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.

On the one hand, Beyond the Edge of Owlsgard feels like it could have come out straight out of the mid-90s. It’s pixely presentation is crisp, the visuals are masterful, and the humour is of-the-time while being timeless, not dated. No, the 90sness of BtEoO feels like the character of an old adventure game that holds up well. On the other hand, the rather serious narrative around a cast of cartoony talking animals is something no publisher back then would have greenlit, cementing BtEoO as definitively indie.

And goodness, did the story work for me. It has the tone of a LucasArts title but the imagination of a cool indie comic. Playing it, I got lost in this world, and I had trouble putting it down. It’s got pacing issues and some characters are kinda flat but the world that unfolds in this narrative is spellbinding and rich. Also, within the first ten minutes of the game you can have a conversation with a talking porcupine about chord progressions and alternative music, which is kind of amazing.

The colour palette seems inspired by the Amiga but unlike 99% of Amiga games, BtEoO doesn’t cause me psychic damage with its visuals. No, the visuals of this game are quite beautiful. The sprites are lively and drawn in a sharp cartoony style although to nitpick: the shrinking on the sprite muddies up the pixels with some kind of compression. The machines also look a stylistically odd but maybe I’m okay with that because they’re strange creatures in the first place. The backgrounds? Painterly.

Also gonna shout out the music. That main theme with the soaring strings: masterful. In the end, I loved this game. I didn’t play it in its entirety over the last few days because I wasn’t enamoured with it. As someone who previously didn’t like point & click adventure games, this title showed me the beauty and nuance of the genre. I’ve found something really special with this one.

Some of my pacing problems were mitigated replaying this and not being stuck on certain puzzles, and this was a blast to replay. Still took me 6-7 hours because I went through a lot of the dialogue, but the writing is good so I wanted to hear it again! And DAMN was the music enchanting this time around. There isn't a lot of it but the stuff that's there is powerful on its own.

Also, I looked it up and 'roebuck' and 'clubmoss' are real words and not some made up fantasy terminology that writers put in to be fancy.