SpaceVenture

Good old times, I was a big fan of the Sierra Quest games like King's Quest, Police Quest, Leisure Sweet Larry and of course Space Quest! Unfortunately I missed the Kickstarter campaign in 2012 when the Two Guys From Andromeda announced their new space game. As they offered a Linux version with release, I bought that version from their website in 2015. When it hit Early Access on Steam I reached out, refering to my previous order and here we are, I got access to SpaceVenture! A native Linux version is not available so far, yet it works great with Proton and it does capture the flair of the original Space Quest games. Many references to Roger Wilco and other Sci-Fi related topics, it did keep its own space quest special humor and is a nice nostalgia trip. I have not completed the game yet, and so far I'm enjoying my time with the new hero and his toolbox-bot. This review is referring to the early access version, there are some issues here and there, so far nothing game breaking though. If you loved Space Quest, give this SpaceVenture a try.

man this game is so bad. I loved space quest back in the day, but this is horrible. Thee first puzzle is a simple slider type puzzle to open a door, but the player character object takes up a third of the screen in that room, blocking most of the puzzle, making it impossible to click. The puzzle itself is not hard, but the game makes you fight to even be able to interact. The very next puzzle is a box sliding puzzle where you have to slide 3 specific boxes in three specific directions, the first of which doesn't seem to be connected in a physics type way to either of the other two. For example, if you were in that room, there's no reason you couldn't push the second box in the correct direction first, but the game doesn't let you do it, so if you're exploring, it makes it seem like that task is impossible. After getting through that box puzzle, there's another puzzle with more boxes (can't push these!) where you need to get your trusty tool dog to activate a forklift, but as soon as I did, I tried to walk to activate it (because nothing happened) and it immediately ran me over and insta killed me. So far, that's what this game is... bad puzzles wrapped in worse interface that's simply an exercise in frustration, not entertaining in the least. This is NOT space quest. More like space qurap.

It's short, even for an old school point-and-click adventure. Maybe I'm too familiar with the genre from back in my day (King's Quest (1984) was my first PC game), but the only troubles I had were tiny objects that were difficult to see, which is a side effect of my personal familiarity with the games that inspired this one. (Being old.) Otherwise, it was rather straight-forward from a moon-logic view. Most of the time was spent looking for the Backer Cards after the game was over (and most of that was travelling all over and the whole [spoiler]space rocks[/spoiler] thing). Play for nostalgia of the days of the rough and tumble, small guerilla development teams but not for depth or wow factor. Most of you kids won't be into it. Sideways thinking and "just enough merit to give it a shot" for problem solving is something from my day. ChatGPT won't help here, and that's a wonderful thing. If you're not from my day, you might need a walkthrough. However if you're not from my day and find this just as easy as I did, you are the future of this world and need to take the reins before we become an idiocratic society guided by consensus computing. (No. I didn't mean to type idiosyncratic, you stupid AI-powered autocorrect.) No crashes in the near 8 hours of play. Occasional visual glitches that were common way back when these kinds of games were written for DOS adventure game engines like AGI, SCI, SCUMM, and so on—all part of the nostalgia if you were there for it.

This game is so very very janky. At its heart I think its probably an okay adventure game. It loves to soft lock you, where either a character becomes unresponsive and won't walk somewhere, or you get off a hover truck to look at something and can't get back on because something is obscuring the hotspot for the seat. Its game where death isn't a punishment, but you need to save often so you can get out of no win situations. Last time I tried playing it I got up to a point where the game seemed to lose track of where in the story I was and suddenly got transported somewhere near the end of the game, sort of spoiling itself. And forgiving the bugs, the UI is just terrible. Characters will randomly start talking while you are in the process of adventure gaming, so you accidentally cancel out their speech, the right click menu needs to learn from sierra games and return to a menu at the top of the screen because it seems to be constant hovering over things after performing an action... and you can't click it away or else you cancel more speech which is ideally telling you what you need to do next, so on top of having to go back to save games all the time to get out of bugs, you need to reload games all the time so you can catch the dialog... hopefully without cancelling it again. Maybe wait until they rerelease the game with the 'almost bug free special edition'

It softlocked on me, setting me back a couple hours. It was not 100% functional up to that point, either. I can't believe something could be this buggy after 13 years.

A great successor to the Space Quest games. Jokes are funny, music is great, and the mood is right

I'm a huge fan of point-and-click adventure games since the 90's, and strive to pick up whatever comes out in the modern era. I loved the Sierra series, the Space Quest series in particular, and a bunch of other titles that were out back then, and even more recent ones (Lucy Dreaming, Drifter, and many others). I wanted to like this game but unfortunately I couldn't for two reasons, and I returned it right away. I'll try again perhaps if something changes or it evolves but: first, there is a constant nagging narration from a deep voice, making jokes and encouraging you along the way. It's distracting and the dad jokes didn't do it for me. And it appeared in the form of an iMom with a background 1950's-type music. I can't get into a game that makes dumb commentary when in fact I seek immersion. Second, the first puzzles weren't true adventure game puzzles, but involved pulling boxes around in some predefined area at an angle, it wasn't a puzzle at all in fact, as in there was no logic challenge. Suggestion to product folks: find a way to completely turn off or eliminate the narrator. As for the puzzles, the other reviews aren't very encouraging on that front. Maybe try out clever and successful adventure games, and see what makes the puzzles fun in these, rather than creating what feels something like a console game.

Good game. Good voice acting. Amusing. Similar to adventure games from the 80s and 90s. It just needs some QoL features, such as an anti-aliasing setting to get rig of jaggies.

What this game has going for it are nostalgia references to Space Quest and the voice acting (besides that One Guy From Andromeda, what's up with that AI voice?) Now for the bad parts: - story is generic and has been done at least a hundred times - choice of engine is detrimental to puzzles, charme and flair -- sometimes hard to click action points because they are blocked by another model -- puzzles are almost all limited to location and sliding things around -- game softlocked on me once at the end If you are looking for a charming and even remotely challenging Adventure game then look somewhere else, this ist not the place.