong: Star Wars | The Force Unleashed is a good game, but it is by no means a great game, at least not by today's standards. You have a lot more "force" to work with than previous Star Wars action games had to offer, but if you don't have 15-year-old nostalgia, you'll want to lower your expectations to actually enjoy!

This was just my opinion.

If you found this review helpful, please consider giving it a thumbs up, and feel free to check out more of my (purely opinionated) reviews.

...is a hidden object game. After you ship got caught in a strange storm with glowing symbols in the sky, you wake up on the shore of an island and find that your spouse was captured and dragged to a mysterious old lighthouse.

For those unfamiliar with the genre, you play and static scenes or panels, from which paths branch, sometimes in several directions. On each panel, there are things you can observe (if the mouse cursor is a magnifying glass), interact with or pick up for later use.

The genre namesake hidden object puzzles consists of a screenful of clutter objects: a shoe, an apple, a frog, a sword, a bottle, etc., from which you must find a specific list of 12 objects. Some objects, marked in blue in the list, require an interaction, such as moving another unrelated object or opening a container to be revealed.

Almost every door, box or chest require some form of puzzle to open. These can be observation puzzles such as images needing to be reconstructed by moving tiles around, or logic-based puzzles with a mechanism needing to be manipulated. Other simply need the use of a key or items (a screwdriver or a crowbar, for instance). And yet others a combination of both, such as a mechanical lock which is missing parts before you can try to crack it.

I found the game to have a very decent quantity of hidden object puzzles. Each of the hand-drawn scenes seamlessly blended the items to be found with the static background, so you couldn't just guess which items were removable. When a puzzle had to be redone a second time (with a different list of objects to be found), the previously removed items were returned to keep the clutter sufficiently dense.

While the story isn't anything to write home about, the game captured the expected otherworldliness I expected, with strange and spooky areas, unsettling animations, and an OK voice acting. You even get a short bonus mission upon completing the game where you experience the same events from a different person's point of view.

Sea Legends: Phantasmal Light is very badly optimized for modern PCs. I've had it sitting in my Steam inventory for a while, and upon recently hearing it was rereleased by its publisher, I expected a decent resolution or at the very least widescreen compatibility. What I found was a blurry, ugly game, stretched horizontally. I had to move it down to window mode to even attempt at enjoying the visuals, uncovering its 1024x768 resolution the likes of which I had on my computer 20 years ago.

Puzzles of other varieties are few and unimaginative, unchallengeing at best, tedious at worst. There is terrible backtracking at times, the game ending on the sour note of picking up an object from the very end of the panel branch, going all the way back to the very first panel to place the object, then having to once again go all the way to the last panel to redo the same puzzle a second time to get a second object, and travel back once more. Oh, and there are two endings defined by the very last puzzle, they don't tell you which choice does what, and the game expects you to redo it enterly to find out that the second ending is a mere 3-second difference in the last cutscene.


What we have here is a terribly average hidden object game, with absolutely nothing unique, nothing that differentiates it from other, much better or modern-looking games out there. If you got it from a bundle, give it a go, but it isn't worth actually spending money to acquire this title.

—————————————————————————
This was just my opinion.

If you found this review helpful, please consider giving it a thumbs up, and feel free to check out more of my (purely opinionated) reviews.

...is a brain-teaser puzzle game. Sent to investigate the circumstances of the disappearance of its occupants, you arrive at a burnt-down house and make your way to the intact attic where a model of the house reveals past events.

A spin-off story from the previous three games, you play a new character investigating the presence of a mysterious power known as the Null, which brings you to a house where a mechanical engineer with an interest for chemistry has disappeared, along with his wife whose family house was at the center of unexplained events. That's where you find a dollhouse-sized model of the manor that doubles as a puzzle box. This time around, you bring your own eyepiece with a lens that allows you to magically peer into the rooms of the dollhouse.

Scattered across the dollhouse and all around each of the eight rooms (nine, if you include the attic), you will find objects you can pick up or interact with, and each action you take causes a chain reaction of new action you can take. Perhaps you find a hidden button on the bottom of a drawer, which opens a hidden panel when pushed, panel behind which is a lever, which when turned will move a mirror, which reflects light on a crystal that activates another contraption.

