May Assassination #6 (Backlog / Snowball)

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After playing Technobabylon, a game I enjoyed a lot, I made a point of trying to play every Wadjet Eye games I could get my hands on, and Blackwell Legacy was the first one that I was able to. Well …. I'm certainly less excited about their back catalog now, let's put it that way.

First of all, Blackwell Legacy offers an experience that is much more akin to old school point & click games. Luckily the runtime is quite short, and there are few moon logic cases (I found two during my playthrough, which I won't spoil here but one involves Ouija Board connections and the other involves telephone shenanigans), but considering Technobabylon had none, this is a bit frustrating. It's an open world-ish game (to the P&C standards at least), meaning you could be stuck in a certain point with only possible option of what to do to advance the game, with no idea of where to go, what to do, who to talk to, what to say, what items to combine with what or to use where. Technobabylon solved it by 'locking' you in a small area with only items that are required in that area, reducing the amount of permutations possible. This is a great design choice that unfortunately the Blackwell Legacy lacks. This game still relies a lot on slow-traveling all over the place, some pixel-hunting, and trying everything everywhere if you get stuck, just in case.

While that's a low, some of the other things that made Technobabylon great are still on display here. You've got strong writing, superb voice acting, charming pixel art, and a well-realized world, albeit the one on display here is more mundane and less exciting/unique when compared to Technobabylon. Also, the pacing is a bit off, the game ended before it really got going, it feels there's very little in the way of a climax to the story, and that the credits roll before you have done what you were supposed to do. I don't know, it's weird.

If you're a hardcore point-and-click fan, you will probably like this one, but if you're casual about them maybe you better avoid it. General consensus is that the series picks up pace from here so I think I'll still try them, but it's very hard to really recommend this one as it is.