Castle Magus

Wow, I never would have expected to hear discussion of games like Rosewater, Old Skies, and Unavowed on the Castle Super Beast podcast. (I literally just finished Old Skies for the first time last night, then immediately started a second playthrough with the commentary turned on. I'll probably be writing a post about it within the next few days. Haven't bought or played Rosewater yet, but it's definitely on my wishlist. Oh, and I've written two separate posts about Unavowed.)

And some of the other games this "Casey Explosion" mentioned here seem like they could be pretty cool, too. Unfortunately, her youtube page has almost nothing on it yet (I threw it on my Feedly, even so), and it's been probably at least a year or two since the last time I watched anything at all on Twitch, and I don't plan on changing that any time soon. I did follow her, at least for now, as a curator on Steam, because in just the bit I glanced at it, I already either own or have wishlisted roughly half of her recommendations, so whenever I have more time and inclination to do so, I'll be checking out the other half as well. (Note to self, for future reference: consider this as a "note to self, for future reference.")

Coming to PC, Mac, Linux and Switch in Spring 2025!

Jump with Fia into seven time-travel cases spanning two centuries in New York City, from the speakeasies of Prohibition to the vicious gangs of the Gilded Age to the World Trade Center on September 10, 2001. Solve temporal problems, survive paradoxes, and resolve the mistakes of the past or die trying—as many times as it takes.

Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/13...
Wishlist on GOG: https://www.gog.com/en/game/old_skies/

Developed and published by Wadjet Eye Games
Trailer voiceover: Sally Beaumont, Abe Goldfarb
Trailer music by: Pond5.com

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Above is the trailer for the next game from Dave Gilbert to be published by his company Wadjet Eye Games. So far, I have written half a dozen posts about their games over the years (this will be the seventh), and this one looks pretty good, too. More than just "pretty good," honestly.

So... that's at least one thing I have to look forward to at the start of this upcoming hellish quadrennium, I guess.

And... damn, now I want to start yet another playthrough of all the Blackwell games, Unavowed, The Shivah (all of which take place in the same universe [and I wonder if Old Skies will as well]), Strangeland, and Primordia, which I've all finished at least once... or else do playthoughs of the ones I still have yet to complete (or even start, in some cases), like Gemini Rue, Resonance, A Golden Wake (it used to be published by Wadjet Eye at one point and still shows up under the Steam developer page, anyway), Technobabylon, Shardlight, and The Excavation of Hob's Barrow. Or maybe do both of those things.

I just finished Strangeland by Wormwood Studios (well, "just finished" as of the time of starting on this post, anyway, as I'm sure at least an hour or three will have passed by the time I actually post it)... ...for the third time, after it was released only two days ago. The first time was a fairly leisurely, normal playthrough, trying to look at and do everything, which took 3.9 hours (according to Steam), though I definitely missed some stuff the first time through. The second time through was with the commentary and annotations turned on and took 8.9 hours, so says Steam, partly because some of those commentary segments were loooooong (not a bad thing, mind you, because they were all pretty interesting), and partly because I was constantly alt-tabbing out to take notes[1] while playing. The third time through, I just kind of tried to blitz through as fast as I could to get the last three achievements that I'd missed ("Gotta Torch 'Em All," "Dumb Ways To Die," and "Big Talker") which took another three hours. (I'm pretty sure that Chester, voiced by Wadjet Eye's Dave Gilbert according to the credits, was the rat, if you use the spirit torch on it? All I know was that after my first and second playthroughs, I was like "Who the hell was Chester? I'm pretty sure I didn't hear Dave Gilbert's voice... o_O") (EDIT) So, it seems that Chester is an Easter Egg if you dial 1-900-740-JEDI on the payphone, i.e. a reference to Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge... except that it's apparently broken at the moment(EDIT 2)[2](/EDIT 2) and will be fixed in an upcoming patch. (Wow... holy flashbacks to my days in WA as a software tester, Batman... O_O) That said, that's the only bug that I encountered while playing the game, as the game otherwise seems to be rock solid, as far as I can tell. (/EDIT)

So... Strangeland. It's made by the same guys who made Primordia, another excellent point-and-click adventure game (and one which I kind of want to play again now, and, in fact, probably will soon). It's published by the company that made other games that I've raved about in the past. Like those games, this one is also a point and click adventure game. If you like that sort of thing, I think you'll love this, especially if you like the weird and macabre. I love point-and-clicks, so I found this to be great.