With each trinket or piece of information you find, you may need to zoom back out of the room you're in, activate another part of the dollhouse and reveal yet another room. The following action to take is rarely obvious, so you'll need to make careful observation and will be required to memorize any potential keyholes or missing piece you come across to go back to at a later time.

While there are many puzzles, few if any are alike. This has nothing to do with finishing a drawing, matching the colors in a pattern or any other puzzles typically found in Hidden Object games. Here, all puzzles are mechanical in nature, and they all feel plausible, as if the physical pressure or motion of your action causes the result, to the point where you could almost imagine the mechanism activating and the gears turning within the object or behind the wall.

This specific iteration is a nice balance of the features found in the previous games. You're back to a single, main puzzle box to solve (the dollhouse), and while the lens allows you to zoom into the rooms and even zoom into objects inside those rooms (inception-style), you're no longer walking around larger areas with corridors and multiple doorways, and strictly focus on an object or room at hand.

Even though this game is once again a mobile port released a few years before arriving on PC, it is perfectly adapted to controlling with a mouse. Using a mouse is perfectly responsive, lacking any "click and hold" often required in games originally meant for touch control. Using your mouse cursor is precise and moving your mouse for the desired motion works very well. The game's visuals and the textures' resolution received quite a step up from original mobile release as well.

While no one plays these games exclusively for the story, the fact that it is an entirely self-contained disconnected story (save for the presence of the Null) has made me feel a little let down. I like a good mystery, and was used to the story being fed in bite-size increments, but I was still hoping to find out what happened to our character after The Room Three and its various endings. This expectation would not have been there if the game's name dropped the number completely, and would probably feel more approachable to those that haven't already played the previous three games.

I can't say I'm that fond of the magical/surreal nature of using the lens. Sure, it works as intended to unlock rooms from the dollhouse instead of merely unlocking doors from within a house, but it's immersion-breaking for me to see inside a keyhole to activate triggers from an angle you just wouldn't see from the hole, or moving something around in lens mode to see the physical reality of the world having changed once you remove the lens. When they were first revealed in earlier games, they served to reveal hidden information to move forward, like invisible paint, x-rays or something else more tangible.


It's definitely my favorite game of the series. The developers have obviously learned a great deal on puzzle boxes, on what works and what doesn't work within the frame of a videogame, and have leveraged their experience from the three previous games. Since it is a standalone game, it's a good opportunity for newcomers to the puzzle box genre to jump in!

—————————————————————————
This was just my opinion.

If you found this review helpful, please consider giving it a thumbs up, and feel free to check out more of my (purely opinionated) reviews.

...is a casual exploration puzzle platformer. Elise's plane crashed on a mysterious cluster of floating islands, where she follows a flying stingray and sets forth to release its wildlife from crystal traps.

Walking around in a 3rd-person view, your goal is to reactivate the beacons of the four islands. Each island will have a series of puzzles to reach and activate core switches. Turning on all the core switches activates that island's beacon. Doors, elevators and swtiches need to be powered, either by weight-based buttons, light beams, lightning-charged rod or other puzzle element, each with its own solution. The buttons, for instance, might need you to push a rock on it, or to use fruits in order to attract a giant hermit crab to stand on it. You must pay attention to your surroundings and see what options you have.

Upon completing the first island, your stingray companion can turn giant to allow you to fly to the other islands. While the game appears open-world, specific puzzles have a linear ground path you're expected to follow, with landing sites showing you where you're meant to start from. Since you cannot carry items while flying, you will be required to walk around to resolve the puzzles, preventing your flight ability from being a cop-out.

Lay has gorgeous aesthetics, with very calm and soothing music, rolling hills filled with colorful flowers and luminescent rocks. There is no stress, no risk of injuries, no monsters to fight, resulting in a relaxing experience of exploration while searching for the hidden crystal collectibles or figuring out how to solve the next puzzle. You really feel like you have all the time in the world.

