Alum

If you go into it hating Christianity your going to hate the story. Outside of that it has Lots of great music, puzzles, scenes, exploration, humor. Everything you'd want from a classic adventure game.

My 6th 100%, I won this game through a bundle giveaway and has been sitting in my library for years so I decided to speed run it, except I didn't realise thinking and problem solving was required. You are meant to figure things out yourself, there are hints available and its sort of common sense but no prompts or hand holding here, which I can sort of appreciate. Story line was good but ngl, I did skip most of the voice lines, I got the gist of it. Was not a big fan of the UI but not a bad one for achievement hunters although get your guides out.

As a point click game it's perfectly fine and at least initially the atmosphere was interesting. I kind of can't recommend it because of the covert religious themes though. If it had been more upfront about it from the start I think I'd be a bit more lenient. Although in fairness in that case I probably never would have played it. The religious theming is also pretty ham fisted. I'm not sure if it would be considered a spoiler to say that the story basically boils down to the love of god saving everyone at the end. If you're a very devout Christian you may enjoy this, although even then the game might still be too ham fisted about how it deals with the subject matter, if you're looking for subtly you won't find it here.

The puzzles and setting are pretty interesting and well done, but the voice acting and story being told is so clumsily handled that it becomes increasingly annoying to endure. I did have to toggle it into windowed mode at a fairly small resolution to even get it to run as some aspects of the build haven't aged well. I would be interested in what this developer could put out with a touch more polish and subtlety.

We gave this game a 5.5/10 when we played it, but it sticks in the mind years later. Alum is a super accurate 90s point-and-click adventure game, except it came out in 2015. It even has a separate configuration wizard before you boot it, and you can technically run it unscaled in a really tiny window. The art direction, music, funny voice acting, and the ridiculous nature of so much of it makes this game incredibly charming and memorable, despite the gameplay and puzzles being infuriating at (many) times. I love this game. Very excited for Wildwood Down, and somehow we missed the launch of Sentry City. Finally doing a playthrough of that soon.

Alum doesn't work anymore in 2024. Removed from account.