From Lex to Rex

This is a traditional point-and-click adventure that could have been a recommendation if not for a few flaws. The translation to English was weird and full of little mistakes. It sometimes felt as if I lost some of the intended humor or meaning. You progress one scene at a time (size of one screen, rarely two) and you're stuck there until you solve everything. I didn't particularly like it, but it's considered a feature. The problem is that you have to deal with a combination of pixel hunting (hotspots barely visible or lost in the background) and non-sensical solutions, the so-called "moon logic". One example being the whole sequence with the prince. Not all the time but too often. Realizing the game didn't play "fair", I eventually ended up trying every item on every hotspot when I was stuck. I know there's a "difficult" tag and a warning about pixel hunting on the store page, but that doesn't excuse poor adventure design that should have stayed in the past. It was not all bad, though. Some puzzles were clever, such as the portals in the tailor room. I know this is subjective, I usually like pixel art, but here, I often found it unsightly, if not ugly. I'm not sure if it was …

Lex to Rex is a short pixel-art point and click game. The game is made up of short 1-screen chapters with chapter selection avaialble form the start and no saves (the game only remembers what chapter you were playing last and reloading restarts the chapter). The story starts simple, but gets convoluted at roughly half point with multiple timelines/copies of the main character intersecting. The puzzles are on the harder side, but the one-room per chapter structure makes them easier to solve then in PnC games with more then one location avaialble at a time. There is a dev-made guide for all would-be achievement hunters available and 100% the game takes about 3.5h. My only technical gripe would be that dialogue from the npcs can have a color that merges with the background and gets hard to read.

Pros - Its kind of a simple story but takes a very bizarre and unexpected route. Never boring. - Fun dialog and lots of quirky characters. - Nice graphics, very nostalgic - Good music - Controls are fine, mostly entirely playable with the mouse but you do need to press ESC to exit. Cons - No manual save, there is an auto-save but you might have to redo a few things - A couple of glitches where Lex seems to appear in the wrong place, nothing game breaking. - The puzzle design was just not my cup of tea. Lots of try everything with everything moments. Lots of pixel hunting. There is no hot spot reveal which I guess might be all part of the old school point and click ethos but I've just gotten use to modern convenience at this stage. - A little on the short side maybe but its fairly priced I think. - No vsync Overall its quite charming and worth a look for fans of the genre.

This game has something that alot of others are lacking: Being genuinely silly and creative. If you like the oldschool classics, you will most likely.. like this game. The puzzles are just great, because you have to try unusual combinations. Moonlogic, sure, but in a fun way. There was a puzzle involving portals that was clever and different. I am looking forward to play the other titles in the series. It has flaws. I was playing with a resolution of 1920x1200, since thats the native res of my screen and it was chosen automatically. Looked great with no black bars. The problem was that at one point in the game I was stuck and couldnt figure out what to do. Came back some time later to try again but nothing. I was sure I was missing something. I didnt like it but I looked up how to proceed and the problem was that there was an exit I couldnt see and mouseover, because it was cropped, because of the resolution. Changed the resolution to 1920x1080 and everything worked. The other thing I noticed were some rare instances where the character sprite wasnt in the correct layer, or popped into view when I clicked on a specific hotspot. Thats it though. Just happy accidents ^^ Thumbs up!

Absolutely awesome game that's extremely underrated for the amount of love and work put into it. From the art style to the humor, this is a must for any P&C fan. BUY THIS AND THE SEQUEL, you will not be disappointed.

The game has wonderful retro pixel graphics and animations. The English translation is not great, but okay. This would normally mean a thumb up but... Unfortunately many of the puzzles are totally illogical, with the game texts rarely giving you any idea what you need to do. In addition you often end up searching the screen for tiny elements to interact with. Your final resort to is to combine everything with everything or looking up the walk through hints. Example: early in the game you need to fix a broken rake. To glue it back together, you need to stick one half into a pile of bones to suddenly have adhesive on the end. The second half needs to be rubbed on some graffiti at the wall, which will add hardener to it. None of these actions make any sense and no dialog or examination of said objects give any clue that this would happen. When you have figured it out by pure experimentation, you need to use the rake on a crack in the floor that does not look much different from any other parts on the screen...