When I checked out Bear With Me in 2017, I was immediately in love.

As a casual fan of point and click adventure titles, the hook that pulled me in was its beautifully designed noir setting, with the game’s even more stunning spirit encased in a child’s imagination. This meant when a prequel episode was to be released alongside the games port to consoles, I was so excited for more Ted E. Bear.

If you haven’t heard of it before, Bear With Me tells the story of Amber and her partner Ted E. Bear as they try to uncover where Ambers brother Flint has gone. The kicker is that the whole thing is done in a black and white, occasionally red, noir style. Ted E. Bear is a drunk, tired old PI character and Amber is the optimistic protagonist character, fulfilling all the classic tropes. Framed as a child playing with her soft toys, the whole game shows an ability to take a classic genre, not innovate on its gameplay, yet make a totally new experience that is a delight to play.

The prequel Bear With Me: The Lost Robots tells the story right before the events of Bear With Me, before Flint went missing with him and Ted E. Bear investigating, as the title suggests, the missing robots. This is all while dealing with the fact that Ted E. Bear is dealing with having been shot through the head. I won’t touch on the story any more as that’s the main reason to play, but it’s a super silly premise which is played out seriously in the world of the game. This balance of total seriousness within the silly premise is exactly what made the first game so damn engaging and is as present here continuing to be so damn good.

As with the main series, Bear With Me: The Lost Robots is absolutely gorgeous to look at. Its simplified cell shaded characters have the perfect balance of detail and simplicity to look gorgeous in black and white. Others in the world are designed so delicately to look like the real versions of these inanimate objects in a way my imagination could never have pulled off.

The biggest flaw is with the game’s point and click nature which is a combination of the flaws of the genre with the fantastic look of the game. Most of your gameplay involves clicking objects in the world in order to tell apart the interactive objects from the scenery. Because the game is beautifully designed it can be hard to tell the difference between the background and something to tap, so you wind up tapping mindlessly until something happens. This is a minor annoyance that is easily overcome thanks to the game’s story and design keeping you engaged enough to put up with it, but a flaw, nonetheless.

If you haven’t checked out the series yet then I would start with the three-part adventure in the base game Bear With Me, not in a small part because Amber is a much better character that Flint. But if you have played it however, and loved it the way I have, then The Lost Robots is the perfect companion piece to the game which I can’t recommend enough.

The post Bear With Me: The Lost Robots (Switch) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

I have a love hate relationship with point and click adventure games.

I love the genre’s gameplay and the stories that can be crafted and told in creative ways. On the other hand, I hate obtuse and obscure puzzles that feel like you fluke your way to a solution rather than using your skills and knowledge to beat. My Brother Rabbit has handfuls of both to tell a tough story.

A family is having a rough time thanks to a child’s severe illness, but with her and her brother’s combined imagination, a beautiful new world is opened for you to traverse, as a rabbit. This creates a story that jumps between the game world and a serious overworld story, which isn’t uncommon in games these days, but can still tug on those heart strings.

The outside world shows the family trying to help their daughter, but the imaginary world is a colourful world where a rabbit is trying to save a plant. These two symbolise the brother wanting to save his sister, and is a beautiful wee story, though the problem with this genre and telling stories like this is if you get frustrated at a puzzle, it can kill the momentum of the narrative. It doesn’t detract from the game as a complete work but does stop the story nailing those emotional hits as well as it deserves.

In general, the puzzles weren’t too hard, but some get obtuse. It’s not that I want to be handheld, but once a game becomes about clicking everything to find out how the game is going to present me an object, or to see if something is hidden, it feels more like scratching an Instant Kiwi lottery card where you just scratch everything and hope something is behind it.

This isn’t helped with playing a point and click adventure game on a console in the first place, because you must move a cursor around the screen which always feels clunky. On top of that there were multiple times I would click things, and nothing would happen so I would move on, to only find out later when I was getting over the puzzle that I had clicked the right thing in the first place but must have been off it’s target box by a fraction.

It’s tough, because my frustrations lie with the flaws of the genre, or at least my perception of these flaws, but I didn’t want to be annoyed by these in a game that is so damn good in every other way, the most notable of this is the stunning presentation.