You play as a guy who wakes up without his memory, in a straightjacket, in a world that's probably best described as a living nightmare. And you're essentially immortal, so dying is mostly just an inconvenience. In fact, you have to die a few times in order to progress. On the surface, the setting is a carnival, with rides and games and such, but it's pretty obvious that there's more going on here. I won't say anything about the story due to spoilers, but... I'd recommend (as the game itself recommends) that you definitely save the commentary and annotations for a second playthrough, because those pretty explicitly spell out what's going on more or less right from the start.

Strangeland has been compared to several other games, like Sanitarium and Silent Hill, which I would say is pretty accurate, especially Sanitarium. In the commentary, other references are made to the Dark Seed games and Weird Dreams (none of which I have played myself and cannot comment on) and the Legend of Kyrandia series (which I have played and fully agree with the commentary that they are wonderful games). I'd also compare it to Planescape: Torment, both for the specifics of the player character being an amnesiac who can die repeatedly to potentially solve puzzles and advance the story and also for the fact that I think the storytelling in Strangeland is great, just like in Torment. There is mention of Torment at one point in the commentary, but it's more in reference to Primordia than to Strangeland. (Seriously, coming from me, a game being compared to Planescape: Torment is high praise indeed.)

Non-game references, as mentioned in the commentaries, are to Norse mythology, such as Prose Edda, Hávamál, etc. (which is kind of funny, because I temporarily set aside my third playthrough of Heroine's Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok in order to play Strangeland), and "The Hollow Men" by T.S. Eliot, among many others. Also quite a bit of Tarot stuff.

The art is great. In addition to Primordia and some of the more eldritch locations in the Blackwell games, I was also getting some Bad Mojo vibes, for the grunginess seeming to coat everything. And, of course, it's all pretty reminiscent of the dark world from Silent Hill, too.

The music, also, is very atmospheric and fitting for the setting. Rather low-key, for the most part, but ever present. I also liked that each of the characters that you can talk to gets their own theme, which sort of builds upon whatever music was already playing in that area, such as the organ music that fades in for the Scribe as you're talking to him.

The voice acting, as is always the case in every Wadjet Eye game I've ever played so far, was top-notch. I have to admit that it was a bit difficult not to hear Joey Mallone in the Stranger at first, but I stopped thinking about it before too long. Also, it seems like Abe Goldfarb voices almost literally half the cast, if you count each character in the "Deadland" as its own thing, rather than... well... spoilers. And I heard some other voices that I recognized from previous Wadjet Eye games, and I saw some other names in the credits that I recognized from other things, as well, which was nice.

Some specific things now, and maybe kind of spoiler-y after this point.

During the commentary, there was a mention of a "flipped puzzle," i.e. one in which the solution is to do the opposite of what you'd think you should do at first, with reference to Shade by Andrew Plotkin, a game about a guy who is, ostensibly, about to go on a vacation in Death Valley. Shade is pretty great, too, I won't spoil it. However, while we're talking about interactive fiction games here, another comparison I would make in this vein would be to Slouching Towards Bedlam, in which (spoilers) the best ending is gotten by jumping out of the window to kill yourself as one of your first moves in the game, which is not something you'd know until you've already played through the game once. (Well, if by "best ending" one means "saving humanity," that is. If your goal is to doom humanity by spreading the Logos, then maybe don't jump out the window.)

I love the idea of "co-authorship" as applying to video games, i.e. interactivity making an otherwise "unremarkable" story remarkable, due to the player's interaction with it. This was talked about in the commentary and it is something that I've long thought about, from way back in my DigiPen days. If I ever were to get around to making that one game that has been trundling around in my head for the past, oh, decade or two now, it would very likely directly deal with such themes. (But I'll probably get around to that right after I finish the novel I've been "working on" for the past not-quite-but-almost as long now... blugh.)

The Dark Thing in Strangeland is compared in the commentary to Rover from The Prisoner, which I thought was pretty great.

