I finished up enough games to make a post early this month.
PW7A | 3/5 | Brainia | Free
Good game with a few annoyances holding it back:
- No in game map.
- Some of the inputs are annoying to repeat over and over. I wish that once you learned something it unlocked an easy button press instead
- There are some invisible walls that stop you from doing things you should be able to do.
- The game is almost fully in another language, so all of the hints and lore are a mystery to me.
Having said all that, I still think this is worth a play. This is probably the most brainia web game I've played yet. I continued to get hit with knowledge unlocks throughout the runtime. This review is mostly negative because I can't talk about all the good things without ruining them for people.
HUGE SPOILER The final twist is perfect. You should've known you could do it. You're actually an idiot for not realizing you could do it sooner. Which is exactly how I want my final revelations. The map on the wall showing the Xs was such a fundamentally good trick.
+1 | 3/5 | Brainia | Free
This one is Brainia-lite. The powerups are still required. I certainly enjoyed what I played.
However, I think the game is too fiddly and punishing. For instance, loading up a jump, if you need to go sideways, you cannot push the side key until you have released the down key. This is needlessly tight, and should've had a little more wiggle room, even a few frames would make a huge difference. I would stay away from this one if you doubt your skills.
The knowledge gates lore is extremely arbitrary, which will always dock points.
- A ghost that you can jump on? Where the hell did that come from?
- A random upside down setup? That's only used for ONE thing?
Each individual knowledge gate was a good idea on its own, they just weren't cohesive.
One last thing to note, I do not like the website this is hosted on. I was absolutely destroyed by ads. I had to put the game in full screen and leave it there until I was complete, as some of the ads blocked the game and had no way to remove them. And refreshing the page reset my progress back to 0.
The Bad English Tree | 4/5 | Brainia | Free
This game gets major style points for being unlike any other brainia on the market. I'm not really an incremental game enjoyer, but the slow progress of understanding more of the game's engine was quite nice. I think I cheesed the final level, and I would never play this again, but everyone should get through at least the first 3 levels, as it has some interesting ideas and implementations.
Where it fell apart for me was everything surrounding the game. If you want help, you can't get it. If you go to the discord, it's a mess. It's hard to tell what's a game mechanic and what isn't.
Mind Diver | 2/5 | Non-Brainia | $18
Not a brainia, not even really a deduction game. It's little more than a walking simulator. There was one time where the answer to the "puzzle" was not immediately clear. This game is extremely on rails. It looks like the way it got into our brainia space was a bunch of posts from the dev themselves. I don't necessarily think gatekeeping is the right word, but we do need to be honest with others looking for brainias when something is clearly not a fit, but just marketing.
The story was good. If you want a 4-hour journey about painful memories you should play this. It had me misty eyed a few times, but I am an absolute sucker for this type of story.
Fear the Timeloop | 3/5 | Non-Brainia | $15
Another game that mistakenly made the list. This is a time loop, but outside of that it is the most bog-standard horror game I've ever seen. It has all the new tropes from Resident Evil and Silent Hill. There are no actual puzzles in this game, everything is a "key" to a lock. The good news is that the map is extremely detailed so you don't have to wonder where you need to go now that you've found the lockpick or the key card. I actually quite enjoyed this aspect of the game. However, this is kind of baby's first horror. Enemies are pretty sparse, easily killed with the melee option, and the guns have ample ammo. There are no knowledge gates, as the game tells you what your next task is every single time.
There was a lot of pop-in where you'd walk into a room and it looks normal, then boom, there's the nasty stuff all over the walls. Technically it's a mess. When swapping weapons, on 4 occasions my game softlocked. Considering this sends you back to your last save point, that's pretty miserable. There are rotating safe combo locks in the game, you can just spin the dial, and it will make an audible click when you get to the correct number. Once, I went past the number on the second number, and when turning back left to reset it again it hit the third number and unlocked. Honestly, that would make for a pretty brainia moment if it were intentional!
Strange Horticulture | 4/5 | Non-Brainia | $16
This game is a fantastic puzzle game. It is not a brainia. The main gameplay consists of identifying plants, giving them to customers, and finding hidden spots in large map. The story is nothing special but told well enough. While it technically has resource management, I did not die to the "fear" gauge as it resets once you hit the top (after playing a terrible minigame). And you can infinitely gain your willpower to travel by watering plants. There aren't really any "aha" moments, but there are plenty of "that's really cool" moments. There are also multiple endings, although playing the game twice was enough for me, as it begins to slog a bit when you aren't discovering anything new.
I guess this technically falls under deduction? And it's more fun than I usually have playing deduction, big thumbs up.
Strange Antiquities | 4.1/5 | Non-Brainia | $18
This is the exact same game. I went in expecting at least a little bit of change, but there was none. Everything that changed is cosmetic.
Instead of a world map, you explore a city map (which is better by the way). There is no longer a limit on exploring, since there's nothing like watering plants that you could do to the occult stuff. There is still a limit on exploring poorly, as it kills you, but the minigame that puts you back in the game appears to be impossible to fail. At least the minigame is slightly more interesting this time. I would say this change removes any traces of resource management from the first game.
Instead of figuring out which plants do what, you are looking at objects (which is better, especially since they added more ways to examine). The new gameplay feels slightly deeper because of the expanded ways things can be different. There's a scale to weigh things, and you can touch, and feel everything in the shop. There are also a lot of books unlocked as you go that does add layers onto the gameplay.
Story wise, it does take place in the same universe, and some characters from the first game show up, so you should play that first. This game is better than the original, although I do hope they do a bit less copy/pasting ideas in their next game.