Recent reviews by Rami Airola

Surprisingly funny stuff.

There's no challenge whatsoever. You just listen to the people answer to your questions. The answers are relatively short so it doesn't become tedious, and a lot of the answers are honestly surprising and funny.

Mallory, "the unlucky woman", was the funniest one. The couple Becca and Todd is a close second.

As I said, there's no challenge, so while the characters answering to questions give you new questions and you are free to choose the order you ask the questions, nothing really has an effect on anything. The only thing that you can miss is that if you ask the question that makes the final reveal / plot twist happen, then the interview is over and you don't get to ask the questions you hadn't already asked. Trying to get them give all the answers to all questions, and making the absolute final choice (four options), is something that might get you go through the game again. After you have gone through the whole thing once you can skip the videos so you can see all dialogues and endings rather quickly.

So, there's not much of a game here, but the actors are all good and charming, and the writing is surprisingly funny. It's a comedy FMV visual novel kind of a game and pretty good at that.

This is like a point and click version of combatless La-Mulana.
Or a 2D version of Myst.

You freely move around a ghost in an open but gated small world examining objects and surroundings, solving riddles and puzzles, and gaining extra powers and skills to open up paths to previously closed places.

You need to understand what you have read, and you need to pay attention to details. The puzzles can be extremely cryptic, but you are free to take your time to think about them. The game doesn't hold your hand at all, you need to think things through on your own (or consult a walkthrough online).

Any fan of La-Mulana or Myst will most certainly love this game, but even for veterans this might be too cryptic to solve without looking up solutions online.

If you've liked the previous games from this developer, you will enjoy this game too - even if the fantasy elements are not something you like.

For those who think they don't want to play some elf-fantasy nonsense I want to say this has a lot of "regular world" gameplay too. And the fantasy parts are surprisingly fun and engaging to play.

I've loved every single game this developer has released on Steam and this is right on par with the quality of the others. 5/5 stuff.

Yeah, this is still great!
New music is good and the new episode is quite challenging and really fun to play. I managed to find the secret level too, but couldn't beat it because challenge goes through the roof on that one!

Both Crystal Caves HD and Secret Agent HD are great examples on how to make a good remake. With CC HD I had lots of fun with the user made levels and while I haven't tried them on this one yet, I'm expecting it to be just as fun.

Fantastic game!

First of all, it's a non-scrolling game which is my favorite style to play these kinds of open ended adventure platformers. There are some other games with that playstyle on Steam, like Alwa's Awakening, Mini Ghost, Bone Appetit and La-Mulana 1 & 2. While nothing can beat La-Mulanas, I think this might be my favorite of the others.

I would've loved this to have more of the La-Mulana type cryptic riddles and puzzles, but you can't have everything. The sense of mystery in this game is great anyway.

Haven't yet completed it but I just beat the third main boss of the game (I've beaten several other bosses too) and I think I'm now able to get to the final area. I have still a lot to uncover in the map and there's a whole full area I haven't yet tried at all (just opened the way to that area).

I love how finding save points and especially the elevators feel REALLY good. While the game doesn't punish that much after dying, as everything you've done is done in your next game after death, there is still a somewhat stressful sense of danger as you don't get to restore health much at all during a run, so you really want to avoid getting hit and it feels bad every time you get hit by something. Every single new shortcut you open feels great, and every miniboss you get out of the way feels great.

I've been able to get my characters pretty strong so they deal quite a lot of damage and can take quite a lot of hits, but I still ended up getting all sweaty and stressed up when I was trying to find the third main boss.

You might end up wandering aimlessly at some points but just remember to check out any fake walls and use your new powers and skills and you'll be alright.

This is a gem!

Quite possibly the best JRPG ever made. It's still as good as it was back in the 90's.

This has been really fun so far. There is zero hand holding even to the point of not being sure what different items do until you perhaps find some way to use them. The game doesn't really point you to any direction pretty much ever, so there's a lot of wandering around wondering what to do next and where to go, but there are some more or less cryptic hints on the walls that you can read.

At first the controls took a bit of time to get used to. This can be controlled solely with mouse or with keyboard and mouse. No controller support whatsoever, but you kinda need the mouse cursor to play the game a lot of the game is about hovering the cursor over the enemies to see their stats and sometimes the enemies are too far from the player character.

The combat is all about looking at the stats of the player and the enemies and deciding to make your move with that knowledge. The enemies don't move and only stand in one place, often blocking doors, entrances and items, and they don't attack before you attack them. You go next to them and click on them, and based on their stats and your stats they lose a certain amount of HP and you lose too. You can see how much HP the enemies have and how much HP one hit from you takes off them and how much HP gets taken from you with that click as well. If the power of your click exceeds the amount of HP the enemy has, it dies and doesn't take any HP from you during the final blow (that is very important to know when calculating how many times you can hit them).