And... one last thing I found pretty neat. In every game I've played that has a telephone and lets you dial numbers, one of the first things I do in such games is to dial 911. I won't say for 100% certain that Strangeland is the first game I've played that actually accounts for that, but if I've played another game in the past that does, it's not coming to mind right now.

[1] - The only other game, at least so far, that I've taken notes while playing was Doki Doki Literature Club. Except in this case, I wrote an actual post using those notes, rather than just text-dumping 8 pages of notes into the Dreamwidth post window.

(EDIT 2)

[2] - Just for context, that tweet I linked to there was in response to some tweets that I had made about the game (including a link back to this very post here), but of course my own tweets don't exist anymore, due to me nuking my original Twitter account after Elon Musk took over.

(/EDIT 2)

(Follow-up to this post can be found here.)

It's a point-and-click adventure game, and probably the best one yet made by Wadjet Eye Games. It's set in the same universe as the Blackwell series (EDIT) and The Shivah (/EDIT), though you don't have to have played those at all to understand the story of Unavowed. At most, there are callbacks to the previous games (the biggest one being that one of the main characters is a "Bestower of Eternity," which is what Rosa and Lauren Blackwell were in the Blackwell games, and his spirit guide is a character directly from those games, too).

The story's great, the characters are great, the music's great, and the gameplay... is what it is for a point-and-click adventure game. If you like that sort of thing, as I do, then you'll like this. If you don't care for point-and-click adventure games... well... *shrug* The story, characters, and music are still great.

The only thing I didn't like is that you're limited to only two other party members, in addition to the main player character, once you get more than the two you start with. On the other hand, that makes new playthroughs in which you see new character interactions a completely viable thing. I went through the whole game with Eli and Logan (and KayKay), but it'll be interesting to go back through using Mandana and Vicki. And then, again, with Eli and Mandana (the two characters you start with), or Eli and Vicki, or Mandana and Logan (and KayKay). You can't do a run with Logan and Vicki, since at least either Eli or Mandana have to be in the party, apparently. For me, at least, always taking Eli and Logan just felt "right," to me, and I was never disappointed that I chose them over the others, but it will definitely be interesting to see how the other characters handle the same situations, given they have different abilities (for example, only the Bestower can talk to ghosts at all, and only the Fire Mage can read burned documents and do other fire-related things). There's definitely going to be at least one more playthrough for me, for the creator commentary.

There are definitely some interesting twists and turns in the story, which I will not spoil here, so... yeah.

In conclusion, I highly recommend Unavowed. (And I recommend playing the Blackwell series beforehand, if you can and haven't already done so, even though it's not a requirement to play Unavowed. It's cool seeing all the references to the previous games. Also, if for no other reason, the Blackwell series is awesome on its own merits.)

Just finished playing the last (most current, anyway) game in the Blackwell series from Wadjet Eye Games.

The gist: these are classic point-and-click adventure games, in which you play as a medium named Rosangela Blackwell (in the 1st, 3rd, and 4th games, at least, since you play as her aunt in the 2nd game) with a spirit guide named Joey Mallone (in all 4 games). Their job is to find lost spirits and put them to rest. To do this, you have to solve the mysteries of how and why they died and such. The games are very cool, in my opinion. I think that if you enjoyed games like Gabriel Knight or Ben Jordan you will like this series as well. (EDIT) And, wow, speaking of Ben Jordan... while playing through the first game with the commentary on, I found out that the guy who did the voice for the security guard in the hospital is, indeed, Grundislav, the guy who made the Ben Jordan games. How about that. (EDIT 2) And, of course, he's Sam Durkin, too. (/EDIT 2) (/EDIT)

I've finished all of the games, but there are commentaries for each of the games as well, meaning that I will be playing through them again, pretty soon I think. If there is only one slight quibble I'd have with them, it's that they were all fairly short games (given that I've already finished all four of them within two days of getting them), but "quality over quantity" as they say.

I'm also interested in checking out some of the other games from Wadjet Eye Games now as well, such as The Shivah and Gemini Rue (both of which I've kind of vaguely heard of before, but hadn't really looked into until now).