PS5 Review: Brok the InvestiGator

March 1, 2023 by Adam W · Comments Off on PS5 Review: Brok the InvestiGator

Is this the ultimate “point and kick?”

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Tagged: Brok The InvestiGator, pc, point and click, point and click adventure, point and kick, ps5, switch, Xbox

PS4 Review: Children of Silentown

January 26, 2023 by Adam W · Comments Off on PS4 Review: Children of Silentown

Dare you enter the strange Silentown?

Accompany Lucy and her friends in this grim, beautifully hand-drawn adventure game. Lucy is afraid of the forest, just like any other child: every night, the echoing roars rob her of her sleep. Not even her dreams are a safe place where she could play. People disappearing is nothing uncommon in the village, but this time, Lucy is old enough to investigate on her own. Or so she thinks. Children of Silentown is a point & click adventure game telling a mysterious and endearing story. Explore the town and its dangerous surroundings, meet its quirky inhabitants, solve puzzles and master minigames. Accompany Lucy on her adventure to get to the bottom of what is haunting the strange Silentown… if you dare.

Children of Silentown is a hand-drawn point-and-click-type adventure where you play as Lucy, a young girl who lives in a small town called Silentown. People in the village go missing regularly but no-one dares leave to find them, nor do they stay out at night and they try and keep as quiet as possible. The game introduces you to a number of the residents like Lucy’s friends and their families as well as other villagers and eventually Lucy learns songs she can use on them to unlock new dialogue options and progress the story forward.

Sometimes these songs will trigger puzzles like threading a needle through different buttons to reach the end, there’s also a rotating puzzle where you need to put cogs in place and rotate these blocks to form a path from one side to the other or others and finally a light puzzle where you need to select blocks to light up the entire picture but without triggering alarms that will reset the puzzle if set off.

The story itself is mysterious and keeps you pushing forward, even if the solution to some puzzles aren’t always the obvious one. The game does also autosave so if you miss out on a collectible for a trophy then you’ll need to go through the entire game again, so be sure to back your save up if you don’t want to miss out on the Platinum.

The art style feels like a mixture of something from Coraline or a Tim Burton film and it works well. It’s uniquely unsettling and the soundtrack is also pretty impressive with some truly haunting and beautiful moments. The story is told through text but there are some nice creepy sounds thrown in to boot.

The Verdict

While not reinventing the point-and-click genre, Children of Silentown has an incredibly creepy atmosphere, engrossing story and clever puzzles that keep you on your toes from beginning to end.