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61 reviews · 7 essays
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Kowloon High-School Chronicle (2004) — it shared a release day with Pokemon Emerald, and needed 16 years to cross the ocean
Episode 57 of “Today Is Release Day”: Kowloon High-School Chronicle, published by Atlus on the PlayStation 2 on September 16, 2004 — 22 years ago today. Pokemon Emerald shipped the same day. This one sold about 42,000 copies. Sixteen years later, it was the one that got rebuilt and sent abroad.
Gyakuten Saiban: Yomigaeru Gyakuten (2005) — they added one case to a four-year-old game, and the series crossed the ocean
Episode 56 of “Today Is Release Day”: Gyakuten Saiban: Yomigaeru Gyakuten, known abroad as Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. Capcom released it on the Nintendo DS on September 15, 2005 — twenty-one years ago today. It was a port of a 2001 Game Boy Advance game with a single extra case bolted on. That one case, and an English mode that shipped inside the Japanese cartridge, carried the series out into the world.
Clock Tower (1995) — the horror game that hands you no weapon and sets a man with shears loose behind you
Episode 55 of “Today Is Release Day”: Clock Tower. Human released it on the Super Famicom on September 14, 1995 — thirty-one years ago today. Your heroine cannot fight. She can only run and hide. Famitsu's review panel gave it 31 out of 40 and a Silver Hall of Fame award.
Inside Dave Grossman's Philosophy — Let the Player Be the Clever One
"Your job is not to make yourself feel clever, it's to make the player feel clever." Dave Grossman has said it for thirty years — and rather than leave it a slogan, he sat his mother-in-law down with his own game and published every place she got stuck. A reading of his philosophy, obsessions, failures, dilemmas and influences across seven sources.
Soundtrack: Return to Monkey Island — the notes a skull sings open the map
Ron Gilbert's pirate comedy came full circle after thirty years, and the composers who invented iMuse itself — Michael Land, Peter McConnell, and Clint Bajakian — came back with it. From the specific notes hidden inside a skull-striking map puzzle to the way melodies change their breathing every time you walk through a door, I, Doremi, trace the design through verified interviews and credits, black coffee in hand.
Counterpoint on Return to Monkey Island — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi rated Return to Monkey Island 8.4/10. I examined five claims drawn from Steam's negative reviews — art style, reduced difficulty, hint design, the ending, and pacing — and worked out where I agree and where I push back.
Soundtrack: Heaven's Vault — a small chord waiting for every moment of discovery
In inkle's narrative adventure, archaeologist Aliya and her robot companion Six sail the rivers of a nebula in search of a missing scholar — and at its core sits a puzzle of deciphering an ancient script. Laurence Chapman scored it, and beneath the intimacy of a string quartet he hid some twenty short pieces written only for 'moments of discovery.' How the deciphering puzzle meshes with those small chords — black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take it apart.
Related reviews
Metamorphosis
A first-person adventure that walks through the morning of Kafka's Metamorphosis. At Gregor's new insect height, desktops and gaps between floorboards become terrain, and climbing across them is how you travel. From Ovid Works.
adventurenarrative-puzzlepuzzle-platformerThe Occupation
A first-person thriller set in North West England on 24 October 1987, in which you play a journalist slipping into restricted areas and interviewing people to gather evidence. The in-game clock runs at real-world speed and the cast moves on a timetable, in this game from White Paper Games.
adventuremysteryobservationPrimordia
A 2D point-and-click adventure in which a robot called Horatio and his small companion Crispin lose their power core and descend into the city of Metropol. You combine salvaged parts to restart broken machines, and read the ruins for traces of who built you. Made by Wormwood Studios and published by Wadjet Eye Games.
adventurepoint-and-clickpuzzleThe 7th Guest: 25th Anniversary Edition
A first-person puzzle adventure set in an empty mansion, where six invited guests and twenty-one room-sized contraptions stand between you and the house's secret. This is MojoTouch's 2019 reissue of Trilobyte's 1993 landmark, the game that showed what a CD-ROM could hold.
puzzleadventurepoint-and-clickLumino City
A hand-built point-and-click adventure whose entire city was constructed from paper and card, then photographed to become the screen. You climb a tower-like town looking for your grandfather, fixing windmills, gears and fuse boxes to bring the power back. Made by State of Play, the British studio behind Lume.
