Emerald City Confidential™

Good point & click adventure game. well written with engaging characters and pleasing art style. Puzzles are not too difficult.

The last time I had played this game was when I was probably 9 or 10 years old. I wanted to come back to it as an adult to see what I had missed as a kid, and Emerald City Confidential didn't fail to deliver. Despite remembering some of the puzzle answers (don't ask me how, I'm notoriously goldfish-brained and haven't the slightest clue why child-me locked in on a copper tube hard enough to remember it over a decade later) the build up to said puzzles was still entertaining. Some of them are easy, and a couple of them even managed to stump me all over again! The game's mostly dialogue focused but that's what makes it so memorable. ECC, in my opinion, is the Bee's Knees because of the writing and how smoothly it flows. Seconding another reviewer who said there were no dead ends to the story. The pacing, character introductions, foreshadowing and plot twists are all what make this worth a playthrough -- whether you're coming back years later or just learning about it. Although I'd recommend to catch it on sale if you can, if you're like me and impatient, I can personally vouch that I don't regret the $10 gump fare for a pretty good nostalgia trip.

I played this game as a teenager and it has stuck with me for the last decade and a half. Replaying it now is powerfully nostalgic in a wonderful way. For an evening of entertainment, this game is more than worth your time. If you want an Oz fix while you're waiting for the second part of the Wicked movie, this game offers a different perspective on the glittering city. The characters have so much personality, the lore is rich and layered on thick. The story itself is fun, concise and enjoyable. The art style and design feels timeless; some of the architecture now reminds me of Hollow Knight, the animal characters feels like they stepped right out of the 2000s comic Blacksad (or equally, could step right into the 2019 game of the same IP) and while some of the animations feel a bit dated, they have their own charm. As a puzzle game, the challenges have decently withstood the test of time and feel neither excessively taxing nor insultingly straightforward. There is a nice logical flow, minimal back-and-forth and most of the direction in the game is intuitive enough. It does show its age somewhat; fullscreen mode especially has some minor visual glitches, but nothing that impacts the play experience or gameplay features. TLDR; discovering this game was on Steam after it living rent-free in my head for 15 years was a lovely surprise, I will be playing this again and again. Absolutely worth the money!

This is a detective noir game that takes place in Oz 40 years after the events in The Wizard of Oz. The writing is absolutely top-notch. The plot, the twists, the noir vibe, the setting, all beautifully executed. It's a joy to play! The game is old and doesn't completely agree with the new Windows versions, but there was nothing game-breaking (some visual bugs and a couple crashes, but the game autosaves when you enter a new area so I didn't lose any progress). It was still playable, at least for me. I played this game when I was a kid and I didn't realize how formative it was for me, and how it really got me into noir, detective, and mystery genres, which are now my favorites! It took me about 8 hours to complete the game. It is absolutely worth the money when on sale, and even when not, if you've got $10 burning a hole in your pocket and some love for old, point and click mystery adventures, I highly recommend it!

I quite liked this little game! Maybe the first Blackwell game really was just 'the bad one' in the Wadjet Eye catalogue. I'll have to check out Unbound next. The caveat is that I know feckall about Wizard of Oz canon and so can't comment on it as fanfic or fixfic. As a point-and-click, though, it was well-design and fun, and as a low-stakes detective story I enjoyed it. I particularly liked the way the game escalates by having you take on cases that end up being more and more interconnected -- you start out taking on relatively low-stakes things and then very naturally find yourself trying to stop a war. Each solution is actually a bigger question, and it worked well. And it was so nicely intuitive and solvable! The puzzle design here was really excellent, there's no need to play it with a guide open or anything. Honestly these early Wadjet games are the best case for this era being the genre's 'golden age' I've ever seen -- usually when people say that the game they're talking about is badly designed, or more usually they're talking about quantity and not quality, but these are the best, most interesting point-and-clicks I've ever played. While this game's setting meant it was lighter in tone than the other games, the ending was honestly pretty heavy and I appreciated the questions it asked about the reality of sacrifice-few-for-many logics. And in true genre fashion it also asks some important questions about power and responsibility and corruption. I can see the guy who wrote The Shivah in this game, even if it's not meant to be that intense. There's meat here. I did find the art to be weaker than the other Wadjet games I've seen, though it'd obviously because they were trying to capture a certain era of illustration and animation. It wasn't my aesthetic, but I get what they were going for. Still, I think their pixel art was much stronger. What is it with Wizard of Oz fanfic, anyway? Why is that like the One Legitimate Form of Fanfic? So weird.

A nice game! I first played this as a kid, and I enjoyed it a lot again as I replayed it now.

Loved this game and its nostalgia!

good game pretty cool

If you are a fan of the old genre of point and click games, I can recommend this little game. It's very straightforward to understand (both in terms of story and in how it works to play). I've never watched nor played anything related to the world of Oz. Even then, that didn't prevent me from enjoying the game still. On the plus side, the game auto saves whenever you switch location, so you don't have to worry about losing progress, unless you leave the game without changing locations, after doing a bunch of actions. I actually took advantage of that once or twice, when I was given several dialog choices and wanted to see the differences. There's only two downsides I can find to this game: - Since it's an old game, the resolution is very small. If you set the game to windowed, the window will be very small, and it might be difficult to read texts. You cannot resize the window either. At least you can set it to fullscreen, but still, a bit of a pity. - At some point, after reloading from the latest save, my game was constantly crashing whenever I tried to interact with anything. It's only after clicking on a random point on the game (to move Petra) that I realised my mouse was still holding something which it shouldn't be (probably what I was holding before it saved; but after reloading, it showed my mouse wasn't holding anything). It's a very minor issue, but for a moment, I thought I could no longer play, until I realised what was going on. What I really enjoyed though, was the journal in the lower right corner. Not only did it allow you to keep track of what you've done and the world/characters of the game, but it also includes a "hint" button, in case you're stuck on a quest. Each click will give you a subtle hint on how to advance, depending on how much help you need. Eventually, it would straight out tell you what you're supposed to do to advance, if you're really stuck. Overall, I enjoyed the atmosphere, the gameplay, and the graphics.

I was a bit skeptical at first, but hey I remember the days of clever point-and-click. And now that I'm 3 hours in, the story keeps me wanting more and wondering what's going to happen. I've just finished reading the entire Oz series plus Ruth's first book to take up after Baum, and it's been a delight to see so many characters from the books so far being used in the game! Definitely recommend playing this!