The Beard in the Mirror

You don't get into the Adventure Game Studio scene if you don't love oldschool point-and-clicks, but The Beard in the Mirror really wears its love for LucasArts and Sierra adventures on its sleeve. It especially delights in letting you get killed in ridiculous Sierra-esque ways but does so with a modern sensibility: you won't lose progress and there are no apparent unwinnable states. BitM's puzzles just drip with the classic 90s silliness, but in a way where one step usually clearly leads you to the next. They often feel every bit as silly as Gabriel Knight 3's infamous cat-hair mustache puzzle, but far less demanding of absurd leaps of moon-logic. The least intuitive of the puzzles, in fact, are often one-step solutions that, if all else fails, can be brute-forced. The more complex the puzzle, the more clearly the solution comes together. It's gratifying to play a game that feels like it belongs in that classic milieu without throwing away what we've learned about accessibility and fairness in game design. The story itself is probably the weakest link -- a suitable but convoluted and sometimes confusing magic-fueled romp through time and space. It's not the sort of thing I'd make a franchise of, but it's a decent frame for a fun fan-letter to classic adventures. This is the first point-and-click from "Oh, a Rock!" Studios, whose main output is visual novels, but I hope they keep at it. It's a better first effort than I've seen from some of my favorite adventure devs. I'm excited to see where this goes.

I LIKE this Kinda strange "guy out of his element game" that plays and feels very old skool...some decent humor so far -hoping for more comedy ... I am not very far yet but Ill stick with it for a bit and update my review- I am still having issues with FULLSCREEN-- I get an error when trying to go to full screen mode REGARDLESS of my selections in the AGS tool... I even installed AGS and no... the best I can do is get it to run at 1280 x 800 in a window- unchecking the window box simply causes an error message to display- https://s17.postimg.org/ke6abf9i7/issues.png https://s17.postimg.org/7y9khog67/ags.png

Amazing story, setting, characters, puzzles...everything. This game was a blast to play. The puzzles weren't overly difficult, but they weren't too easy either. The story and characters are engaging and hilarious. I loved every second of it.

A hapless young adventure-player gets sucked into a world of fairy tale intrigue and romance along with his trusty pink crowbar and three vegetarian gumballs. You know, it's really goofy -- purposefully so most of the time -- but it's really earnest and sweet, and has enough self-knowledge to capitalize on its own naivete without being [i]too[/i] self-aware. Oh, that self-awareness! It'll reach right up and poke you in the a$$ when you least expect it! Fun fact: the scariest character in the game is none other than Artie, the rock-collecting forest guardian. That guy will literally [i]kill[/i] you over a colorful mineral. Puzzles are solid, not too difficult, but occasionally spike into head-scratcher territory. You won't tear your hair out, I think. I want to brag on the game's storytelling a little. Despite the fact that this is a relatively simple fantasy world (the time travel element does mix things up in the second act), and even though the game is only about three hours long, it does an [i]excellent[/i] job at building a believably strong relationship between Lily and Paul -- you can totally see [i]why[/i] they care about each other so much. It doesn't matter that Paul is only about 1.5 degrees removed from Guybrush Threepwood. (I originally got a little ticked because I couldn't blow the game up to fullscreen, and I was ready to drop it out of hand -- but then, I'd been going around humming Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror" all day long in anticipation of playing it, and on top of that, I remembered that I've played through things a lot clunkier and glitchier than this, so I gave it whirl . . . and it was a very pleasant experience! I actually had a lot more fun with [i]Beard in the Mirror[/i] than that overrated sepia turd [i]Grim Fandango[/i], I kid you not.)

A true nostalgia trip for early 90's pixely point&click adventure game fans. An ordinary, somewhat shy guy gets whisked away to a fantasy land and tasked with a quest that he neither understands much of or feels up to - but nevertheless sets out on this unexpected journey of discovery and growth. Along the way he'll make friends and enemies. He'll meet some crazies and non-human forms of inteligent life. As you'd expect from a fantasy tale, there's swords, magical creatures - and love. But all of that has its own unique flavor, specific to the creators -- a wife and a husband -- and the flerd between Paul and Lily feels all the more personal and adorkable for that. The game itself leans to the comedic side, and the puzzles especially require some unorthodox, out-of-the-box thinking -- but while the solutions might not be evident at once, they're fair and require only that you mind your surroundings and inventory. I enjoyed it thoroughly, and while I've never played King's Quest or Simon the Sorcerer (which, I think, might've been major inspirations), as a LucasArts adventure fan I some of my favorite things out of it, too. Pros: - the old-school graphics! Today's mainstream where games seem to revel in being hi-res festivals of murkiness -- and I love me some pixels and saturated, juicy colors - the comedy - I've always preferred the funny point&clicks with odd-ball characters, and this one has plenty - the heart - the game's a passion project that was made on and off for 10 years! You have to admire this kind of devotion! Cons: - there's one Click Time Event that I found annoying (but the creators say there's an option to skip it if you've failed twice) - one puzzle leads to a dead end after much effort taken, which seems a bit unfair (but the actual solution isn't far away, actually)