I always say that if you are going to make a game frustrating, you can win me over by at least making it good to look at, and My Brother Rabbit delivered exactly that. The beautiful imaginary world uses bright colours and haunting design choices like a creepy eye on a door that makes staring at the same screen for 15 minutes only a little bit annoying. I can’t quite describe it in a way that does any kind of justice, so look at the screenshots to be amazed.

My Brother Rabbit is a beautifully told story, presented in a stunning way. If you like the genre and don’t mind the frustrations then it is well worth checking out, and if you get frustrated the same way I do with the genre, it’s worth having a closer look because there is a lot to be enjoyed here for any gamer.

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Point and click adventures games seem to be a genre that comes and goes in popularity. There will be a drought, then a resurgence, before the next drought seems to kick in. It has been a while since I last played a really good one, so when I saw Nairi: Tower of Shirin get released, I had to check it out.

Nairi: Tower of Shirin kicks in with Nairi reading a history book as she is nodding off. Suddenly a racoon, her tutor, barges in telling her to escape. She winds up trying to be smuggled out of town in a crate when she is captured by bandits, and her interesting story kicks off.

The most interesting thing about Nairi’s story is the world she discovers below the one she knew. She was sheltered in a well-off family, so wasn’t quite exposed to the way the world is for many others, and as she has to get out of her predicament, she learns a lot about the magical world, and the lives of people in different socio-economic demographics.

With a visual novel, the text itself is so very important. Especially because the game doesn’t have voice acting, which would have helped a lot, but the text itself was easily good enough. I really enjoyed the story that tackles serious subject matter, but in a light hearted and casual way. The game does have some average music and sound effects, so it is a totally fine game to play without your ear phones on, but with a story like this you do need to pay attention.

Something that isn’t new, but I haven’t seen too much in point and click adventure games recently is that you don’t see Nairi when exploring. She appears when there is dialogue because character models pop up to show dialogue occurring, but when pointing and licking it is from a first-person perspective. I prefer making my characters walk uncomfortably around a static screen in this kind of game, but to be fair it has minimal impact on gameplay not doing so.

The biggest winner the game has, and what drew me to it in the first place is the aesthetic. The characters are an array of species of animals and humans, and they look absolutely gorgeous. Beautifully designed and animated with a Ghibli style, and just grainy enough to look stunning, if you are going to spend a few hours staring at a fairly static game, you want it to look this good.

The game can use the Joy-Cons, which is the perfect fit for a point and click adventure game, because it lets you point and click. The pointing wasn’t always perfect with the Joy-Cons which created some unnecessary frustrations, which occasionally made me prefer to return to handheld mode, but in handheld mode some details got a bit small in certain puzzles which was annoying.

Nairi: Tower of Shirin isn’t a perfect game, but it is a short and very enjoyable experience. An interesting story, with interesting gameplay that tests the genre and how it can work with the Switch’s hardware is well worthwhile, and boy is it pretty.

The post Nairi: Tower of Shirin (Switch) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Go forth and colonise.

The legendary game developer, Sid Meiers first unleashed the living and breathing map dominating Civilization title on early PC’s back in 1991.

Pure wizardry for its time and over the almost 30 years the game has expanded a thousand fold and now can be found on portable play with the Switch.

2K Games released Civilization VI, once again proving that epic gaming goodness can be derived from a smaller system and cartridge.

If, somehow, you have never played a Civ’s title before, it’s relatively simple but highly complex at the same time.

A point in click, or more appropriately a point and place, as you build up your civilization across an endless expanding map.

Civilization VI is also a strategic game. Much like city builders, past and present, you will need to work your strategy to the best advantage of the resources available and the types of civilians that you have. And these ‘humans’ will evolve and embrace newer resources and technology as you go forward.

Civ’s (as it is known) on Switch sees you, like a God, building up your village in to a town, then in to a city and beyond to a thriving metropolis. You will deal with the usual human antics, politics, treachery and more.

Civilization VI sees you start out with the bare basics in the year 4000 AD.

If you are new to Civ’s most definitely you will need to play through the tutorial as if you are unsure what you are doing you could waste what few resources you have on this new found land.

Doing it right and seeing your civilians prosper is so satisfying and amusing to sit back and watch as they live out their lives under your watchful gaze.