puzzlepoint-and-clickadventureIttle Dew
A top-down puzzle adventure in which a castaway adventurer works through block-pushing rooms using only the items she picked up — a fire sword, an ice wand, a portal wand. Released by Ludosity in 2013.
puzzlesokoban-likeadventureThe Last Campfire
A 3D puzzle adventure in which Ember, a small lost flame, walks an underground world and works through the small contraptions blocking the stranded souls it finds there. A storybook-shaped project from Hello Games, the studio behind No Man's Sky.
puzzleadventurenarrative-puzzleThe Magic Circle
A first-person meta-puzzle set inside a fantasy game that has been in development for twenty years and is still unfinished. You steal behaviours from creatures and objects, paste them onto other things, and rewrite your way toward the exit. Puzzles have no single intended answer. Released in 2015 by Question, a studio whose members are credited with work on Thief and BioShock.
puzzlemeta-puzzlefirst-personEvent[0]
A first-person narrative exploration game aboard a retrofuturist spaceship, where you type your own sentences into the ship's terminals to talk with its AI, Kaizen-85, and look for a way back to Earth. Free text rather than dialogue options is the central mechanism, and how you speak changes the AI's attitude and your ending. A 2016 work by Ocelot Society.
narrative-puzzleadventurefirst-personFelix The Reaper
An isometric puzzle game in which Felix, a reaper who never stops dancing, may only walk where there is shade. You flip the sun between two positions to reshape the shadows, push and pull props to cast new ones, and arrange each mortal's fatal accident. Made by Kong Orange, narrated by Patrick Stewart.
puzzlesokoban-likeadventureHappy Game
A point-and-click adventure that walks a sleeping boy through three chapters of nightmare. You pull, turn and pick at the screen to open the way forward, and what waits there is smiley faces, pink bunnies and rooms the colour of blood. Amanita Design's first turn toward horror, scored by the Czech band DVA.
puzzlepoint-and-clickadventureOneShot
A top-down puzzle adventure: guide a child through a world whose sun has died, carrying a single lightbulb toward the top of it. Between the item-combining, a handful of puzzles reach out into the player's own computer. From Future Cat.
puzzlemeta-puzzlenarrative-puzzleZero Escape: The Nonary Games
Two Spike Chunsoft mystery adventures in one package: nine people are locked inside a facility and must pass through numbered doors to get out. It bundles the DS-born Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors with its sequel Virtue's Last Reward, alternating first-person escape-room sections with branching novel sections.
mysteryadventurenarrative-puzzleEliza
A visual novel about a woman who returns to work as the human voice of an AI counseling app, reading its scripted lines aloud to clients. Written by Matthew Seiji Burns and made by Zachtronics, the studio behind Opus Magnum, it ships with a kabufuda solitaire game on the side.
visual-novelnarrativeadventureRöki
A point-and-click adventure through a snowbound forest drawn from Nordic folklore, following Tove as she gathers and combines objects to search for her sister. Polygon Treehouse's game has no combat and no fail state, carried instead by hand-drawn landscapes and a story about loss.
adventurepoint-and-clicknarrativePhoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy
A courtroom adventure in which you play defense attorney Phoenix Wright, matching one line of testimony against one piece of evidence to break a lie. Capcom's collection gathers all fourteen episodes of the three games first released between 2001 and 2004, with the art redrawn frame by frame.
mysteryvisual-noveldeductionTrüberbrook
A point-and-click adventure in which Hans Tannhauser, an American physicist who has won a trip to a remote West German village in 1967, chases a stolen physics paper and walks into a story about another dimension. Made by the German studio btf, with sets built as real miniatures and photographed.
puzzlepoint-and-clickadventureBrothers - A Tale of Two Sons
Two brothers set out to find the Water of Life for their dying father. The left stick moves the older brother and the right the younger, both at once, and you cross ravines, waterways and the bones of giants by pairing what each of them can do. Every line is spoken in an invented language. Directed by Josef Fares at Starbreeze Studios, released in 2013.
puzzleadventurepuzzle-platformerLara Croft GO
A turn-based puzzle adventure that walks Lara down isometric ruins one tile at a time. You slip past snakes and spear traps, pull levers, and count the turns left on a cracking floor. Square Enix Montréal folded Tomb Raider's jumping, climbing and shooting into single board moves, in the second game of their GO series.
