AFAIK it should be - but not since 2017. If I remember correctly we started these threads later.
/edit: The first one seems to be from 2018:
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I recently started playing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle again, even though I’d already finished the main story. I’d left so many things behind, so many side puzzles to solve, which I’m doing today.
I find many similarities between this game and Zak McKracken:
- you have to visit real locations (or locations that existed in the past)
- there are puzzles to solve
- there’s just enough action, not too much
- some puzzles require items scattered around the world to be solved
All of this fascinates me. - There’s great humor
It’s no coincidence that it’s a Lucasfilm Games game!
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Me too
I’m exclusively playing adventure games nowadays - apart from a couple of puzzle platformers if my daughters ask.
I recently played Thank Goodness You’re Here and I have mixed feelings about this one. It’s very silly, but… there’s basically no gameplay. All you do is run around aimlessly punching stuff. I found only two instances that I could consider “a puzzle”. Charming and funny at times, very British, but absolutely not what I expected.
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Is that the one where you die within a few seconds after the intro, unless you know that you have to run? In that case, no, didn’t play very far (more than a few seconds, though). Must have been distracted by something else, and then never felt the urge to return. Or it didn’t work well under Wine at that time.
Agree on the pixel art, however. Made it impossible for me not to buy, plus the description also sounded like it would be a fairly chill experience.
Talking of getting distracted, I shelved Dungeons of Hinterberg for now to play, believe it or not, Forza Horizon 6. I really used to love racing games back in the days, and I tried a few indie offerings over the years, with none of them really keeping me interested for long.
But FH6, with its Japanese-inspired world, the whole exploration and collecting stuff aspect, and yeah, even a bit of racing, seemed worth trying out. And I really like how chill or challenging it can be, adapting well to whatever mood I might have.
It’s perhaps not quite as zen as driving around in circles for 3 hours straight (FH6 has race tracks too, though races only last for 3 laps), but there’ll be remakes of the old Geoff Crammond games to hopefully remedy that!
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Down to the lighter you can only get in Cairo.
I’m currently replaying too, but having already scored 100% before on my first playthrough I wanted to focus on just the main story now, without too much side tracking (only if it takes me to some nice places, but not getting pictures of all cats on the roofs for example). I had just reached Cairo when the DLC became available to play for free (on Luna), so I travelled back without a lighter… and now I have to go through all these dark areas trying to not lose or extinguish my torch. It definitely changes the atmosphere having to wander in near dark. And makes finding some TNT less fun.
I might be able to quick-travel to get that lighter, but somehow that would be unrealistic as I am in the the middle of sneaking around and trying to find my way back to a safe place; so I think I’ll just stick with it.
The only thing missing is the “What Is” verb
That, and a manual save option.
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As opposed to not having a lighter? 
Anyway, the lighter in Indiana Jones is the one with infinite fuel 
Isn’t that true for the one in Zak McKracken? 
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No, the one in Zak gets too hot, so you can’t use it for too long on end. (Thus saving on fuel. Plus you refill it with the can of gas found on Mars)
Indy doesn’t smoke, so he has to travel all the way to Cairo and engage in lots of sidequests to raise enough local currency to purchase the ONLY lighter in the entire world.
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Yes, that’s the one. That first scene is a ‘flash-forward’, it then sets you three days earlier and off you go. Not sure how far in I am but the story is pretty good so far.
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I’m playing Murders on the Yangtze River. It’s pretty decent so far (first two cases, insofar as they’re separate).
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Never heard of it, but the descriptions are promising. How different is the gameplay compared to Ace Attorney?
Conceptually it’s similar. There are clues and contradictions to spot, and deductions to make. But you do so walking horizontally (and only horizontally). That’s the primary difference. Also there doesn’t seem to be a press mechanic, but it’s possible that’ll still come.
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That’s been sitting on my wishlist for a long while now. So I’ll be curious for your final verdict.
Another such game I bought (but have not yet played much) is LumineNight. One reason for setting it aside is that it felt overly serious and grim. Ace Attorney OTHO was light-hearted and funny. Gameplay-wise, what I’ve seen of LumineNight doesn’t seem to deviate too much from the formula, though.
And speaking of: did anyone play Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective? Found only one mention on the forum.
There are more mentions than that? Unless you mean only one in what are we playing.
I actually never finished it. I think I went on vacation or was otherwise not playing the game and never returned, sometime not too long after the game properly opened up.
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An additional answer just showed up. I played a debate where you’re being pushed off the screen if you don’t answer in time. It’s a bit like the conversations in Oxenfree, except adversarial. It was not uninteresting, but slightly harder because of the translation. In the rest of the game it doesn’t matter if you have to reread a sentence because of an odd turn of phrase.
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Murders on the Yangtze River also had some “coop deductions,” riffing on The Great Ace Attorney. The end was a touch preachy (going as far as putting words from a historical speech in the mouth of the main protagonist), but it was definitely a good game with beautiful backgrounds.
On a similar note, yesterday I finished [the new Shinrai game](SHINRAI Saku - Blooming Beyond Despair by GosatsuVNs), over the course of two partial days. This one was 100% visual novel, just a single choice, no deductions. But it was decent as an epilogue to the first game. In any event here’s also a reminder that GENBA no Kizuna is a good game.
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Started playing Nighthawks, another one of the games I backed on Kickstarter seemingly ages ago. It’s basically a text-based game with RPG elements, much in the style of one of those Choose your own Adventure books, with perhaps a bit of a Visual Novel thrown into the mix.
It’s also one of the first games in ages where, when I looked at the clock, it was 1:30 am already! Luckily that was on Saturday (well, technically Sunday, by then). So yeah, I guess it’s quite good so far.
Main story revolves around Vampires in a Mafia / Mobster milieu. Not that I’m terribly drawn towards either of those (never watched The Godfather, for one), but maybe that also means it feels fresher than the umpteenth high-fantasy RPG. I still got to draw a map of the sewers on graph paper, though. Guess sewers are universal.
Recommended if story-driven games in a somewhat underrepresented setting are your thing.
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