It's a cliche, but you can really feel the passion that has gone into this game. I haven't got the most experience with the kind of 90s point-and-click-style adventure that this game pays homage to but, from what I do know, this game seems to get it pretty spot on. The pixel art is honestly fantastic, the music is great and, while I wasn't the biggest fan of some of the VA here, the sheer quantity of it in a game like this is something to be commended.
That all being said, there are definitely some significant issues I had with this one. Owlsgard really isn't the most polished of games. While the dialogue is mostly the right level of cheesy for a game like this, it does regularly step over the line into more cringeworthy territory. And a lot of it is written very... strangely? The English dialogue in this game definitely wasn't written by a native English speaker, and that's something I'm usually more than happy to overlook, but when the American-accented VAs read everything out verbatim (grammar mistakes and all), the game often comes off as really quite surreal and janky in a bad way. I also had a few straight up glitches when playing this; at one point the game randomly switched language to German midway through a conversation only to switch back by itself later on, and at one point I got softlocked in a room because the interaction point for the one door back out despawned for some reason. Also, you can't change the resolution of this game for some reason? It seems very odd to me that a game would release in 2022 without any way of playing it fullscreen.
But technical and localisation issues aside, there is still a lot to be appreciated here on top of the aesthetics and general vibe. I was quite a fan of the plot in this one; there were a lot of twists and turns that I was not expecting at all, and I enjoyed how much the scope and stakes of the story had expanded by the endgame. The actual puzzles here are also mostly decent; while this genre has a reputation for being filled with moon logic, there really were only one or two points in this game that I felt required a logical stretch too far. What was often far more awkward was finding the damn items you needed; many puzzles required an item that could only be obtained by interacting with what appeared to be a background item (e.g. the sea, a nondescript pile of rocks, a window) in a certain way. As such I had often worked out what the solution to a puzzle was waaay before finding all the pieces I'd need to enact it, leading to a lot of time aimlessly traipsing the world (and or, y'know, Google...) looking for anything else to interact with in the hopes an item would pop out. That being said, I think the good does just about outweigh the bad here in terms of puzzle design, and I really did appreciate a lot of the more clever puzzles that are sprinkled throughout this game.
So yes, I think I can recommend this one. I think some of the effort that went into this one was perhaps focused in the wrong places (rather than having unique dialogue for every tree you try to speak to, some more bugfixing and text editing would have been nice...). But on the whole, enough care and love has been poured into this one to smooth over some of its shortcomings, and make it worth a play regardless.
That all being said, there are definitely some significant issues I had with this one. Owlsgard really isn't the most polished of games. While the dialogue is mostly the right level of cheesy for a game like this, it does regularly step over the line into more cringeworthy territory. And a lot of it is written very... strangely? The English dialogue in this game definitely wasn't written by a native English speaker, and that's something I'm usually more than happy to overlook, but when the American-accented VAs read everything out verbatim (grammar mistakes and all), the game often comes off as really quite surreal and janky in a bad way. I also had a few straight up glitches when playing this; at one point the game randomly switched language to German midway through a conversation only to switch back by itself later on, and at one point I got softlocked in a room because the interaction point for the one door back out despawned for some reason. Also, you can't change the resolution of this game for some reason? It seems very odd to me that a game would release in 2022 without any way of playing it fullscreen.
But technical and localisation issues aside, there is still a lot to be appreciated here on top of the aesthetics and general vibe. I was quite a fan of the plot in this one; there were a lot of twists and turns that I was not expecting at all, and I enjoyed how much the scope and stakes of the story had expanded by the endgame. The actual puzzles here are also mostly decent; while this genre has a reputation for being filled with moon logic, there really were only one or two points in this game that I felt required a logical stretch too far. What was often far more awkward was finding the damn items you needed; many puzzles required an item that could only be obtained by interacting with what appeared to be a background item (e.g. the sea, a nondescript pile of rocks, a window) in a certain way. As such I had often worked out what the solution to a puzzle was waaay before finding all the pieces I'd need to enact it, leading to a lot of time aimlessly traipsing the world (and or, y'know, Google...) looking for anything else to interact with in the hopes an item would pop out. That being said, I think the good does just about outweigh the bad here in terms of puzzle design, and I really did appreciate a lot of the more clever puzzles that are sprinkled throughout this game.
So yes, I think I can recommend this one. I think some of the effort that went into this one was perhaps focused in the wrong places (rather than having unique dialogue for every tree you try to speak to, some more bugfixing and text editing would have been nice...). But on the whole, enough care and love has been poured into this one to smooth over some of its shortcomings, and make it worth a play regardless.