puzzleadventurepathfindingScribblenauts Unlimited
Type a noun and the thing appears: a jetpack, a dinosaur, a scalpel. You use whatever you summoned to help the people around you and collect Starites across a hand-drawn 2D world. Adjectives change what you make, and an editor lets you build objects of your own. From 5th Cell.
puzzlesandboxadventureTHE LONGING
A hand-drawn adventure about waiting. You play a small Shade, alone deep underground, whose one task is to wait 400 days for a sleeping king to wake. Everything moves slowly, from the walking to the doors, and the timer keeps running while the game is closed. You can explore the caves, furnish a room, and read real classic novels to make the time pass faster. Made by Studio Seufz.
adventureidlepoint-and-clickMinit
A small black-and-white top-down adventure in which a curse ends every life after sixty seconds and sends you home. Only the items you picked up and the new houses you found carry over, so each minute reaches a little further than the last. Made by four developers including Vlambeer's Jan Willem Nijman, published by Devolver Digital.
adventurepuzzletime-loopContradiction: Spot the Liar!
A live-action (FMV) murder mystery in which Detective Inspector Frederick Jenks spends one evening - 5pm to midnight - reopening a drowning in the small English village of Edenton. You interview the residents, collect what they say, then pair two statements that clash and confront the liar to unlock the next thread. Designed and scored by Tim Follin for Baggy Cat.
mysteryfmvdeductionThe Bookwalker: Thief of Tales
A novelist whose ability to write has been shackled dives into books to steal the legendary objects inside them. Reality plays out in first person and the books in isometric view; you craft tools from scavenged junk and spend ink to rewrite a line of the story. A story-led point-and-click across seven fictional worlds, from DO MY BEST, the studio behind The Final Station.
narrative-puzzlepoint-and-clickadventureRiME
A boy wakes on an unfamiliar island after a storm and runs, climbs, swims and shouts at the stonework, guided by a red fox toward the peak of a distant tower — a five-chapter puzzle adventure with no combat, no HUD and no dialogue, released by Tequila Works in 2017.
puzzleadventureexplorationCHUCHEL
A comedy adventure from Amanita Design in which a hairy little creature chases a single cherry through thirty short stages, helped and hindered by his rival Kekel. There is exactly one verb — click — and behind almost every press waits a hand-drawn gag.
puzzlepoint-and-clickcomedyAI: The Somnium Files
A detective adventure set in near-future Tokyo, in which a one-eyed police detective works a serial murder case alongside the artificial intelligence housed in his prosthetic eye. First-person investigation scenes alternate with third-person 'Somnium' dives into a suspect's dream, where a six-minute budget must be spent to open Mental Locks, and an in-game flowchart lets you walk the branches toward several endings. Written and directed by Kotaro Uchikoshi of the Zero Escape series, from Spike Chunsoft.
mysteryadventurenarrative-puzzleSyberia: The World Before
A third-person adventure in which lawyer Kate Walker moves between two timelines — a girl named Dana in the 1930s and Kate's own present — retracing the history of the city of Vaghen alongside the automaton Oscar. Progress comes through assembling mechanisms and hint-assisted exploration. Microids' fourth entry in the series.
narrative-puzzleadventurepoint-and-clickDeponia
A hand-drawn point-and-click adventure set on a planet that has been turned into one enormous rubbish tip, where the self-absorbed Rufus dreams only of escaping to the floating paradise of Elysium above. You combine scavenged junk, talk residents into things they should not agree to, and lever a way out of the scrap. The first of Daedalic Entertainment's three-part series.
puzzlepoint-and-clickadventureReturn to Monkey Island
A point-and-click adventure in which series creator Ron Gilbert returns, three decades on, to the pirate comedy he left unfinished. It replaces the old verb menu with a single context-sensitive interaction, adds an in-world hint book that opens solutions in stages, and sends Guybrush Threepwood after the Secret of Monkey Island once more.
puzzlepoint-and-clickadventureDay of the Tentacle Remastered
Double Fine's redraw of the 1993 LucasArts game: a broken time machine scatters three friends into the past, present and future of the same motel, and you switch between them, mailing objects across the centuries to stop a purple tentacle from taking over the world.
puzzleadventurepoint-and-clickSyberia 3
A third-person adventure in which the lawyer Kate Walker joins a Youkol migration north, assembling clockwork devices along the way. Microïds' third Syberia, which trades the fixed painted screens of the first two games for a 3D space you walk around in.
