Darkestville Castle

Wow, this was hard to give it a thumbs up or down, but overall it's more on the negative side for me. Let's start with what i liked - the graphics are nice, animations are smooth, voice acting is OK, the main character is annoying, but likeable and some of the jokes are funny and the story is - while very cliché - OK. Let's see the problems from smaller to bigger ones: - music - a lot of Monkey Island rip-off. It runs even when there's a loud radio in the scene, so you have the game music, the music from the radio AND a dialogue. brilliant. - many characters feel very undeveloped or underutilized. They are there for a single puzzle and some conversation, but they don't feel real characters, just mechanics to move forward with your puzzles. - interactivity - OK, so i have 3 verbs to choose from, but the game rarely gives context specific responses for things i'm trying. Even seemingly logical combination of items or trying to talk with inanimate objects give the standard "you can't do that" responses. No hints, no acknowledgement that the idea might have made sense in another universe or anything. - the dialogues. They are long. Everything we learn about Cid is not by SHOWING, but by TELLING. People talk a lot. Instead of getting some real insights to past adventures and his personality, we learn it by listening to people talking about it. Obviously the "show, not tell" principle was not heard of by the creators of the game. - monkey island. I mentioned the music already, but then the ending is stolen from there as well and just too many things felt like that it's trying to be a cheap copy of Monkey Island. Would be ok for a first, budget game, but this game looks professional. For that, this is DEFINITELY not ok. - the puzzles. They start out great, they are logical, i was able to make progress with just a bit of trial and error, so i had a good feeling about the game. Fun character, fun story and logical puzzles. By the second half of the game this started to turn into a nightmare of idiotic puzzles where I rather relied on a walkthrough instead of trying things forever. With no hints and no logic in many of these tasks, it felt just like a chore, not fun. This for me turned the overall evaluation negative. So overall - a short game, relatively funny, but nothing memorable and with terrible puzzles.