Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Dec 24, 2022

  I've not finished it yet, but I love it so far and it feels like it easily belongs in Wadjet Eye's publishing catalogue, and it's helping bridge the gap for me between The Excavation of Hobb's Barrow and Rosewater which is coming out soon. Wanted to really call out the animation: it is far beyond what you'd usually expect in an AGS game, and it has a lot of charm.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 24, 2022

  ✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨ 7/10 Cats recommend this game. Follow my curation for more interesting games and genres. ✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨ ☑️Reminiscent of the classic Sierra / Sam and max games. ☑️Alright voice actors (clearly re-used voices) ☑️The graphics are beautiful. ☑️The story is straight forward. ☑️No difficult controls. ❌Blatantly obscure puzzle "buttons" ❌English translation has a few German text making it hard to solve puzzles. You can read more in depth some of the game here: https://www.taptap.io/post/3898632 The game takes you to the kingdom of Velehill as Roebuck Finn is returning home from his adventures. He is horrified to find that his home has been destroyed and his parents have gone missing. He quickly starts to realize that things are not what they seem, finding out that more animals have been going missing as of lately, even in the larger and deeper parts of the forest. As you investigate, you discover that machines have invaded the land and are threatening to destroy your world. With the help of your companions and your undeniable wit you embark on a journey to Owlsgard and beyond to uncover an ancient mystery and save your world from the machines. Solve puzzles, interact, gain knowledge to help him and his friends figure it out.

  How is the game?

  A problem with old Sierra / Lucas arts games is with the way they were made. They didn't want their games to be too easy or too ridiculously hard for their players, but they still wanted the game to eat up as much of your time as possible so you wouldn't be beating them in a few hours rather than a few days or weeks. Since most people didn't have access to the internet, this was the norm. I don't think this type of game play is that fun anymore. This game also falls into the realm of obscurity and un-fun puzzle designs at times when the solution is literally right in front of your face for hour because you can't differentiate visual indents, etc. I am not saying this game is bad, but rather frustrating when you need to solve a puzzle that is so blatantly obvious, but the visuals you see on screen do not immediately lead you to the solution for the puzzle, until you finally click on it. Imagine looking at a brown boat, then on the boat is a slightly darker brown spot. That could be the solution to a puzzle and have you stumped for hours if you are not keen on clicking and exploring everything on the screen. There is a "Modern" mode. This basically grants you a more automated approach to the game. Puzzles will become way more obvious, flashing key aspects that should be investigated, etc. While still being fun to play with less mental work involved. I didn't actually find the "Classic" mode all that difficult, just a bit tedious at times. Example: You're pressing a button, but that button has another button that is shaded / indented in a way that makes it look like a part of the design and not a button at all. So you run around trying to solve the puzzle until you find your way back to this location and frustratingly finally end up clicking it, which solves the puzzle! Wow, amazing puzzle! I used so much of my brain for this puzzle! So much thinking when in reality it was just a visual puzzle that was deceiving my eyes. This can obviously be more of a personal bias than an actual problem, but it just pisses me off.

  Conclusion

  There isn't any combat, the game is more of a novel at times followed by minutes and sometimes hours of puzzle solving with repeating actions. The story is good, the characters are nice and the puzzles, while sometimes irritating and exhausting, feel okay enough to be moderate but not hard.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 25, 2022

  I played for about two hours, but I can already say that this a great game, very polished. It really feels like a Sierra game with a Lucasarts interface, with a cute and intriguing world, a fun story, good puzzles, big maps to explore (and I love that). The only thing I’m not too fond of are the dialog which I found a bit long. Besides that, it’s awesome. I love the art style, the narration, the music and SFX. I advice you to pick the Modern Mode, even if, like me, you played a lot of P&C adventure games – it mostly makes some items more visible. I don’t think pixel-chasing is fun or fair, so it’s a nice addition. Overall, great game. I’ll update my review when I’m done! EDIT: I’m on chapter 3. I’m honestly very impressed. This is one of the best adventure games I played in years with Return to Monkey Island. I highly recommend it!
• gamedeal user

  Dec 25, 2022

  I've played a lot of Adventure games in my day. But this one here truly captures the spirit of old school 90's adventure titles. If you grew up a fan of games like Kings quest, Legend of Kyrandia, Torin's passage and such you'll feel right at home here.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 26, 2022