narrative-puzzleadventurepoint-and-clickNauticrawl
A turn-based first-person puzzle game in which you climb into a stolen alien machine and learn to fly it with no manual and no tutorial, decoding a wall of unlabeled levers and switches while a hostile world hunts you. Spare Parts Oasis makes the control panel itself the puzzle.
puzzlesimulationadventureTacoma
A first-person exploration adventure set aboard an emptied space station in 2088, where you replay, rewind and walk around volumetric recordings of its six-person crew to reconstruct the days before they left. From Fullbright, the studio behind Gone Home.
observationnarrativeadventureHyperbolica
A first-person non-Euclidean adventure set in towns built from hyperbolic space, where parallel lines refuse to stay parallel, and spherical space, where distant objects look larger; you talk to residents and play races, skiing and snowball fights to build an intuition for the place. Made by CodeParade, who wrote the rendering pipeline from scratch.
puzzleexplorationfirst-personTOEM
A hand-drawn monochrome observation-puzzle adventure in which a child leaves home with their grandmother's camera, photographs whatever the villagers and townspeople ask for, shows them the shot, and uses the stamps earned to move on to the next region — rotating the view to hunt for subjects, from Something We Made.
puzzleobservationadventureGrim Fandango Remastered
A 3D point-and-click adventure in which you play Manny Calavera, a skeletal travel agent in the Land of the Dead, following a journey and a conspiracy told across four years. Double Fine's rebuild of a film-noir-meets-Day-of-the-Dead world, with repainted textures, dynamic lighting and a re-recorded live score.
puzzleadventurepoint-and-clickGhost Trick: Phantom Detective
A puzzle adventure in which a newly dead protagonist possesses the objects around him, chains the single action each one owns, and rearranges the world in the four minutes before somebody dies. Directed by Shu Takumi of Ace Attorney for the Nintendo DS in 2010, brought to Steam by Capcom as an HD remaster.
puzzleadventuremysterySomerville
A 2.5D narrative puzzle-adventure in which a nameless father crosses a British countryside broken by an alien invasion, a dog and a small son at his side. Light in hand, he melts alien matter and lets it set again to open a path. Jumpship's first game, told without a single line of dialogue.
puzzleadventureatmosphericBroken Age
A village girl chosen as a sacrifice and a boy aboard a spaceship run by an overprotective computer. Switch freely between their two stories, combining objects to solve puzzles, in a hand-painted point-and-click adventure — built in two acts by Tim Schafer's Double Fine on crowdfunded money.
puzzleadventurepoint-and-clickPaper Trail
A top-down puzzle game in which the screen is a sheet of paper: fold it over and the terrain on the reverse joins the front, building a path for Paige as she journeys through a hand-drawn world. From Newfangled Games.
puzzleadventurepathfindingThimbleweed Park
A point-and-click adventure about a 1987 small-town murder, switching between five characters — two FBI agents, a ghost, a foul-mouthed clown and an aspiring game developer. Its nine-verb SCUMM-style interface was rebuilt for modern machines by the creators of Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island.
puzzlepoint-and-clickadventureMoncage
A wordless optical-illusion puzzle adventure. Each face of a glass cube holds a different world, and rotating your view until two silhouettes line up locks them into a single mechanism. You move between a factory, a lighthouse, an amusement park and a church, picking up scattered photographs that assemble the story of a father and a son. From Optillusion.
puzzleadventurepoint-and-clickMyst
A first-person puzzle adventure: you arrive on an unknown island and move between an abandoned library and four Ages, piecing together a story of family betrayal from machines and journals alone. Cyan Worlds' own Unreal Engine rebuild of their 1993 original, walkable flat or in VR, with optional puzzle randomization.
puzzleadventurefirst-personGenesis Noir
A hand-drawn black-and-white point-and-click adventure in which you play No Man, a watch peddler diving through the history of the universe to save his love from the Big Bang — a gunshot fired by a jealous god. Feral Cat Den built it out of tactile puzzles: turn a dial, touch a thing, see what happens.
puzzleadventurepoint-and-clickCreaks
A hand-drawn 2D puzzle-platformer in which you descend a dim mansion, shine light to turn mechanical monsters into furniture, and use that furniture as footing. No dialogue, no combat, no inventory — solved through a single rule called light, from Amanita Design, makers of Machinarium.
