The Samaritan Paradox

Don't even bother trying to play this without a walkthrough. This game's problems are many: barely any direction, nonsensical puzzles and interactions, requiring you to click items in specific order or they just do not work, designating parts of the same item on screen as different clickable areas, multiple timing based puzzles, a complete clustertruck of a "plot", absurd and unbelievable characters, UI straight out of the MS-DOS days, dodgy voiceover on half the characters, some extreme pixel hunting, unlikable main character, author's barely disguised political soapbox - just to name a few. There's tons of much better point and click games out there, don't waste your time with this.

This game is just awful. I don’t think there was a single point at which I had any idea what the actual ♥♥♥♥ it wanted me to do. I mostly stumbled into progressing the story by interacting with everything, and even when I knew what I had to do, implementing the solutions was often so obtuse I still needed to look at a guide (looking at you, you ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ compass horse). This may be the worst-designed point-and-click I’ve ever played. Ten years after Wadjet Eye! Ten years! The self-satisfied, navel-gazey story was insufferable. The game was so, so in love with how supposedly clever it was, which frankly was probably part of why the puzzle design was so bad. But also it was so busy thinking it was engaging it never spent time actually being engaging, and was actually insanely trite. I saw someone in a Steam forum thread say, “‘Wait, when did we learn that?’ might as well have been the subtitle of this game,” and it’s an accurate comment. Then there’s the ugly, blurry pixel art, the miserable UI, the terrible demarcation of interactables, the weird bug where text would start autoskipping and I’d have to restart to fix it which meant hitting ALT-F4 because there’s no ‘quit’ button in …

The game starts off well, with an appealing storyline on paper. But it quickly loses its appeal, with uninspired puzzles and linear gameplay. You get bored very quickly and want to play something else. It's a big disappointment, which is a shame. I paid less than a euro for it, and I think it's a waste of money. Even if it were free, I wouldn't recommend it. Honestly, was this game even tested? The storyline is forced, the puzzles are rubbish. The menus and save system are from another era, and unfortunately there's a bug that causes you to lose control of the mouse and can happen at any time. I'm playing the game with a walkthrough and even that makes it very tedious. Seriously, play something else, don't waste your time.

Recommended if you like point and click. There's a few pixel hunts and puzzles where you're like "I didn't know I could do that" due to lack of signposting, but I liked the story.

Jammed pencil award

So this was an interesting experience. I will say, it's not without flaws: the overreliance on left AND right clicking everything, examining things over and over, certain puzzles being too fiddly or slow, can be annoying. And the pacing isn't smooth, it goes: short intro, decent intrigue, cripplingly slow annoyance, mild intrigue, all wrapped up. As you work towards "finding Chapter 2" and working through it, the puzzles change and become improperly designed (with the sundial puzzle relying on completely random info rather than clues you can find or the crossword puzzle needing you to do something illogical to get the answer or, as I did, find the correct name but with an incorrect spelling). However, while I did start to lose interest during that dip, while it did irk me, after that section it actually picked up again. In fact, I dare say it accelerated rapidly, it feels like the ending hit almost immediately after that section. But it actually wrapped up fairly well, with a decent twist, all the loose ends tied up, and somewhat realistic dramatic flair. Plus, as I was aiming for the "I got your back" achievement, it really gave that last twist a nice moment of humanity to it all…