The Phantom Fellows

Only 20 minutes in and already find the dialogue EXTREMELY annoying. These developers are trying way too hard to be funny. The main characters comment on everything. Their jokes are corny and very longwinded. They argue like a married couple instead of a pair of old friends. There's no such thing as a straight answer in this game. It's as though the writers were a bunch of shut-ins not used to human contact. And they just wanted to share all the HILARIOUS jokes they built up over the months they were working on this game. Funny dialogue is cool, but not at the expense of all else. Even when you try to quit the game, the narrator argues with you for a minute before it will actually close out. The other problem is that nothing is labeled. So you just have to walk around and click everything. And when you do, you'll get more HYSTERICAL dialogue like "that feels like a door." The tutorial tells us that pixel hunting is part of the fun of the game and reminds you to click on everything you see (because they wrote funny descriptions and don't want you to miss any of it!) The problem is that this is a pixelated game so it's very difficult to tell what is an object and what is just scene…

Two important things first: First, for windowed mode, press Alt + Enter. Second, it ends on a cliffhanger. I think this game will divide its players. If the game's style of humor matches yours, I think you'll love it. It didn't work for me. I really enjoyed Darkside Detective, I love absurdism, and I can see what the devs were going for here. My main issue is that much of the humor is repetitive. Not literally the same jokes over and over, but the same kind of jokes. Extremely long awkward conversations. The main protagonist's neurodivergence constantly making him say the wrong things. His ghost companion frequently talking down to him, in an equally overly wordy manner. The entire game is extremely wordy, so if it doesn't click, the playing experience becomes tiresome. I should note that I was streaming the game, so the long conversations did not make that fun, due to the amount of text to be read out loud. I think this is a game best played on your own, unhurried, without an audience. If the long conversations bore you, you can read and click through as fast as you like. Of course, important information could randomly show up in the middle of long irrelevant …

Good and fun investigations pnc!

A delightful game. I was made aware of it through One Short Eye's video on it, My wife and I played it together as we do many games like this, we do the voice acting ourselves. It was genuinely laugh out loud funny and just a very fun experience. Some of the puzzles stumped us, but thankfully nothing too moon logicy. Really loved the relationship between Oliver and Englebert. Felt very sincere, even when they were being sarcastic. Really hope this gets a follow up. We want to see what happens next. Great job man. You clearly put your whole heart into this.

I really wanted to like this, since I love the Darkside Detective games. Phantom Fellows is not for my taste, though. I am not saying the game is terrible and encourage any reader to weigh positive and negative reviews before making the choice to buy this game. With that out of the way, this is my take: I found the text really annoying, like it is trying too hard to be funny. There are good jokes, but most of them are just forced and/or reeeeeeally long-winded. This could be tolerated, if not for the fact that in the middle of many of those overly elaborate, drawn-out dialogue there is, sometimes, information that is useful for solving the puzzles. So the player must pay close attention to all that nonsense to fish out the obscured information. Oh god. Comparatively, not every Darkside Detective joke makes me laugh either, but at least they are harmless one-liners.

Pretty fun dialogue and puzzles.