The absence of violence makes it very approachable for young kids, such as my 2-years-old going "Ohhh!" and "Ahhh!" as he sat on my lap while I played. The puzzles aren't very challenging for an adult, but they are a good entry point for children who might get frustrated with harder Zelda-esque mazes and riddles.

I can't help but feel like there should be much more of a narrative, but with the total absence of any dialog or background story, it really is just a game about solving a puzzle and moving on to the next one. You have no idea what you're doing or why, and can merely deduce your objective. I had to read very deeply into it to come close to the synopsis with which I opened this review. This looks like a magical place, but void of any hint of purpose.

If you aren't keen on finding collectibles, you might find this to be a much shorter experience than mine. I must have spent half my play time flying around each island and across the overworld map looking for crystals hidden behind rocks, on ledges or behind hills. That and with the game being easy, you might just get bored before ever completing the main quest.


As a free game, it's very hard to put much weight in the game's fault. It is a beautiful game, perfect for emptying your mind of all worries for a short while, or introducing children to simple world environment puzzle solving. Just don't expect a challenge.

This was just my opinion.

If you found this review helpful, please consider giving it a thumbs up, and feel free to check out more of my (purely opinionated) reviews.

...is a tycoon-style business manager. Take over the latest attempt at creating a dinosaur-themed zoo across the multiple islands of the Muertes Archipelago, balancing your attention between InGen's competing divisions while avoiding the mistakes of the past. This review is based on the game with all DLCs.

Starting with an arrival point, you construct your park with paths, buildings and enclosures. You build expedition and research facilities to get more dinosaurs and buildings, ranger stations and ACU centers to keep your dinosaurs in check, various amenities to maintain your visitors' food, drink, fun, shopping and restroom needs, bunkers and storm defense stations for protection, and more. Almost all buildings must be connected to a path and be powered through a series of electrical substations and pylons from your power stations.

Dinosaur enclosures are built from a variety of fences (some electrified) which address the needs of the dinosaurs held within. Each dinosaur requires a certain enclosure size with enough grass, forest and water for its liking, and has a specific minimum and maximum tolerance of same-species dinosaurs and total enclosure population. They also have their own diet, herbivores even getting rating-boosting Jurassic plants once Paleobotany is unlocked. Visitors must be able to see your dinosaurs, whether from a viewing gallery or platform, a nearby hotel or a guided-vehicle tour, and the more visibility they have, the more money you make.

In addition to making money from visitors and investing in research and development, you must balance your attention between three competing departments: the science, entertainment and security divisions, which will regularly offer randomly generated contracts with specific objectives to achieve. Each successful contract increases your reputation with that faction (which unlocks new stuff and missions), while slightly decreasing the others'. If you ignore one too much, you'll be plagued with sabotaged power stations and enclosure doors mysteriously left opened.

The developers really knew what the most important part of a Jurassic World game had to be: the dinosaurs. Each of the 68 species (including 5 hybrids such as the Indominus Rex) was meticulously designed and animated down to the last detail: how they move, eat, look around, sleep, yawn, growl, blink their eyes. Even their behavior was considered: Velociraptors will stand in circles to socialize, Dilophosaurus will display their frills to intimidate the others and become their group's alpha, Triceratops will charge your truck if you overstay your welcome in their enclosure. Yes, Alan, those Parasaurolophuses do indeed move in herds!

Rarely have I seen so much attention given to the source material outside the more fanbase-heavy intellectual properties. Everything is a reference to the movies: the way genetic manipulation is handled, how dinosaurs get sick from modern common diseases, transportation systems such as monorails and gyrospheres, the tropical storms and how they make the roads slippery and might damage your electrical grid, every pixel of aesthetics (even more so in the Return to Jurassic Park campaign). You're modifying the color pattern of a Stegosaurus? Do you want default skin, one of the patterns from genes you researched, or one of the five specific patterns exactly as seen in The Lost World? It's there!