  A fantastic little adventure, reminiscent of Lucasarts and Sierra classics, while still being accessible for newbies and experienced players of point-n-click adventures alike. The art was, of course, absolutely lovely throughout - props to the animations in particular, they add a lot to the game world. The soundtrack, too, was basically perfect - feeling like an 'enhanced' CD soundtrack for a Lucasarts game, complete with goofy animation matched little musical stings for in-game events. The writing, of course, is also quite good, with a fair few laughs to be had. Occasional grammatical errors show up throughout, but it doesn't detract from the game at all, in my experience. I'm not the best at reviews - all I can really say is that this was a very fun time, and I highly recommend picking it up when you can, if this kind of thing appeals to you!
• gamedeal user

  Dec 28, 2022

  Beyond the Edge of Owlsgard is a great little hidden gem among point-and-click adventure games and exactly the kind of game I needed at the end of an overall pretty awful year 2022. That’s because this game is unapologetically escapist, with no meta-nonsense to get in the way (I'm looking at you, Ron Gilbert). More importantly, it’s a game that’s confident in its own identity. It doesn’t limit itself to constantly referencing adventure game classics – comparisons to Inherit the Earth are inevitable, but only due to the subject matter (hey, I never said I wouldn't reference the classics). Instead, Owlsgard tells an engaging adventure story with likeable characters in a wonderfully realized fictional world. Even better, this is a fully finished, self-contained story – so no worrying that the game will just stop halfway through, with promises of a sequel that’ll never materialize. As you can see from the screenshots, the videos and the demo, Owlsgard is also a game with amazing production values, even compared to non-indie titles. The cartoony pixel art style is spot-on, with special mentions going to the lavish animations which are used liberally throughout the game. The music, sound effects and full voice acting are also amazing, with only one or two voices in the German version feeling a little ‘flat’ compared to what the expressive art style and cartoony animations demand of them. The English voice cast is better in this regard, though I did come across some odd turns of phrase while playing the English translation for a bit – maybe that’s just me overreacting, though. When it comes to the puzzles in the game, I’m happy to say they fit exactly into my comfort zone as a casual adventure game player who grew up with the mainstream p&c adventure games of the nineties. Puzzles in Owlsgard are mostly of the ‘use-object-on-object’ school popularized by the likes of LucasArts and Sierra Entertainment, so don’t expect any complicated Myst-like logic puzzles. The main challenge here comes from paying attention, understanding the environments and sometimes thinking a bit outside the box. Admittedly, some of the puzzles might require thinking quite far outside the box, but we never get into cat hair moustache territory. The only bit of criticism I’ll have to throw at Owlsgard in terms of its puzzles is that I think your companion Gwen is maybe a bit under-utilized. She’s used mostly for story and flavour dialogue, so don’t expect her to play an active role in a majority of the game's puzzles the way Max was used in Sam & Max Hit the Road, for example. This doesn’t make the puzzles worse, it just feels like a tiny missed opportunity in an otherwise stellar indie point-and-click adventure game.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 1, 2023

  Was a wonderful experience. Great voice acting. Great animations. Great story. English VA of the deer sounds like MatPat from game theory.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 4, 2023

  Fantastic game. Finished in about 9 hours and another hour to get the good ending. Start to finish and top to bottom this is a very high quality game. Great art, voice acting (as good as you find in the genre), music, writing, characters, story and most importantly - puzzles! The game has more puzzle density than a lot of modern point and click games. Very authentic to early 90s LucasArts game but no pandering. Just quality. The design still holds up but you don't get Monkey Island in jokes every 10 minutes. Don't forget to push/pull/move items in the world. Use those verbs! When you are stuck this will be the reason most of the time. Play the game. It's 100% worth it and mandatory for fans of the genre. In contention for the top point and clicks of 2022. -- NOTE: Easy to miss a couple of hotspots in Ch4 if you aren't careful and you'll end up getting the 'bad' ending. Keep ample saves around the obvious ending and you can trivially backtrack to do what you need to.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 4, 2023

  This was such a charming little adventure game! I had a great time with it! Definitely worth checking out if you're a fan of the genre! I love the little foreground animals
• gamedeal user

  Jan 8, 2023

  A very neat point and click game in the style of old Sierra games. The charm from the game ramps up a little bit later, the start does feel a little bit forced, emotion wise. However the characters did grow on me after a short moment with them. I would recommend playing on "Modern Mode" unless you're a sierra masochist.