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47 reviews · 4 essays
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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: Thimbleweed Park — music that decided never to give a hint
The music Steve Kirk wrote for Thimbleweed Park does not help you solve anything. Step on a thing, push a thing, and it never tells you where the answer is. On a palette of theremin, lounge and prog, all he plays is the air of a town that functions. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart why this music refuses to hint, and what you can steal from the 'pool' system he built for each location.
Soundtrack: Genesis Noir — a universe built from improvisation, sounding when you touch it
In the black-and-white adventure Genesis Noir, a watch salesman named No Man tries to save his lover from the Big Bang — a gunshot fired by a jealous god. There is no dialogue; the story runs almost entirely on sound. Skillbard's Tom Carrell and Vincent Oliver spent four years scoring the cosmos by 'bolting live jazz improvisations together like puzzle pieces.' Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart why a touch-and-try puzzle and an improvised score fit each other so well.
Submachine (2005) — A Door into the Subnet, and the Lineage of Flash Escape Puzzles
On 15 September 2005 the Polish cartoonist Mateusz Skutnik posted a single Flash game on his own website. It was simply called Submachine. Later renamed Submachine 1: The Basement, it became the seed of a ten-part escape-puzzle lineage. I read this hand-drawn browser work, one that never sat on Steam at the time, as a chapter in the history of escape puzzles.
Related reviews
Primordia
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-clickadventureHypnospace Outlaw
An observation adventure set in 1999. You patrol Hypnospace — a virtual internet people browse in their sleep — as a volunteer Enforcer, wandering personal homepages and digging out rule violations and hidden pages with nothing but a weak search box and thin clues. Designed by Jay Tholen at Tendershoot.
observationnarrative-puzzlesimulationThere Is No Game: Wrong Dimension
A meta point-and-click in which a narrator insists there is no game while you drag and click the furniture of the game itself — title screen, menus, cursor. Each chapter jumps into a parody of a different genre. Made by Draw Me A Pixel.
puzzlemeta-puzzlenarrative-puzzlePlease, Don't Touch Anything
You are covering a colleague's bathroom break in front of an unmarked console with a single red button, and you have been told not to touch anything. A pixel-art point-and-click puzzle by Four Quarters about reading the clues hidden in the posters and the wiring to dig out its 25 endings.
puzzlepoint-and-clickobservationHappy 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-clickadventureZero 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-puzzleMachinika: Museum
A first-person puzzle box in which you scan alien devices of unknown origin delivered to a museum, peer inside them and reprint their missing parts until they run again. A short piece from Littlefield Studio that opens seven machines one at a time, with the touch of science-fiction archaeology.
puzzleescape-roomobservationRöki
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-clickadventureTHE 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-clickUnderground Blossom
A point-and-click escape puzzle that rides down seven metro stations through the life of a woman named Laura. You buy a ticket, search each room, and reassemble the pieces of her memory. A 2023 release from Rusty Lake, the studio behind the Cube Escape series.
puzzlepoint-and-clickescape-roomThe 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-clickadventureCHUCHEL
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-clickcomedyInscryption
A deckbuilding card game played across a candlelit table from Leshy, a narrator holed up in a cabin: you draw woodland-creature cards and sacrifice your own pieces to put them into play. Stand up from the table and the cabin itself becomes an escape-room puzzle. By Daniel Mullins, who made Pony Island.
puzzlemeta-puzzleescape-roomAI: 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-clickPony Island
A meta-puzzle in which you are trapped in a deliberately shoddy arcade cabinet built by the devil, alternating between a pony side-scroller and puzzles that reorder instruction blocks inside the machine itself. Daniel Mullins's first commercial release turns the window and the UI into the mechanism.
puzzlemeta-puzzlenarrative-puzzleSyberia 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-clickStrange Antiquities
A 2D identification-and-deduction puzzler in which you mind an occult antiques shop in the lakeside town of Undermere, probing unlabelled objects by colour, touch, scent and inner perception, cross-referencing illustrated tomes, and handing each customer the item their trouble calls for — where what you hand over decides the town's fate.
puzzlemysteryGrim 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-clickThe House of Da Vinci
A first-person escape puzzler set in Florence, 1506: in the workshop of a vanished Leonardo you use a lens that sees inside objects and a device that replays the past, opening one wood-and-brass contraption after another. Built around nesting — every solved mechanism opens into a further one — by Slovakia's Blue Brain Games, 2017.