I wish there was much more physical changes possible to dinosaurs through genetic manipulation, but you're limited to their color scheme (speaking of which, why would zebra genes change a dinosaur's scales to striped black and white? Zebras have black skin, it is merely the fur that is striped). The movies made a point to explain that their dinosaurs aren't the chubby, feathered fellows modern science knows them to have been because they used frog DNA to fill the gaps in their genetic makeup, resulting in the reptilian, scaly look they have. In this case, why doesn't introducing bear, dragonfly, crow or cockroach genes have any impact whatsoever in their appearance? The only hybrids are those you unlock with Dr. Wu in the campaign.

While the game rightfully put a lot of time and effort focusing on the dinosaurs, the park management and customization are lacking. To keep visitors happy, you'll always combine the same three buildings and repeat them every once in a while across your park. There are no decorations, no color customization of anything you build, and the few scenery objects available are terribly finicky to place. Unless you flatten the entire build area, putting nearby buildings on different land heights will create sharp hills and crooked roads you can barely drive your ranger vehicle on.


Overall, Jurassic World: Evolution is a very good tycoon game and an excellent Jurassic World game, assuming you go through all the DLC campaigns to unlock everything, but that's what's holding it back from perfection. If building a park is what you want and don't actually care that much about dinosaurs, stick to Planet Zoo from the same developers.

—————————————————————————
This was just my opinion.

If you found this review helpful, please consider giving it a thumbs up, and feel free to check out more of my (purely opinionated) reviews.

...is a point & click adventure game. Dan, a grizzled old geezer, left his life to go on an adventure, arriving in the abandoned town of Red Pines in the hopes of finding a legendary book.

Upon starting, you're in a large area in an isometric (but not gridlocked) view where you can walk, react or interact with various objects for information or clues, as well as pick up items for later use. There are also collectibles in the form of caches (which for a reason I can't fathom the character keeps referring to as "caché" when it's pronounced like "cash") which can be partially hidden, but an audio cue will actually warn you of its proximity.

Point & Click games are characterized by the environmental puzzles you have to solve. Sometimes, it's as simple as jumping or climbing, using an item from your inventory, or doing a combination of both with some tricky timing. Some of those puzzle interactions will require to correctly click or move your mouse cursor for it to work. Other times, you need to navigate a maze-like area, backtracking and entering through a different door to go around obstacles.

I really dug the art style (which doesn't need a description since the game's screen shots perfectly do them justice). What you won't see in the screen shots are the fluid movements and sometimes comedic animations, which goes hand in hand with the comic book-esque visuals. The sound effects lend themselves perfectly as well, with each click of a door, each stomp of a food step, each ruffling of grass leaves being accompanied by appropriate echo or altered volume.

There definitely is an old-school touch to the inventory management. A nice touch, however, is that your character will actually hold whatever item it is you have selected, and will kneel to take it out of his backpack whenever you're looking into your inventory. There's also a clear distinction between one-time use items, which will indicate a quantity, and those that can be used again multiple times, like the golf club (often used as a handle) and the valve (used as a...valve!).

Another game that is brought down by how short it is, easily completed in about an hour or so (my <4 hour playtime includes multiple playthroughs to get some missing achievements). There's only two areas, Red Pines which has the outside area, an apartment block (comprised of a couple of hallways, stairways and flats) and a garage, and then the Museum which has the outside area, the main hall, and a few rooms and hallways.

Including the "cachés", there are a dozen items you pick up in total, and you're stuck with them even when they outlived their usefulness. Even one-use items, once spent, remain in your inventory with a quantity of 0. The limited selection also means that there are very few puzzles or environmental elements with which to interact. When you do find an item, you'll often know exactly where is the one place it's meant to be used. Otherwise, the in-game tutorial stuck in the top-right corner drops any semblance of mystery the genre is meant to be full of.


It's a very average Point & Click. I won't go as far as recommend against playing, but if you have the money the asking price expects you to spend, get yourself Day of the Tentacle – Remastered, A New Beginning – Final Cut or another of the myriad of Point & Click games offered on Steam.

—————————————————————————
This was just my opinion.

If you found this review helpful, please consider giving it a thumbs up, and feel free to check out more of my (purely opinionated) reviews.

