Blackberry the Witch: Journey

Blackberry the Witch: Journey is a hand-drawn point-and-click adventure. There is some nice worldbuilding in the first half of the game, letting the player piece together bits of information from various sources. The second half feels more like a bunch of random encounters with random characters. Generally the game is quite easy, but there are never any indications of whether or not we're on the right track, and occasionally that can become an issue. Sometimes, especially in the first half of the game, it's quite fun to figure out what the game wants us to do. Other times it's frustrating, especially since there are a couple of puzzles which are just absurd. In at least one case, "use X on Y" doesn't work but "use Y on X" does. There are many alternate-interface puzzles, which are also hit-and-miss. Some of those puzzles are timed. The ocarina puzzle seems to be bugged right now: it worked for me only after reloading a savegame and redoing the same steps. The graphics are decent, but the animations are quite bad. The voice snippets in dialogs are very annoying. Another annoying thing is that the display of text lines can be sped up in dialogs but not in speech bubbles outside o…

I just cannot do it! The moaning and squeaking of the character in lieu of dialogue is so unnerving that I just cannot continue. If I had not left the game on and went out for the afternoon I would have requested a refund.

I just cannot recommend this game. It has absolutely no direction. You are supposed to use your journal to tell you what you should be doing, but the journal (at least in my game play) does not update as it should and you have to wander around, back and forth, clicking on everything and hoping you can find a way to advance. There is no voice acting, the main character just grunts and squeaks, I had to turn the sound off. The art style is cute for the most part, but the characters are really wonky looking. Bottom line, it feels unfinished and the game just isn't any fun.

Colorful adventure game that won't leave a lasting impression but is nonetheless enjoyable for one playthrough. You know what to expect if you've ever played a point-and-click adventure game. This title sticks to modern mechanics, which means that you are not required to select actions when you click on something. When you hover over a hotspot and click the mouse button, the main character will either examine it, as is the case with most objects, or use/pick it up. The only voices are grunts, small laughter, sighs, etc. Because these can be heard every time you click on something, it can quickly grow bothersome. Although it is evident that the language was not initially in English, the translation is fairly good and not a copy-paste job, as is common in games. The majority of players will not even notice the occasional typo or bad wording. Most importantly, it does not detract from the story at all. I recommend that you immediately activate the eye that reveals all hotspots with a circle. While it's true that most of the fun comes from inspecting the screen and discovering objects, the game simply doesn't allow that much interaction with the world. Adventure games normally a…

Pros - Nice art-style - Interesting world and characters. - Pleasant soundtrack - Hot-spot reveal tool. - Entirely playable with the mouse (on screen buttons for inventory/hot-spot/settings/exiting the game etc.) - Journal to remind you what you should be doing. - Mostly fine puzzle design, classic point and click for the most part with some mini-games, although one particular kind of mini-game I never want to play again. - Basic but engaging story. - Autosave Cons - There is a particular kind of mini-game where you just have to mouse your mouse along a track and it sounds easy but the implementation here had me tearing my hair out at times. In fact any of the mini-games which involved clicking and dragging the mouse to move/rotate something could potentially be frustrating as it seemed at times like there was some weird sensitivity/detection issues. - Game indicates its running at 60 fps (locked) but some animations felt more like 30 fps. - Quite a few grammatical/translation issues, nothing game-breaking but it does become quite noticeable. - Dialog text speed was a bit slow for my liking. - I had one occasion where the UI disappeared and so I had to kill the game and restart, …

A classic point & click quest game for 2-3 evenings.