escape-roompuzzleobservationSamorost 3
A point-and-click adventure across nine tiny worlds with no dialogue and no text, where a hooded figure carries a found brass flute and opens the way by playing notes at rocks, creatures and machines. From Amanita Design, the studio behind Machinarium.
puzzlepoint-and-clickexplorationBroken 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-clickThe Past Within
A point-and-click adventure playable only by two people at once: one stands in the Past, the other in the Future, and every puzzle is solved by describing aloud what only your own screen shows. The past is drawn in 2D, the future in 3D. Rusty Lake's first co-op-only game.
puzzleco-opescape-roomThe Room 4: Old Sins
A first-person contraption puzzler set inside an old dollhouse found in an attic: open the mechanism in one room, then carry what you find to the room that is missing a piece. The fourth entry in Fireproof Games' The Room series, rebuilt for PC.
puzzleobservationmysteryThimbleweed 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-clickadventureLittle Inferno
A 2D point-and-click that plays out entirely in front of a fireplace: order toys from a catalogue, burn them, watch how each one goes, and pair two or three of them by wordplay to find 99 "combos." Released in 2012 by Tomorrow Corporation, the studio behind World of Goo.
puzzlepoint-and-clicknarrative-puzzleMoncage
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-clickGenesis 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-clickThe Room Two
A first-person escape puzzler in which you peer at, rotate, and pry open strange clockwork boxes, using a special lens to reveal hidden marks. The second Room game widens from a single box to several interlocking contraptions, from the UK studio Fireproof Games.
puzzlemysteryobservationRusty Lake Paradise
As Jakob, eldest son of the Eilander family, you return to the island of Paradise after your mother's death to lift the ten plagues through her hidden memories and strange family rituals: a hand-drawn point-and-click of macabre, surreal puzzles from Rusty Lake, makers of the Cube Escape series.
puzzlepoint-and-clickmysteryTangle 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.
puzzleadventuremysteryChinatown Detective Agency
A cybernoir point-and-click set in near-future Singapore, where you run a detective agency and crack international cases by researching real facts in a browser outside the game. General Interactive Co.'s experiment hands the last step of every clue to the live web.
deductionobservationmysteryThe Room Three
A first-person escape puzzler set in a mansion on a remote island, where you peer through a lens at the boxes and mechanisms left by the Craftsman, uncovering hidden layers one at a time. The third Room game expands the series from a single box to a whole estate, built on one tactile verb and an eyepiece that multiplies what you can observe.
escape-roommysteryobservationHidden Folks
A 2D hidden-object puzzle set in hand-drawn, monochrome miniature landscapes you unfurl, cut through, and poke to uncover the folks tucked inside. Every sound is made by human mouths, across 32 areas with 300+ things to find.
hidden-objectobservationpoint-and-clickThe Rise of the Golden Idol
A 2D deduction adventure where you click through frozen crime scenes and drop harvested words into blanks to reconstruct who did what, why, and in what order. A standalone sequel to The Case of the Golden Idol, set across twenty linked cases in the 1970s.
deductionobservationnarrative-puzzleTwelve Minutes
A real-time, top-down thriller in a single apartment: you are killed, snap back to the moment you opened the door, and loop the same twelve minutes, using only what you have learned to break the cycle. Luis Antonio builds dread from few verbs and one room.
mysterynarrativetime-loopStrange Horticulture
A 2D occult deduction puzzle in which you identify each plant that arrives at your counter by matching it against an almanac and the clues you gather, then use its effects to answer customers and steer the story. Made by the UK’s Bad Viking, it unravels foggy Undermere’s mysteries with a cat and a single book.
puzzlemysteryThe Roottrees are Dead
A first-person deduction puzzle: scour the early, dial-up-era Internet plus books and articles to establish who is truly blood-related to a crashed dynasty, filling in the blanks of their family tree. Evil Trout Inc.'s reworking of a free Global Game Jam browser game.
deductionobservationnarrative-puzzleThe Case of the Golden Idol
A deduction game: examine frozen crime-scene tableaus, gather words from the evidence, and fill in the blanks to reconstruct each murder across an 18th-century mystery.
deductionobservationnarrative-puzzle