...is a hidden object game. On your way to the Scarlet Rose Hotel for a winter vacation, you come across a murder and feel compelled to investigate the mystery linking the victim to other events.

A typical hidden object game: each location or scene is a first-person view of a fixed panel with various points of interest on which to click: containers to open, objects to pick up and zoom on, paths to follow. Clicking most of these will require you to solve a puzzle to unlock a door or lid, while others consist in the namesake hidden object puzzle where you must identify a bunch of items from a screenful of clutter. Most objects are meant for one-time use, some being used as keys to pen locks, tools to remove obstacles, pieces missing from puzzles, or parts that must be assembled into another object.

The story is told through the protagonist narrative what she observes, reads, thinks or deduces. You also have conversations with various characters you meet along the way (none of which are interactive or branching). As you progress through the story, new information or objects you get will have you backtrack to earlier locations to interacting with new points of interest or travel to newly unlocked paths. You'll even occasionally redo some hidden object puzzles a second time for more items.

Much of the charm from such games comes from the delightfully drawn panels, seemingly hand-drawn, which allow moveable and removable objects, interactive elements and collectibles to seamlessly blend in with the background. And yet, many will have well-placed lighting effect and animated scenery to establish the atmosphere. Adding to this is very simple, yet mood-setting music and background noises.

I actually enjoyed the story, even if it's nothing groundbreaking. There are a few crime scenes where you identify various clues: a broken glass, a foot print, a stain on the carpet, and must place them in order so that you can establish a narrative of what took place, giving you insights of the culprit's intentions and methods.

Some puzzles are exceedingly simple, perhaps one or two gave me any level of challenge to solve. Hidden object puzzles are also much less cluttered, making the few removable objects easy to find. Yet, for all its lack of difficulty, the game allows you to skip the puzzles, ask for hints when looking for objects, or have a point of interest sparkle to find them faster. Since hidden object games have an absolute lack of replayability, a higher difficulty would have been welcomed.

It is frustrating how many items could be multi-purpose, but the game is too linear to allow any creative thinking. Your inventory might have a knife, a screwdriver, a nail file, a letter opener, but nope, this specific screw must be removed using the side of a coin I will only find at a later time. As soon as you've used it, it is removed from your inventory, even though it would have been pretty useful later on. This problem haunts hidden object games in general, but felt particularly present in this game.


What can I say about Crime Secrets: Crimson Lily I wouldn't say about almost every traditional hidden object game out there, especially those by Artifex Mundi? It's a nice way to entertain an evening, with no specific reason to avoid it. I certainly won't pretend I'd pay the asking price for it, but whether you get it with a discount or as part of a bundle, give it a try!

—————————————————————————
This was just my opinion.

If you found this review helpful, please consider giving it a thumbs up, and feel free to check out more of my (purely opinionated) reviews.

...is a jigsaw puzzle game. Complete multiple jigsaw puzzles of various sizes and difficulty from photographs of cute puppies.

There are 84 jigsaw puzzles across 4 collections, each of increasing difficulty that start with 20 pieces (5x4) for the easiest one and reach 90 pieces (10x9) for the last ones, all of which are unlocked right from the get-go. The first 7 of each collection actually have a grid showing the outline and shape of each piece.

Pieces are spread around the central board. Gameplay is as simple as picking up the pieces by clicking and holding them with the left mouse button, and dropping them where you want to place them. If you place them correctly, the piece becomes a shade lighter and locks in place. Completion of each puzzle gives a 3-star rating based on how many moves you made and how much time you took.

You are offered a very large variety of puzzles, as most jigsaw puzzle games I've played don't have half as much. Pictures have a good enough resolution to them, none of them have that blur found when pictures are stretched over too large of a monitor. Dog lovers will appreciate the funny settings in which some of the dogs are placed, or how cute many of them can look.

The puzzles are way too easy. My daughter could do jigsaw puzzles of over 90 pieces before she was even 4 years old. Since pieces lock in place upon dropping them close enough to their intended position on the board, you can often take a guess as its location or try a few places until the part sticks. There's no piece rotation, and the interlocking connection are all typical rounded ends with slight variation of size, so there will be no challenge whatsoever at completing the puzzle.

