Baron Wittard

Solid Myst-like game that does a lot of things well, even if it borrows a lot of stuff from other games. You know the drill: point-and-click your way through pre-rendered screens, observe things, gather information, solve puzzles, etc. etc. This game is a lot of work, and I mean that as a compliment. Your character writes nothing down, so you'll want a notebook handy. I settled for taking pictures of my screen, but whatever you do, you're gonna need a system to keep track of things. There are a lot of places to explore, and many small easy-to-miss things, so you need to pay close attention. That said, I never found myself pixel-hunting and progressing through the story was never too challenging. The maaaaaajor downside is that all the puzzles in this game are borrowed from other places, and not only are they unoriginal, they're fricking HARD. And not in a "just be smarter" kind of way, it's like they intentionally made them as tedious as possible. There's a Tower of Hanoi puzzle with seven blocks, a classic "slide blocks around to form an image" puzzle with TWENTY-FIVE squares, and to cap it off, a Knight's Tour on the chess board. This is the one area where the developer(s) really phoned it in, and the game suffers because of it. All in all, it was an enjoyable experience, and the exploration of the Utopia is a fun (and sometimes pretty dang spooky) experience.

I literally wasn't able to finish the game because of a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stars puzzle. And halfway through the game I started to wish Ragnarok happened just so baron ♥♥♥♥♥♥ can finally shut his hole.