The Unlikely Prometheus

[table][th] Review by [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/34633003-Gaming-Masterpieces/lists/] Gaming Masterpieces [/url] - The greatest games of all time on Steam. [/th][/table] If you are just interested in point and click adventures go here: [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43642699-The-Adventure-Library/lists/] [u] The Adventure Library [/u] [/url] Is this game a masterpiece? No, it's just a little indie point and click adventure. You play a guy called Igor (noone cares if this actually IS your name), the servant of Dr. Frankenstein. You help him to procure body parts from the graveyard for his groundbreaking research. Unfortunately, the backwards inhabitants of the nearby village don’t agree with this research and storm the castle of Dr. Frankenstein. Since they also want to kill you, you should relocate to a more peaceful location far away from the castle. You control Igor with three icons - talk/eat, look at, interact. This works quite well, and you receive answers for everything you try… during the first part of the game. The game has won the $105 Adventure Game Challenge in 2021 and been released for free on itch. It takes about 3 hours to reach the end of this version. The Steam version continues after the end of the free itch version. Unfortunately, the quality deteriorates a bit in the new part, you often click on hotspots and nothing happens. Also the puzzles get more difficult. I haven’t finished the game so far after about 7 hours of gameplay. Maybe I am just not good enough, but in most other games I can continue by brute force (trying out everything with everything). This didn’t work here, and I’ll have to wait for a walkthrough. [u][b] Conclusion:[/b][/u] Don’t expect a masterpiece, and you will be pleasantly surprised by some good puzzles and funny situations in this point and click adventure.

It has its fair share of classic Pn'C flaws such as Moon logic, lack of Hot Spots key, annihilation of the 4th wall, etc. However, I might still have given it the thumb up... if it didn't systematically crash on a landscape transition at the start of chapter 4 (out of 6.) I insisted a dozen times with no success, and since the game is more than a year old, it's clearly never going to be fixed. So forget it.

The Unlikely Prometheus is an adventure game of medium difficulty. Almost all the puzzles are inventory-based. The first half of the game is very good. There are some clever puzzles and funny moments -- sometimes both rolled into one. There are meta-jokes, but they're bearable. Probably the only minor annoyance in the first half of the game are the large text boxes, which pop up all the time -- object descriptions appear when hovering over a hotspot, and dialog lines appear because there's always some background chatter going on. The text boxes jump all over the screen and keep getting in the way. The second part of the game is not as fun. The lack of hotspot highlighting becomes an issue because there are some easy-to-miss objects and exits. The second part has many moon logic puzzles, including puzzles based on terrible puns. Some puzzles would have been fine if they had had better signposting. Many attempted interactions don't give any response at all. There aren't many locations and active objects, so the second part still isn't very difficult. There's quick movement between locations, which also helps.

Pros - Good art-style, I think the black and white theme works but it can be difficult to see some items - Fun dialog, story and quirky characters - Pretty good puzzle design, Pretty much all inventory based puzzles with a sequence puzzle at the end. I think there was a couple of silly item combinations or uses but it was mostly fine. I've definitely played more illogical games. Cons - As mentioned while the graphics are nice, it can be sometimes easy to miss thing and there is no hot-spot reveal. Quite a bit of my time was down to being blocked a few times by not seeing an item. - Instead of the inventory presented when you move the mouse to the top/bottom of the screen, in this game it appears on right mouse button which is more traditionally used to observe an item for further context (and still is used for that purpose for items within the inventory) You will get used to it eventually but for awhile you will keep bringing up the inventory when you just intended to look at something. Overall its quite charming. Recommended.