Recent reviews by ialarmedalien

Enjoyable short game where you uncover the dark history of a plantation through historical documents and artefacts. Although the gameplay is very linear with little chance to diverge from the path, the story is interesting and the main character has plenty of funny little quips. I would have liked a bit of a mental challenge but that wasn't really the focus of the game.

Spirits of Baciu is a short puzzle/adventure game set in an otherworldly forest where you play a cat spirit who must find a lost owl feather. As always, retrieving the feather requires first finding other items to solve puzzles for the various NPCs you meet on your feather quest. The game was originally made for mobile, which explains why the UI and controls are somewhat PC-unfriendly; tapping on parts of the screen or dragging inventory items would be intuitive, but translated to keyboard and mouse, the cursor is tiny and there's little indication of which areas of the screen are clickable hot spots, and when interacting with characters (right click), the position of the cursor makes no difference.

On the plus side, the artwork is beautiful and very original, although it does suffer from being upscaled to fit the much higher resolutions of a computer monitor. The ambiance is suitably spooky (especially if you find synthesizers creepy) and the characters you encounter add to the sense that you are in an unpleasant dream-like state.

On the down side, the control system is frustrating: for example, to talk to an NPC more than once, you must move your character and then interact with the NPC again; lack of feedback when left-clicking. The "guess the sequence" bell puzzle is far too long, given that there are four bells to choose from; such puzzles become tedious very quickly, particularly if the ordering of the sequence is random. As is common for the genre, the puzzles do require some moon logic, but given the limited inventory and ability to interact with the environment, most could be solved by brute force. I also wondered why all the characters in the game were male -- are there no female spirits in Baciu?

I would give the game a 6/10; whilst it suffers from being a port of a mobile game, it's a pleasant enough diversion and the price tag is appropriate. With any luck, "Spirits of Baciu: The Deception" (for which this is the prologue) will improve upon the weak points of this game to provide a more consistently enjoyable gaming experience.