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Fanatical (formerly BundleStars) – Part Fifty-One: Odyssey Bundle
Lost Civilization - A fairly standard point-and-click puzzle adventure. Suzanne’s uncle discovered some lost secrets of the Mayans that may be related to aliens. Suzanne’s kidnapped fiancé is a much more pressing concern to her, however. Pros: They manage to switch up the hidden-pictures puzzles with some “find the right place to put the object” variations. Cons: It’s entirely standard for the genre otherwise.
The Last Door - Collector's Edition - A King’s Quest style puzzle adventure game that’s very much in the horror genre (the introductory puzzle involves clicking on the tools for a man to commit suicide by hanging, just in case you didn’t know what you were getting into).
Heroes & Legends: Conquerors of Kolhar - An autoplay game, pseudo-rpg, in that there’s a story and your characters gain levels. In practice, you’re mostly just struggling with the equipment system. (Hint: Bring home a full inventory from every battle and recycle it all for materials; don’t bother trying to have backup equipment for your characters.) And activating special abilities to try to keep your characters alive, of course. The plot is forgettable—demons are coming to overtake the kingdom, blah blah blah. It’s okay; vaguely entertaining and requiring little brainpower, but you won’t miss it when it’s gone.
Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller - I’m not the biggest fan of puzzle adventure games, but can tolerate them for an interesting story and/or protagonists who are actually clever and/or snappy, witty dialogue. This manages to fail on all counts, being a fairly stock supernatural “thriller” where the protagonist is too dumb to live, and seems to solve puzzles because her supernatural sense actively shows her what simple tasks to take.
Quest for Infamy - Clearly inspired by King’s Quest and Quest for Glory, this is a puzzle adventure game done in a retro style with a lot of options of things you can look at, talk about or attack. I managed to die less than five minutes in by kicking in a door (despite the fact you’re apparently supposed to be a rogue here), without even seeing the turn-based combat system the game blurb boasts. If I’m in the mood for this sort of experience, I’ll play the games that inspired it first, I think.
Face Noir - Slow and clunky animation in a cheesy noir-detective puzzle adventure game. The plot certainly didn’t interest me enough to deal with the jerky controls.
Morningstar: Descent to Deadrock - This was a decently done, if short, sci-fi point-and-click puzzle game. There are no hidden object scenes; it’s all collecting objects and using them together or in the right places. So, simple and relatively straightforward. I give them credit for 1) having decent graphics and cutscenes, 2) managing to remain “sci-fi” the whole time, 3) having a perfectly acceptable plot.
Supreme League of Patriots Season Pass - This included the first three games in the series, which makes it unfortunate that I wasn’t particularly interested after ten minutes of the first one. They’re puzzle adventure games that take pride in the fact that they don’t include any hidden object scenes or puzzles, just lots of dialogue and clicking on things. But like many instances here, this isn’t as witty as it wants to be (even with British accents) and it’s one of those cases where I suspect that even though I agree with a bunch of the politics, they’ll irritate me. So, pass.
Moebius: Empire Rising - A puzzle adventure game starring a not-really-a-detective-but-does-it-anyway genius character. I played about an hour of it, but lost the thread of the story and couldn’t bring myself to go back to it.
Overall: I think it’s fairly clear that I like point-and-click puzzle games, but my patience is much less with puzzle adventure games where you have to move your character around and the puzzles are more moon-logic-y. Nothing in this bundle was amazing to me, though your feelings might vary if you enjoy puzzle adventure games more.
The Last Door - Collector's Edition - A King’s Quest style puzzle adventure game that’s very much in the horror genre (the introductory puzzle involves clicking on the tools for a man to commit suicide by hanging, just in case you didn’t know what you were getting into).
Heroes & Legends: Conquerors of Kolhar - An autoplay game, pseudo-rpg, in that there’s a story and your characters gain levels. In practice, you’re mostly just struggling with the equipment system. (Hint: Bring home a full inventory from every battle and recycle it all for materials; don’t bother trying to have backup equipment for your characters.) And activating special abilities to try to keep your characters alive, of course. The plot is forgettable—demons are coming to overtake the kingdom, blah blah blah. It’s okay; vaguely entertaining and requiring little brainpower, but you won’t miss it when it’s gone.
Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller - I’m not the biggest fan of puzzle adventure games, but can tolerate them for an interesting story and/or protagonists who are actually clever and/or snappy, witty dialogue. This manages to fail on all counts, being a fairly stock supernatural “thriller” where the protagonist is too dumb to live, and seems to solve puzzles because her supernatural sense actively shows her what simple tasks to take.
Quest for Infamy - Clearly inspired by King’s Quest and Quest for Glory, this is a puzzle adventure game done in a retro style with a lot of options of things you can look at, talk about or attack. I managed to die less than five minutes in by kicking in a door (despite the fact you’re apparently supposed to be a rogue here), without even seeing the turn-based combat system the game blurb boasts. If I’m in the mood for this sort of experience, I’ll play the games that inspired it first, I think.
Face Noir - Slow and clunky animation in a cheesy noir-detective puzzle adventure game. The plot certainly didn’t interest me enough to deal with the jerky controls.
Morningstar: Descent to Deadrock - This was a decently done, if short, sci-fi point-and-click puzzle game. There are no hidden object scenes; it’s all collecting objects and using them together or in the right places. So, simple and relatively straightforward. I give them credit for 1) having decent graphics and cutscenes, 2) managing to remain “sci-fi” the whole time, 3) having a perfectly acceptable plot.
Supreme League of Patriots Season Pass - This included the first three games in the series, which makes it unfortunate that I wasn’t particularly interested after ten minutes of the first one. They’re puzzle adventure games that take pride in the fact that they don’t include any hidden object scenes or puzzles, just lots of dialogue and clicking on things. But like many instances here, this isn’t as witty as it wants to be (even with British accents) and it’s one of those cases where I suspect that even though I agree with a bunch of the politics, they’ll irritate me. So, pass.
Moebius: Empire Rising - A puzzle adventure game starring a not-really-a-detective-but-does-it-anyway genius character. I played about an hour of it, but lost the thread of the story and couldn’t bring myself to go back to it.
Overall: I think it’s fairly clear that I like point-and-click puzzle games, but my patience is much less with puzzle adventure games where you have to move your character around and the puzzles are more moon-logic-y. Nothing in this bundle was amazing to me, though your feelings might vary if you enjoy puzzle adventure games more.
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Or try Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, which is the latest by Lori and Corey Cole who made Quest for Glory. If you've not played QFG, you might want to play them first because there are a lot of references, but Hero-U came out a couple of months ago so it's probably smoothest to play and it does fundamentally stand alone. (Disclaimer: at this point I know Lori and Corey personally & I substantially supported Hero-U. I still recommend the game. Especially if you like puns.)