Perils of Man

Not for me, but great for middle grade. I played for over two hours & I didn't find the story & characters engaging. To be honest I find them rather annoying. The puzzles are simple & aren't fun, the point & click can be all over the place, just feels like it's there so it can have an excuse for gameplay. The animations & voice acting are great! for an indie title, they're outstanding. I can see younger audiences liking this. if you are or have an 11-year-old they would like this. It's their demographic this game targets. Disappointing, a good story should know no age. I won't be giving a rating out of 10, this isn't for me. I do recommend it for younger audiences. *key purchased from Green Man Gaming

I played this almost a decade after release and wasn't really expecting much, but I quite enjoyed it. I think any old school adventure game fan wants to be a Bill Tiller fan from his having been one of the leading artists on Curse of Monkey Island (the amazing art of which is a key part of making it an all-time great) and other Lucas Arts classics. But unfortunately he's mostly flopped since deciding to change from being an artist to being a designer and writer. A Vampyre Story was abandoned unfinished (he's been talking about making a second part for 15 years now, but it's clearly never going to happen) and wasn't a good game at all even taking it as just a first chapter. Ghost Pirates of VooJu Island was an unplayable disaster. Duke Grabowski was another one that was abandoned after a very short, mediocre at best first chapter. So I was happy to discover that Perils of Man is short but tells a complete story and tells it well. The art is very good as you'd expect from Bill Tiller, the voice acting is excellent with the one notable exception of the protagonist's mother, the story is well written and entertaining, the puzzles are pretty basic but interesting enough mostly to keep the player motivated. The one major problem is that some of the environments are quite dark (with no brightness option in the settings), and there is no hotspot indicator. So it either becomes a tedious pixel hunt several times or you just need to check a walkthrough (as I did) when you're stuck and are pretty sure it's just because you missed some random object in a dark corner of some room.