The Phantom Fellows

The game is mostly good. There are a few rough spots with the controls (I definitely accidentally skipped 25% of the dialogue) and the story (though we'll see with the next game IF?! it resolves.) All around has decent art and puzzles that aren't impossible to solve (with multiple solutions for more diverse gameplay and a good hint system.) The writing van be hit or miss but does lean more towards the funny side which I always enjoy. Its not the best game but it is more fun than alot of other point and click games. Try it yourself and see if you enjoy it. I look forward to seeing what this studio can do with alot more time and effort put into the next game.

I really liked the humor and dialogue in this game. Both of the main characters have a great back and forth, and I love the repeat jokes in the game too. I also like when the game had sentimental moments to. I almost cried during the squirrel backstory ngl and I liked seeing how much the duo cared about each other. It might just be my lizard brain talking, but I really liked all the random achievements you can get by just messing around. It added a nice time waster to the game that rewards you with a achievement and a joke that makes it worth it to go out of your way to look around more. If I have any complaints it would be the amount of useless items you get during a day. There might be some use to them that I never picked up on or those items might be there to allow you to play around and find different solutions, but it can make it harder to decern what you actually need to do to solve a puzzle since there's so many different options available to you. I found myself getting suck a couple times because I was confusing myself. Overall, I wish there were a bit less useless items so the puzzles didn't feel so out there sometimes. That being said, I had a lot of fun with this game and I am looking forward to a sequel.

I think you'll be able to tell from the screenshots if you'll like this game - if you like this kind of game, you'll like this game. Sure the interface is a bit clunky times, but that's honestly not unusual for the format - after you get used to it, it becomes super easy, barely an inconvenience. I quite liked how the game was a bit open-world-y, and didn't really notice moving around between different places was worth doing until a bit late in the game. Fantastic soundtrack and the pixel art of Colorado landscapes really blew my hair back.

This was one of my games of the years in 2024, and I'm not just saying that cause the dev is a friend of mine! It's truly a labour of love which doesn't leave any pixel unturned, in other words you can interact with everything you can find to your hearts content! Or you can follow along with the exploits of the fellows with some of the greatest names in adventure gaming, Oliver Cobblestone and Englebert Picklebender! To get the most of the game though it's best not to rush through it, but to take the time and appreciate all the attention to detail and banter between the fellows, and maybe even get the grand total of all 100 achievements!?

Someone named Anna may or may not have scaroused me into purchasing this game. Good thing, too, otherwise I might end up getting haunted by some ghost named Picklebender. Really?! Not even Slimer or some other good ghost name, but some guy who shows his spectral brawn by wrestling with gherkins? Anyway, you know what to do: Look. Listen. Buy. Play. Laugh.

Two important things first: First, for windowed mode, press Alt + Enter. Second, it ends on a cliffhanger. I think this game will divide its players. If the game's style of humor matches yours, I think you'll love it. It didn't work for me. I really enjoyed Darkside Detective, I love absurdism, and I can see what the devs were going for here. My main issue is that much of the humor is repetitive. Not literally the same jokes over and over, but the same kind of jokes. Extremely long awkward conversations. The main protagonist's neurodivergence constantly making him say the wrong things. His ghost companion frequently talking down to him, in an equally overly wordy manner. The entire game is extremely wordy, so if it doesn't click, the playing experience becomes tiresome. I should note that I was streaming the game, so the long conversations did not make that fun, due to the amount of text to be read out loud. I think this is a game best played on your own, unhurried, without an audience. If the long conversations bore you, you can read and click through as fast as you like. Of course, important information could randomly show up in the middle of long irrelevant rambles, so clicking through too fast is a slight risk. It took me about 12 hours to get through to the cliffhanger at the end. When the devs say it's a "Narrative based adventure game where the writing and the story come first", they aren't kidding. This game was built around delivering amusing quips from conversations, and by interacting with the environment. The adventure game puzzle solving doesn't take second place - it takes third place. Second place is occupied by optional achievement hunting. There are 100 Steam achievements! Without even trying, I got a little over 40 of them. Still, I needed a walkthrough, and the devs have provided one on their website, though it's for completionists so it's a little difficult to discern which actions are the bare necessity to progress. I will say, I loved the absurdism, the pixel art, the atmosphere. Chapter 5 really pulled me back in, I was enjoying it so much... until the end of the chapter, where during the climax, the main protagonist's social awkwardness returned to full strength and ruined it for me. The later parts of the game also started getting more crass, with a lot of ♥♥♥♥ jokes. My recommendation: Find a YouTube video of someone playing the first chapter. It's not going to spoil anything for you; the starting chapter's puzzles are extremely simple to solve. Pay attention to the way characters talk, and how they describe things around them. If you're enjoying the writing style, then I'd say buy the game. If it's not grabbing you, don't go further. The style of humor and conversation will continue in the same vein for the rest of the game.

Good and fun investigations pnc!

Classic P&C game, good jokes, had a good laugh with the gas canister at the beginning. I found the constant bass playing music kind of annoying and distracting to the dialogue, though. And had to do a LOT of pixel hunting, found myself advancing in the game without the plot, having all the items, but then having to go back so the story would continue, too much back and forth. Also needing to click an item on screen, but one of the characters was in the way, and that made it so it was really difficult to find anything at the beginning until I figured out what was happening, then it got annoying since I had to click away first to get that item. All the same a fun game, but I think I'll see about grabbing it again in the future.

Je n'ai pas réussi à accrocher à ce jeu. L'idée est pourtant bonne, et le principe détective+fantôme est assez éprouvé, mais ça ne marche pas. Le jeu est vraiment trop poussif et verbeux, avec des énigmes un peu trop tordues pour être honnêtes. L'humour rajouté dessus sonne plus comme une perte de temps imposée que comme quelque chose de vraiment "détente". Bref, je pense qu'il n'a pas su trouver son ton.

this shameless "the darkside detective" rip-off has two things going for it: nice and shiny pixel art graphics and good music, the two things both games have in common, save the very concept of course. other than that, nothing is even close to being at par with TDD. the puzzle design is pretty weak and the UI is most impractical and annoying. while you can change your walking speed in options, it's never fast enough as you have to cover long distances over and over again and you can't teleport away to the next screen either. no respect for players' time. much worse though, is the fact that the dev seems to have a really bad case of mouth/keyboard diarrhea and you have to go through endless attempts at lame, senseless, unfunny jokes and back and forth banter between characters. sense of humor is subjective, but the actually funny & attempt at funny ratio was like 1/100 for me. there is often a 1-5 second pause after each one of them too and that adds to your irritation and waste of time. after a point i started skipping the dialogs at the risk of missing info that might help with the progression of the game. i have played hundreds of p'nc adventures and except one other time, i don't remember to ever have done that. it was that unbearable. PS: at the end of this ordeal you don't even get to see a proper ending. you just have to wait for the sequel to come out and go through it too. yeahh..NO!!