You are always in control and you can reward or discipline your population with new amenities, or restrictions. And just like real people, your population can be very unpredictable.

On Switch you use your joycon to move the mouse around the map. The resource and items menu is located at the bottom of the screen. Fairly simple stuff.

Civilization VI on Switch also comes with all four DLC packs; Vikings, Poland, Australia and Persia – with a New Zealand Maori DLC set to release soon.

Civ’s can be a quick play or an extended, and being that it is now on portable you can take your entire civilization with you wherever you go and check up on them, maintain and do quests as you like, as they live their lives in real time.

Civilization VI is a game that never ends and fully addictive.

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Indie developer HomeBearStudio is excited to reveal that point and click adventure Nairi: Tower of Shirin is set for release on November 29th, 2018, and will be simultaneously launching on Nintendo Switch and Steam.

“It’s been an exciting and creative time for the team developing a game with not only with a unique setting, and strong and endearing cast, but one inspired by many facets, including Japanese anime but also Disney Pixar.

A synergy with so many ideas, strong storyline and tantalising puzzles, plus appealing to a wide audience with compelling gameplay has been our goal. We believe that we have achieved this through our love of the adventure genre. We wanted to offer something a little bit special – NAIRI: Tower of Shirin – is the result.” Joshua van Kuilenburg, founder of HomeBearStudio reflected. “NAIRI: Tower of Shirin is a point and click adventure puzzle game that offers up stunning graphics, engaging cast, superb audio, powerful narrative and puzzles that are a seamless part of the appealing storyline.”

The player follows Nairi, a young girl from the rich district of Shirin. A sudden incident forces her to abandon her rich, sheltered life, and she eventually ends up in the seedy lower district of the city ruled by gangs. Nairi meets a former gang member called Rex, who joins her throughout their adventure as they uncover a dark mystery involving the mysterious Tower of the oasis city of Shirin.

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Assemble Entertainment today released the first gameplay trailer (above) for the point & click adventure game Leisure Suit Larry – Wet Dreams Don’t Dry.

As a direct sequel to the first Leisure Suit Larry game, Wet Dreams Don’t Dry tells the tragic story of Larry, who is thrown straight from 1987 into the present day. How will Larry react to the modern world with smartphones, social networks, and dating apps? What is the mega-corporation Prune planning? And what do two wrestling alpacas have to do with it? The gameplay trailer gives only limited answers to these questions.

In addition, the world’s first live presentation of Leisure Suit Larry – Wet Dreams Don’t Dry will take place today, 4 PM UTC, on Assemble Entertainment’s Twitch channel – for about an hour, the unbelievably capable people behind the point & click adventure will play the game and answer questions from the community.

Leisure Suit Larry – Wet Dreams Don’t Dry is to be released on November 7, 2018.

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The award-winning point-and-touch adventure Harvey’s New Eyes from Daedlic Entertainment will bring the crazy world of Edna and Harvey to mobile devices. Harvey’s New Eyes is the sequel to Edna & Harvey: The Breakout, and the PC version has already thrilled fans and the press. The full adaptation to iOS devices impresses with its quirky sense of humor and intuitive gameplay. Together with the protagonist Lilli, the players solve tasks in her convent school and must show that they aren’t afraid of unusual solutions. 

Players experience the inventive action of the colorful adventure – from the award-winning makers of The Whispered World and Deponia – from the perspective of the protagonist Lilli. She calmly faces the unfair and boring tasks set by the abbess, which she transforms into crazy adventures with fantasy and imagination. Friendly and hostile students, grumpy convent inhabitants and mysterious objects can either help Lilli or present her with new, unique tasks. The game confronts the strange events in the school with quirky humor and outlandish action.

Things get even more eccentric when Lilli’s cheerful censor gnomes get involved. If something weird or disturbing happens again behind the convent walls, the potato-shaped creatures just paint everything pink.

The PC version of the award-winning sequel to Edna & Harvey: The Breakout was nominated for Best Game for the 2012 German Computer Game Award and earned the title of Best Young Adult Game. Harvey’s New Eyes was also named Best Adventure and Best Young Adult Game at the 2011 German Developer Award.

The exciting comic adventure will be available exclusively for iPhone and iPad starting August 15, 2018.

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