This is a point-and-click game that I apparently bought in January last year for £2.09, though I'm not sure why I did. You play as a humanoid robot called Horatio who, alongside Crispin, his wise-cracking floating assistant, have to venture out into a post-apocalyptic, post-human world inhabited solely by other robots in order to recover a power core after it's stolen from your home.

It started off quite well. I liked the painterly art style and moody atmosphere, and the puzzles were challenging while still being logical. Pretty quickly, however, these puzzles became horribly obtuse and I was forced to take the 90s era Lucas Arts tactic of just using arbitrarily using everything in my inventory on everything else in the vague hope of making progress. Unlike those Lucas Arts games, however, there was none of the humour or the charm here to see me through. This was exacerbated by how, too often, an item I needed was easily missed as it just looked like any other piece of random scenery; it wasn't until I happened to hover my cursor over it that I noticed it was something I could even interact with. As it wore on, this got worse and worse, and from about the half-way point I just used a guide to see the game through to the end for the sake of doing so. Some of the later puzzles seemed entirely obscure: I had absolutely no idea how I would have figured them out by myself, and a few were dependent on game mechanics that, to my knowledge, were completely un-tutorialised.

It's the first game I played and completed on my Deck, so there's that novelty, and it's only three and a half hours long, but I'd struggle to recommend this to any but the most hardcore of point and clickers. Developers like Amanita Design and Telltale Games have proven that there are ways to modernise these sorts of games, but this felt like a relic.

4/10