puzzlepuzzle-platformeradventureFirmament
A first-person puzzle-adventure from Cyan Worlds, the studio behind Myst and Riven. You plug a wrist-mounted tool, the Adjunct, into sockets to work cranes and generators as you cross three abandoned steampunk realms — a meditative world with no ciphers and no notes to take.
puzzleadventureexplorationTangle Tower
A hand-drawn, fully voiced detective adventure: a painter's murder in a strange mansion, solved by interrogating suspects, pairing the clues you gather, and cracking the puzzles hidden through the tower. SFB Games' 2019 follow-up to Detective Grimoire.
puzzlemysteryadventureQuern - Undying Thoughts
A first-person puzzle adventure: stranded on an island with no way back, you open some fifty doors by working gears, crystals and alchemy, and solved contraptions return, reused, so the whole island reads as one machine. A 2016 homage to Myst and Riven from the four-person studio Zadbox.
puzzleadventuremysteryThe Shapeshifting Detective
A murder-mystery FMV in which a detective can shapeshift into anyone they've met to draw out secrets no one would tell a cop. The killer is picked at random each new game, and 1,600+ live-action clips branch on your choices — from D'Avekki Studios, makers of The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker.
mysteryfmvadventureEther One
A first-person adventure where, as a "Restorer," you dive into a dementia patient's memories, gathering letters and objects in the seaside town of Pinwheel and solving optional puzzles to rebuild the past — carrying just one item at a time. By the UK's White Paper Games.
puzzleadventurefirst-personThe Forgotten City
A first-person mystery-adventure set in an underground Roman city bound by a golden rule — if one person sins, everyone dies — where you relive a single day through a time loop, unravelling the city's doom through conversation and moral choice. By Modern Storyteller.
mysteryadventureinvestigationRiven
Cyan Worlds' own ground-up 3D remake of the 1997 classic — a first-person puzzle adventure with no hints and no highlighting, where you walk a collapsing island and read its water, machines and D'ni number system to unlock its secrets.
puzzleadventureArranger
A grid puzzle-adventure where taking one step moves everything sharing your row or column, and the board loops at its edges. No sword or keys — you shove the things on the floor to open the way. The debut from Furniture & Mattress, folding movement, combat, and exploration into a single verb.
puzzlegrid-basednarrative-puzzleThe Sexy Brutale
At a masked ball, the guests are murdered one by one by the mansion's staff across a twelve-hour loop that resets each midnight. As a bystander in a bloodstained mask you eavesdrop from the shadows and wind the clock back and forth to read the choreography of each killing, then intervene before the victim dies. An isometric mystery puzzle by Cavalier Game Studios and Tequila Works.
puzzlemysteryadventureThe Gardens Between
A time-manipulation puzzle in which two arrow keys and one action button rewind and advance time as Arina and Frendt climb islands of memory. You move time itself rather than the characters, unspooling wordless scenes of childhood. From The Voxel Agents.
puzzleadventuretime-manipulationParadise Killer
A first-person open-world detective adventure set on Paradise, an artificial island of alien-god worshippers where the ruling Council is murdered. Investigator Lady Love Dies gathers evidence, decides for herself who is guilty, and proves the case at trial — a whodunit with no single 'correct' answer, wrapped in a vaporwave world.
mysterydetectiveadventureCall of the Sea
A first-person adventure puzzler set in the 1930s South Pacific, where Norah lands on an unknown island chasing her husband's lost expedition, reading journals and inscriptions and turning devices to unlock its secrets — Out of the Blue's Lovecraftian entry in the Myst lineage.
puzzleadventurefirst-personCarto
A hand-drawn exploration puzzle where you rearrange the map pieces you find — match a forest or sea edge and the terrain joins up, revealing paths and people. Sunhead Games builds a warm, unhurried adventure on a single, clever verb.
puzzleadventureQ.U.B.E. 2
A first-person puzzler where manipulation gloves grow colored cubes on white walls — red steps, blue springs, green movable blocks — recombined to cross a sand-buried alien structure. The sequel to Q.U.B.E., made by Toxic Games.
puzzlefirst-personadventureObduction
Touch an artifact that falls from the night sky by a lake and you are flung to an alien landscape stitched from fragments of Earth across times and places. Walk, observe, and solve the machinery linking world to world to find your way home—a first-person adventure from Cyan, the studio behind Myst, that makes observation its only verb.
puzzleadventurefirst-person