A fun and well-designed adventure that is brimming with humor and captures the style and feel of classic Sierra adventure games but without being mind-numbingly hard. It's well-worth a purchase for any fans of classic adventure games.

Great quest with very interesting storyline, very good puzzles and great atmosphere. 100% recommendation for lovers of good old games.

[url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/7520163/]You can find hundreds of other reviews through our Curator page[/url] [h1]"It really grows on you."[/h1] It would be very easy to label The Beard in the Mirror as a throwback to the early years of adventure gaming, so I’ll do just that. The Beard in the Mirror is a throwback to the early years of adventure gaming, resplendent in its simple pixel graphics and dumb icon interface. It very much wants to roost among the classics, specifically Sierra’s seminal library. To this end, it offers you a points system that rewards you for extracurricular puzzle solving, and even provides a myriad of ways for your character to meet his humourous end. However, it is, after all, a modern game aping a classic, so rather than smugly kill you off and banish you back to your last save, it describes how you would have died before backtracking you to your poorly-made decision and hopes hindsight has provided you some wisdom. It’s the story of Paul, an aimless twenty-something trying to find some direction in life after leaving home and graduating college. He’s awoken one morning by a strange girl at his bedside who claims to know him, but he holds no memory of. Distraught at not being recognised, the girl flees, and Paul chalks this night-time visit up as a particularly vivid dream. This mindset is challenged when he awakes and finds himself locked in his room. After ransacking the place to locate a key, he finds his bedroom door now leads to a forest path he’s pretty certain wasn’t there the morning before. Neither was the angry guy, waiting in ambush, who accuses Paul of numerous crimes he considers himself completely incapable of performing. Paul doesn’t remember the world he’s forced to explore, but the world seems to remember him. The majority of the adventure is trying to make sense of that, and finding his place inside the chaos of it all. Though this sounds like quite a heavy task, Paul spends most of his journey unable to comprehend the weight of it all. Much of the game makes fun of his inability to treat his situation with the gravity it deserves. For example, when forced to ransack his room looking for a solution to the locked door, you’ll quickly find his favourite crowbar, spray-painted pink and lovingly adorned with a frilly bow. You’d think this the ideal tool for prying open his door and securing his freedom, but he’s very attached to his crowbar and doesn’t want to risk chipping the paintjob. To the credit of the developer, there’s a kind of absurdist humour running roughshod throughout. A local cobbler finds the idea that someone isn’t interested in his exquisite wares so impossible, he takes disinterest in his goods as a genius bargaining ploy, and haggles himself into oblivion. Guards that show no interest in gatekeeping new areas behind routine fetch quests are cross-examined by Paul for not living up to the trope correctly. It’s all pretty light-hearted, until the reasons Paul can’t remember anything starts to become apparent wherein, well, it’s still pretty light-hearted. But there’s certainly a shift in tone as the game processes; it never forgets that it’s a goofball at heart that’s asking you to make your way through a foreign world, solving all of life’s problems with whatever rubbish you’ve managed to cram into your pockets, but it also never forgets how things started. With a mystery. The Beard in the Mirror makes you work towards the answers you’ll find, but it doesn’t drag them out. With around a four hour lifespan, it’s never going to compare in size with some of the goliaths of old, but it doesn’t need to. It knows the story it wants to tell, and that story gets told. It fleshes out a world that shouldn’t exist, finishing a fable that it never really starts and shunts Paul begrudgingly along into adulthood. It also provides three unique uses for vegan-produced vegetable-flavoured gumballs. That’s a remarkable achievement in itself. [url=http://www.honestgamers.com/15178/pc/the-beard-in-the-mirror/review.html]// Full Review[/url]