Void Breach

The main point of attraction of this "lo-res" game is the art style which harkens back to a mid-80s Sierra game. Unlike those games, this is an actual point n' click game which makes use of a mouse and eschews the use of the text parser. While most of the graphics are purposefully pixely, the cursor icon is more hi-res, which breaks from the feel of the rest of the game. A large number of the puzzles in this game involve getting past some obstacle, whether it is a tree stump, a wolf-like creature, a giant baby, etc. and this style of puzzle became repetitious and I would have liked a wider range of puzzles. Fortunately, the game is not overly difficult -- at least nothing quite as obtuse or fiendish as the gnome's name riddle from King's Quest 1 -- but some of the puzzles did involve random experimentation until something finally worked. The entire game took around 3-4 hours to complete. There were even a couple areas in the game where I was trying to figure if I never managed to get past or if they were red herrings (getting past a locked door in a castle). If you are looking for some nostalgic 80s gaming fun, give Void Breach a spin. It looks like the developer is working on another pixel game which I am eager to see what comes of the next game.

A retro-styled point&click adventure game, where you play as a scientist whose daughter disappeared during an experiment with dimensional waves, and an opportunity to rescue her brings you to another world with the weirdest environment and creatures. The game is most resembling to the early Sierra “quest” adventures, graphics look very similar to first King’s Quests or Space Quests. The storyline has one central plot where you search for your lost daughter, otherwise it is a haphazard mix of partial quests and items spread across randomly laid locations. Gameplay is fairly easy and you will rarely get stuck, the only problem I had was with the controls – there is no bar to select walk/look/use/talk icons, instead you need to cycle through them via keyboard or mouse wheel, which can get pretty frustrating. Overall the game feels like an experiment of a point&click adventure, but it’s still a worthy game of its own which brings entertainment and nostalgia for the golden age of adventures.

Void Breach is a surprisingly fun little retro adventure game. The graphics are just as garish and janky at they look in the trailer, but there's something endearing about this kind of boldly ugly style. I guess I am exactly the target demographic because I'm old enough to have played the original games that were built in this style, so the aesthetic really worked for me. It's like a mishmosh of childhood memories you don't quite recall. It helps that the music is very, very good. Seriously, the game is worth buying just for the music alone. The puzzles are all of the "your path is blocked, find the thing that will unblock it" type, but because there aren't many locations and there aren't many items, you can't really get stuck. I only had to look up a walkthrough once, and it's because it wasn't intuitive to me that you can use items on yourself as well as other things. So now you know. If you like oldskool adventure games, or that Ceephax style of melancholic chippy synth music, you'll like this game. Short, sweet, solid.

Good adventure game with heavy retro vibes from the 80s and nice music

Lately, I have been doing a play through of the Cosmic Void catalogue of point and click games. They are typically simple fun little games, with very random ideas and just out of reach puzzles that keep me thinking. They have all been pretty entertaining, so I wanted to try the oldest game in their repertoire. They have come a long way. This game is pretty shoddy in many areas. The art is pretty atrociously amateur, and that’s coming from someone with a very high tolerance for MS paint style pixel art. There is some gold among the roughage though, I really loved some of the character art. It’s uncanny and grotesque (and a bit hard to tell how intentional that is). But the environments have no sense of perspective or even much of an articulation of what the space really is. It made for some very confusing navigation. But the worst part is the puzzle design. This game asks you to do a ton of backtracking. Usually you get an item on one screen, then need to run to the other side of the world to use it - rinse and repeat. There’s no map, so you are fumbling through very confusing environments. There’s no consistency either, for example: you might exit a room on the right and then enter the next room on the right, top, or bottom. Puzzles are not obvious at all, many times moon logic-y, so I had to run back and forth many times. It just got very tedious and frustrating to play. Some puzzles were good and logical. Just like some art was fun to look at. But overall I wouldn’t recommend this to many besides the most hardcore point and click fans with a pretty high tolerance of jank. Check out their more recent games instead - they grew a TON.

Pros: most puzzles. Cons: GUI, saving system, plot gets confusing sometimes.

It's entertaining enough, perhaps a bit short. It worth the money. (nice music)

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