Trilled Meow

Acquisitions

  • Hot Tin Roof


Challenge Me!

Challenge Post

60% never played
20% unfinished
20% beaten


  • AER: Memories of Old

    5 hours playtime

    20 of 20 achievements

  • Memoria

    20 hours playtime

    31 of 31 achievements

  • Midnight Mysteries 4: Haunted Houdini

    16 hours playtime

    14 of 16 achievements


AER: Memories of Old

Cool-looking

Challenge me from last month. I found this to be kind of boring. You could fly around various areas, but it's basically an empty world with only a few things to interact with. Aside from that there are a few light platforming sections. It seems more like an experiment than a full game. Nice character art, especially for the main character.


Memoria

Medieval Won on SteamGifts

SG/Play or Pay win. I played the first game a few months before this, so the story was still pretty fresh. Both games had stories that felt mysterious to me, rather than generic. The characters are fun yet don't take away from the themes of the story. I don't want to spoil either game, so I will just say that in this one, you switch between Geron the bird catcher from the first game, as well as a new character, Sadja, whose story presents a riddle that could solve Geron's problems.

"If you want something from me, you'll have to come and get it." *drops items into abyss*


Midnight Mysteries 4: Haunted Houdini

Achievement Clean Up At Least Somewhat Historic Detectives! Mystery! Murder! Educational England, My Lionheart Ghosts New England O Canada USA Won on SteamGifts

Challenge Me! for the current month. And no, the game does not take as long as my playtime says. Have I said enough times how much I love the Midnight Mysteries games? While as games they are just simple HOGs, they are really fun for history and classic literature buffs with lots of little easter eggs. I've previously read about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's naive/enthusiastic belief in spiritualism. He increasingly believed in ghosts, mediums, and various other occult or supernatural phenomena. There's also his adorable belief in the Cottingley Fairies, which the game also makes a reference to by including one of the faked pictures in a HOG scene at his house.

Serious Doyle business. I bet that's his real signature, too.

Maybe you wonder why I'm writing about Doyle in a game called Houdini. Well, they were friends for a while, but Houdini was a skeptic. He wanted to publicly expose mediums as being performers just like himself. This upset Doyle. The game centers around how Houdini really died (which isn't seriously debated--he died of a ruptured appendix in a Detroit hospital, which incidentally appears in the game). The game presents multiple possibilities for Houdini's death, including the possibility that he was killed by spiritualists, which at first I thought was totally made up, but the devs didn't disappoint: a 2006 book called The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero actually makes this as well as other unsubstantiated suggestions.

Part of the story is focused on working out the secret code Houdini and his wife Bess agreed on as a test for mediums. I knew about this because of a Kate Bush song:

Everybody thinks you'll never make it
But every time you escape
"Rosabel believe,
Not even eternity
Can hold Houdini"

Kate Bush—Houdini

Cece09

Oh just started Aer myself like an hour ago and I get what you mean with it. Just a lot of random floating islands with only a few giving you stuff

Trent

Memoria has been in my Itching to play list for ages (well, since I first created the list when I was new to BLAEO). I played the first one and it was one of my favorite point-and-clicks until I played Dreamfall Chapters recently. How does Memoria compare? I really need to play it.

I really enjoyed AER by the way. But I’m easily amused.

Trilled Meow

The Memoria story carries on pretty much directly from the first game. The first game was a lot less difficult than games like Deponia (fewer items in your inventory, smaller areas, fewer areas you can access at any given time), and I thought this was pretty similar. There might be more puzzle mini-games in this one. I believe you can hold down space or something to see everything you can interact with. Likewise, it’s pretty easy to get all of the achievements compared to some other Daedelic games if you check a guide for missables/places you need to reload and choose a different option every once in a while, and there’s a good one on Steam.

Trent

Thank you for the reply. Yes, it looks like there’s a very good guide. And yes, I remember Chains of Satinav being pretty reasonable as far as the puzzles…something where I could work through most of them and eventually consulted a walkthrough in a few cases.

EvilBlackSheep

I’m glad to see love for the Midnight mysteries series. It’s such a nice HoG series, even tho it’s not as popular as the Artifex ones. I wish they’d release the last one on steam too so I could complete my collection.

Trilled Meow

I didn’t even realize there was another one. I have two more to play on Steam at least. I thought the Artifex Mundi ones were okay at first (and they are gameplay-wise), but the stories are just generic and don’t make me care at all.

EvilBlackSheep

If you’re missing keys for the ones you haven’t played on steam, I “think” I have keys for most of them somewhere from a bundle, let me know which ones you’re missing and I’ll look into it.

The problem with Artifex is that they’re not all equal on quality, and yes the stories are often generic (I like a few of their series a lot but some others are just bland). If you haven’t yet, maybe check out Adam Wolfe, it was an interesting take from another studio to Hidden object with a story.

Trilled Meow

I already have them, but thanks for the offer. They’re good games for me to save for when I’m tired of other stuff I’m playing, and it’s nice to know I still have some (plus one more that I didn’t know about). Adam Wolfe is one I played and liked. I think when I wrote about it here, I said something like, “They just did whatever they wanted.”