Any of these more modern adventure games worth playing?

[DriacKin]

I really enjoyed A Vampire Story,tho I'm not that big of a adventure fan.Most adventure games I've played were the Monkey Island series and the Broken Mirror ones.I generally seek in a adventure game a way of relaxation,from the combination of great graphics and music,and,for me atleast,AVS has both.Some of the views were breathtaking for me,it almost felt like Monkey Island went on a trip to the mountains and woods,and the soundtrack is just great(listen to the one in her bedroom...wow).

Sure,the game aint that funny,and yes,the protagonist can be quite irritating sometimes(same goes for her bat,I guess) but all in all it's a great adventure experience,with easy to digest puzzles and awesome views.And last time I checked,it wasnt episodic,it was just a regular adventure game,with a sequel in the development.It was waaay longer than any S&M episode (and more recently Monkey Island episode too).

All in all this game is sort of a quick fix for gamers:it has decent to funny dialog,great cartoonish grafics,and decent to nice characters.

I found the humor in Vampyre Story to be kinda lame. It felt like they were trying too hard and it felt more annoying than funny.
Maybe I've just been spoiled by the older LucasArts games like Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, etc...

 

[aries202]

Black Mirror is OK/Good, Syberia 1 and 2 are both great games (in my book anyway), Post Mortem and Still Life are great , so is Lost Crown.

Secret Files: Tunguska might be OK, if you like the genre and the gameplay, so would Scratches and Culpa Innata be (Culpa Innata is currently only available as a legally downloaded (bought) game.

The Longest Journey and Dreamfall: The Longest journey are really excellent games as well as have very great stories to tell

 

[onemananadhisdroid]

I'm currently playing Dracula3, and whilst the first two belong into the category of bottom of the barrel French Myst-alikes with no logics or plot whatsoever, I'm pleasantly surprised by this. There's lots of talking, and it's a budget title from a company used to making games on a tight budget, but the production values are sound.

What got me interested in the first place was the setup: It's 1920, the world is just trying to recover from WWI. You're playing a priest sent to Romania and embark on a mission to prove that vampires are about as real as Santa Clause. It can be unsettling playing this at night, particularly since there went a lot of historical research into this. Everything is made to be pretty authentic, you're even carrying around three thousands pages of bibledom, all in Latin on tops. All vampire fiction cliches are firmly in place, like the fog in the deserted streets of a town in Transylvania, the wolves' howling, garlic lying all around, lots of coffins and a cemetary on the outskirts of Carpathia. But with the ever present question whether this is all real or something else it's played for something differen't than you might expect.

That said, the puzzles are hard. You can and have to spend hours on those alone. And one of the last puzzles is the single hardest puzzle I've seen, ever. Don't expect to solve this last one without resorting to a walkthrough, for everything else patience, pencil and paper will do the trick.

 

[Longshanks]

Of those you've listed, Post Mortem is an interesting attempt at non-linearity, though buggy and of patchy quality. Its sequel Still Life is more polished but less interesting. Both are worth playing. Culp Innata, for me, was rather boring. But, if a superficially fleshed out and shitty looking world that borrows heavily from Blade Runner, and follows a well-worn dystopic "utopia" path, interests you at all, then it may be worth taking a look. I'm not sorry I played it. I am a sci fi fan, even of stuff that's not particularly good. This was the reason for my interest in the game, and also a large part of why I found it so predictable and unoriginal. In the end it was the gameplay, and the Longest Journey-like, though even worse, "girly" chats that brought the game way down.

I will finish with an obligatory mention of The Last Express. Not new, but still quite shiny. Play it if you've not done so.

 

[DriacKin]

The Longest Journey and Dreamfall: The Longest journey are really excellent games as well as have very great stories to tell

Dreamfall is a terrible game with a nice story to tell.

 

[Black Cat]

@OP

Both Dark Fall and The Lost Crown are very good games. Dark Fall, in particular, is, like, the most atmospheric game ever. It really plays with your mind, and it's kind of horror is very elegant and refined. Highbrow, one could say. TLC has a very surreal but subtle and tranquil style, too. Very "Twilight Zone", maybe. I like them both a lot.

And have you already played Loath Nolder? I did not see it in your list, but since it is also a modern indie horror adventure with a similar style to those two and a lot of good things i though i would mention it in passing, at least.

Back to your list, now. Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened is nothing to write home about. It is not bad, you see, but it is nothing special either. The idea of Holmes Vs Cthulhu was, like, so cool it hurts, but in the end it comes to nothing special and never actually makes anything cool with the premise. Mundane, mostly. A lot.