If you go ahead and fight the enemies without thinking it any further, you will die very quickly. It's very important to think before you hit an enemy, because you have to be aware of how many health potions you have and when you should use them, and which enemies you should choose to fight and when.

You will gain experience points for defeating enemies and every time you level up you will get your HP meter filled up, so that's something you should be watching too and use that to your advantage. When you are strong enough, some enemies will become one-blow kills that don't take away your HP at all and instead basically will give you free HP.

The enemies don't seem to spawn back so the ones you have killed will stay dead.

Apparently there are intentional possibilities for sequence breaking too so there are multiple ways to go further.

Right now I'm contemplating on whether or not to buy health potion with the little money I still have and if I should use that to be able to get rid some tougher enemy blocking a path somewhere, or if with more exploration I could find another way to proceed. Maybe I will end up needing that money further in the game...

It's a really good and mysterious game and especially if you like "open world" top down retro adventures with zero hand holding and Zelda 1 style world map progression (no screen scrolling) I recommend this to you 100%.

Excellent "metroidvania" that isn't really that non-linear but has somehow made it feel as if it was quite non-linear. Save points, challenges, secrets and items have been spread around in a manner that makes you constantly think you want to check out one more room, just one more, one more after this, ok one more.

Really fun game! Recommended to anyone who likes open action adventure platformers.

Quite short visual novel with a lot of charm. Looks great and sounds even greater as the music is amazingly good real deal "pc engine / turbographx-16" style of stuff!

The bonus Game Boy style poker mini game that you can access at any point in the game would alone make me recommend this game, so with the boobs and the awesome music with surprisingly charming light-hearted and fun attitude and presentation this gets a definite YES from me. I've gone through my share of naughty visual novels where you'd rather just click click click click through the whole thing as fast as you can and still get bored, but this one stands out from all the rest.

Great game!

It plays like Fairune (another fantastic game, check it out).

Combat in this and Fairune is like in Ys I&II where you just walk over the enemies and your level decides if you get hurt, how much do you get hurt and whether the enemy dies or not. So some places have enemies impossible to kill but who hurt you a lot, some places have enemies that you can kill but who hurt you for 1 or 2 HP and some places have enemies that you kill with them giving you no damage.

The combat is not the main attraction of the game. It's mostly about solving puzzles and figuring out secret paths. There are vague hints to things but the game doesn't hold your hand almost at all, ever, and that's what's so great about it. You will feel you are stuck, but when you end up finding a new hidden path or solving a puzzle it feels really good.

Now, at this current moment I finally feel like I'm actually really stuck so it could be that's the end for my game :D
Tried to get some help from the forum but let's see if the dev or someone else helps.
But even in this situation, while wandering around aimlessly, just going through as many screens as possible trying to see what I have missed, I was able to find a couple of new things I had missed, but neither of them helped with what I was trying to achieve. Still it did make me feel that maybe there is a way.

It's relatively fast to go around the world, and you will even end up unlocking some teleporters that help you going through the world faster.

The game does look and sound a bit cheap and unpolished and amateurish especially compared to the likes of Fairune, but make no mistake, there's a lot of love poured in to this game. It's fantastic gameplaywise and the puzzles end up getting quite tough the further you go and you have to give attention to what you see in the world or you will end up getting stuck in no time.

The music sounds like MIDI music, and it perhaps is. While the initial gameplay music gets a bit too repetitive after a while, there are some very good songs playing during the game. Each new area has its own music and a few of them are REALLY good. And again, there's a bit of "unpolished amateurness" in the music but many of them are actually very good compositions and you'll probably end up humming some of them when you are not playing the game.

Deaths are pretty rare in this game. Just be patient, grind a bit, use save/heal points efficiently with grinding and you have no problem. In later game there will be some enemies that are impossible to kill and who kill you immediately upon touch, but you are warned about it. Those are the places you end up seeing the Game Over screen, but those screens are really fun to try to get through (and the game over tune is great!). As said, the main challenge in the game is to figure out puzzles and secret paths completely on your own.

I'm playing this with and Xbox360 controller and it works well with it. Sometimes you have to tinker around a bit in the menu screen before the controller is fully working, but it works well after that. And the controller only uses the directional and one action button while menu/map/inventory/etc buttons are usable only on the keyboard, so that design seems odd. If you play with the keyboard only then there obviously aren't any problems with that.

tl;dr
The game looks and sounds a bit unpolished and amateurish but don't let it fool you, it's a FANTASTIC game and if you love games that don't hold your hand you will love this.