Instead of larger, more challenging puzzle, the game makes up for the lack of difficulty with inconvenience. Moving a piece around counts as a move, so just grouping pieces together or moving them out of the way in order to reach a desired piece counts as a move, punishing more methodical players. If you have pieces that obviously go together, you cannot connect them together: they will exclusively stick to their target location on the board. It's as if the programmers never played a real-life jigsaw puzzle and have no idea how hobbyists actually play those.

The game offers little incentive: no adjustable difficulty, no puzzles requiring longer sessions, no Steam achievements. Heck, there isn't even music or anything to make the experience pleasant in any way, shape or form.


Puppy Dog: Jigsaw Puzzles is an extremely forgettable jigsaw puzzle game. It's only saving grace is the quantity of puzzles it has and its low price, but I still would never have paid for it.

—————————————————————————
This was just my opinion.

If you found this review helpful, please consider giving it a thumbs up, and feel free to check out more of my (purely opinionated) reviews.

...is a race-against-the-clock puzzle game. Following an experiment going wrong, you are shrinking into nothing and must mix chemical ingredients to make an antidote before your time runs out!

You begin in a lab, with ingredients and recipes randomly scattered across the room on shelves and counters, in cupboards and drawers, and you need to find each and every one of them. Some may be hidden among or behind other decorative items such as water bottles or plastic bins. In addition to the clipboards, additional recipes can be found on white boards or chalk boards on the walls, depending on the laboratory you are located in.

Following the recipe, you must use the chemical ingredients in a number of ways: mixing them with each other or with water (which you pour from the sink), process them in a code combiner, or place them in a microwave. If you ever make a mistake, you can put the result in a reverter to get your former ingredients back. If you spill or break your bottle (if the option is turned on), you can recreate it and its content from using the restorer. You must follow the trail of recipes and end up with three key chemical components to place in your antidote producer.

There are six different laboratories, ranging from a small office laboratory to an apartment loft to a workshop, each offering a very different experience: the layout of the place you walk (or rather run!) across, the placement of the equipment, the spread and quantity of drawers and cabinets your ingredients and recipes could be hidden in, or even the presence of wall-mounted boards with recipes which influences the quantity of clipboard recipes you must find.

Most of the fun comes from challenging yourself as you frantically run from one device to another with your chemical ingredients. Timing is key: while these two are mixing, throw the other one in the microwave and pour yourself another bottle of water while on your way! The smaller you get, the harder it is to carry stuff around or even to reach countertops to place your ingredients, forcing you to get creative with chairs, boxes and other decorative items so that you can get to those hard-to-reach places!

Besides the preset difficulties and challenges, you can customize your experience, as a dashboard is at your disposal with every setting being adjustable: how tall you start, fast you shrink, how fast you run, how high you jump. You can determine how long each device takes to process ingredients, or whether their placement is randomized. You can change the quantity of recipes and, by extension, the quantity of ingredients. Are the bottles spillable or breakable? You can even affect things like gravity, or whether you can double jump!

You cannot call this a simulation. All the chemical ingredients are randomized: the name, the color, the shape of the bottle. I'm not complaining that the names are made up (there are no such things as ninjatium and jumbozium), but there's no consistency. If I break a bottle, it will be restored as a different color. If I mistakenly mixed a red ingredient with water, the reverter will give me a yellow ingredient and...green water? While total randomization should allow infinite replayability, I would've loved to have consistent recipes, perhaps many of which you would learn as you played through the game, memorizing which ingredient to mix to get a specific result. There could be an entire wiki dedicated to the game's dozens or hundreds of recipes!

Mistakes are actually hard to make. Unless you don't actually bother to read the recipe, you'll never make any. There could've been partial recipe forcing you to take a guess or try a thing or two. Perhaps a recipe clipboard only gave a numbered sequence without telling you what the ingredient was, or perhaps it was unsure if Ingredient A had to be mixed with Ingredient B or Ingredient C. But there is no point in experimenting, since a mistake always results in a mix called "?!?!?" which is unusable except for the reverter. What if the wrong ingredient in the microwave caused an explosion? The wrong code sequence created a colorful (but pretty opaque) fog in the lab? What if the wrong mix resulted in fumes causing all sorts of wacky effect? Alas, there is none of this.