The Black Mirror is also like that, but somewhat worse. There are several parts where you are suposed to try things until something clicks, and not a lot of memorable things. In the end the MOST memorable thing in the entire game was for me that close to the end you are suposed to solve a puzzle based on a certain occult symbol in wich there are five hebrew characters, right? But all other characters other than those five are not hebrew characters. They are characters invented by the designers because they were too lazy or ignorant as to research what those things in the original symbol were. That kind of game it is.

(Edited because my grammar just broke in those last lines.)

 

[onemananadhisdroid]

Are Loath Noader and Dark Fall really that good? I've only played the demo from each of those back in their day, and both looked rather like your typical one man budget project to me. The design is built deeply within constraints, resulting in abandoned places and a narrative shoe-horned into a billion notes scattered all over the place. And on tops a couple of spooky sound effects in an attempt to keep you interested. It's some kind of formula that appears to be the law with such games. And it's mostly employed with no genuinelly interesting twist to it or wit or imagination. I recently downloaded the demo of Last Half Of Darkness: Beyond The Spirit's Eye and had to hit alt+F4 about a minute in.

Admittedly, in the long run, I can see myself enjoying any of those, as I rather like any kind of creepfest, be it intelligent or rather run off the mill.

But then there's The Lost Crown (no demo, darn), which received some rather good reviews, and that's from the same man as Dark Fall. One of those days.. I think there's also a sequel to Loath Noader in the making, and the trailer doesn't look bad - but from that little I filtered through the demo it's not the low production values this game is suffering from - if it *is* as meh as most reviews would suggest. Which of course all boils down to personal taste all over again. In any way, in terms of a Cthulhu fix, Dark Corners Of The Earth looks a much spicier prospect to me. In a way, my experience with games like that made me hesistant to try Dracula 3 at first - Dracula 1 and 2 don't make for an exact fit, but they were still first person horror low budget affairs all the same, with all the money being wasted on the rendering farm. But since the third one could be had for 7 bucks I gave it a shot. It's still no masterpiece, the balancing is off, as is the pacing sometimes, but the research and different take on a tired myth make it rather interesting to play.

Oh yeah, and the puzzles surely weren't made with the idea that just about everyone ever needs to make it through to the end of the game. :twisted:

 

[Black Cat]

@onemanandhisdroid

Dark Fall and Loath Nolder are really very good. Yes, both are low budget but very well constructed games.

In Dark Fall, for an example, the horror is never "in your face" and it is built in little details, to the point where you can miss many of the "scares" if you are thinking about something else while playing. And all is based around a "romantized" version of real ghosthunting, so it actually has a more "down to earth" feeling to it. Is objective is more to unerve you than to "scare" you: It is a game to play at night, and for long strechtes, so the atmosphere actually builds up and starts afecting you really bad. Many times you end scaring yourself silly, the game only giving you the tools to do so. It is, as i said, very subtle and elegant and playful. Not a Resident Evil, nor a Silent Hill.

And Loath Nolder is strange in that it is the first game to actually be Lovecraftian in "soul". It is a game were you must not only read a lot of things, but do so very carefully and marking important passages in the text so they end in your "Thinking" inventory and can be combined with some other ideas to create solutions, codes, hints, and plot points. Most of the time you are wandering empty, haunted places looking for hints, reading documents at half-light, fiddling with puzzles, and trying to steel yourself against the sound effects. It is also very dependant on build-up, so it comes to the player in the end: I played the entire first chapter in a single night, so everything was fresh in my mind and when the things start to happen i was, like, WOW, this is so fucking cool and scary i will not be able to sleep this night at all. Players who do not get so involved in their gaming may go "bo-ring" instead.

But yes, both are of the "Abandoned place where dark secrets and evil things are to be found." It does not bother me (i am of the Myst school of adventuring, so i prefer big places to explore at my own pace, evil puzzles to solve, long journals to scan for clues, lots of atmosphere to soak, and no characters to kill nor talk to) but maybe they are not your kind of game. Dark Fall has you talking with dead things through a parser, though. And you also have a very cool Ouija Board , with parser too.

The last half of darkness is also that kind of game. I did not write about it in my other post because i did not finish it, so i do not know how that one will turn out.

The Lost Crown is more like classical adventure mixed with Dark Fall, in that you have all the ghost hunting tools and subtle touchs, the various occult elements without ever coming even close to "fantasy magick", but you also interact with weird people and not all true puzzles are from the "Myst" school of adventuring.

 

[coldcrow]

A more recent entry would be: Rhiannon: curse of the four branches.

Great and realistic indie ghost-adventure.

 

[DraQ]

Syberia is good <=> you put oddly oneiric atmosphere above mental challenge, logic and hard puzzles.