I actually had some fun with this game! However, having completed the included challenges, I'm left to make my own fun with the custom scenarios, increasing the complexity of the game by adding more recipes and ingredients, or by altering the parameters of my character, and I'm yet to see just how much replayability I will have before I'm bored. Still, I found the concept different and original, even if it seems a whole lot like Inch by Inch, so it gets my recommendation!

—————————————————————————
This was just my opinion.

If you found this review helpful, please consider giving it a thumbs up, and feel free to check out more of my (purely opinionated) reviews.

...is a brain-teaser puzzle game. Still obsessed with the fate of your friend A.S., you are pulled from your train into a castle by the mysterious Craftman, who challenges you to solve his puzzles with promises to reveal the secret power of The Null.

You begin in a train when a box suddenly appears before your eyes, containing a prism that summons the mysterious Null which transport you to a cell in a castle. From there, your goal is to escape, and explore other rooms that are unlocked one by one until you have collected all the prisms and required items to escape the castle. Each of these rooms is linked to a different building located on the island: the lighthouse, the clock tower, the mill and the observatory, each with puzzles of their own.

In each room or set of rooms, you must interact with objects in the room, pushing buttons, pulling levers and opening compartments to find objects and keys to unlock further buttons and compartments. Devices and items are spread across the rooms, but many will have a featured puzzle box you'll regularly need to get back to in order to progress.

Not all buttons or interactive parts are obvious, some of even very hidden, requiring you to look at everything from every angle. Some will often require to solve puzzle mini-games: moving items around on a board, rotating gears in a specific order, or solving a riddle. Carrying over from the previous games is the lens device that sees hidden markings and clues, and you early on upgrade it with an additional lens that allows you to peek into specific tiny spaces to activate a box or device from within.

There are a lot of puzzles in there, very varied, none of them too obvious. This isn't a typical Point & Click game and is leagues above the puzzles found in Hidden Object games. The puzzles feel very mechanical or physical, and solving each puzzle feels like it's articulating a mechanism or articulates a contraption, each lever or gear feels like it's serving a physical purpose, whether to open a door or to supply you with a key or object that will.

Every single step requires thought and observation. It mixes obviousness with extreme subtlety, often at the same time, throwing you off track. You opened a cabinet and found an item inside you need to progress? But did you see that on the inner face of the cabinet door, there was a small sliding button at near the bottom that opens a compartment accessible from behind the cabinet? This is a fictitious example, but is very representative of some of the traps in this game.

Although it is a mobile part, the game is complex enough to make it a worthy PC game, working well enough with a mouse that you wouldn't necessarily know it was originally a mobile game.

I can't help but feel like the game is losing some of the appeal the franchise had. You used to have one highly complex central puzzle box, and spent a lot of time working it and unlocking it from every angle, the few other items in the room merely serving as storage for keys and handles you needed to further unlock the box. In The Room Three, most devices have a one-time use single purpose, and you instead spend a lot more time moving around the room from one device or box to another, or even from one room to the other, forcing a lot a back and forth, so playtime relies a lot more on you missing something and backtracking to check dozens of locations again and again to see what it is you missed.

There just isn't as much care put into the quality of the environment. I clearly remember how The Room was proud of the new high-resolution textures, the added details, the extra work put into every simple part of the puzzles, showing off comparative "original release" versus "PC edition" screenshots in its marketing. It sure doesn't look like that care was put here, as if the attention to detail in the finer finishing touches were missing, making it feel much older than it actually is.


It's a nice game, but a step down to the original one in my experience. If you like busting your brain on solving puzzles, it's a medium challenge and still enjoyable enough to get me to recommend it, but in my opinion, the first games remain the superior ones.

—————————————————————————
This was just my opinion.

If you found this review helpful, please consider giving it a thumbs up, and feel free to check out more of my (purely opinionated) reviews.