5/10Developer: Duelboot | Released: 2014 | Genre: Adventure, Facile

This one barely took an hour to get through – I almost put it in a Short Sessions blog post instead.

It felt crude and simple in the beginning, like a small fan mission for e.g. Half-Life. I woke up in a space station – all alone of course – and walked from a bedroom to a greenhouse, then to a lounge, the kitchen, and back into the greenhouse. I was about to quit at that point, but then I noticed that something was different. Turned out that time had passed when looping through the sections.

This immediately made the experience more interesting. I kept circling around in the sections to observe the changes. This led to a new location and a surprise. And as a free game, I’d say the surprise is worth giving it a shot – just don’t expect awesomeness.

7/10Developer: Random Seed Games | Released: 2015 | Genre: Adventure, Facile

A very short walking simulator facile adventure. It took me about 66 minutes to get through it.

I spawned in the middle of a big desert area and had to find more than a dozen points of interest. Usually temples, cities and huge statues with an object to click for a screen of white text. Time was slowed down significantly and that gave me a few minutes to seek out two or three of the points before an asteroid brought upon the apocalypse. It was not possible to visit all points in one session alone.

Oh, the irony. I just came from Outer Wilds, another game that gave me limited time to explore before a celestial event annihilated everything – forcing me to start over again.

Now, the day after, I happened to play another game with the exact same core idea.

8/10Developer: The Fullbright Company | Released: 2017 | Genre: Adventure, Facile

I’d say this is one of the best of its kind, if you’re into walking simulators facile adventures.

As a female investigator I arrived at a big space station orbiting Earth. A crew of six had gone missing after a breach of oxygen and loss of communication, and it was my job to find out what happened. But due to the nature of this genre, it was pretty much devoid of actual puzzles or action.

I could enter three major sections of the space station in a specific order and play back AR recordings of the ghostly appearances of the crew members. It was even possible to rewind and fast forward while walking between their spacetime placeholders. Sometimes I could access their AR logs and mail system too. The only thing that required a little bit of attention was if a 4-digit code for a door was revealed.

I bet this game would be great with Virtual Reality goggles.

6/10Developer: Paul Cuisset | Released: 2015 | Genre: Adventure, Point & Click

Next up in my (barely diminishing) backlog was this adventure game by the creator of the classic platformer Flashback, which is probably why I bought it cheap on sale some years ago.

It turned out to be unremarkable, with a just touch of 3D viewing and ungraceful controls.

The game started with the attempted suicide of the protagonist, Franklin, who then awakens in a pod on an island where a robotic voice wants him to solve puzzles. There were four chapters lasting about 6 hours for me, starting in a laboratory and then continuing outside on the island itself.

Each of the chapters had typically 2-3 screens. Both the screens and most zoomed-in locations had a subtle touch of 3D viewing around an object, or at least a little bit to the sides. This was actually confusing in the beginning of the game and had me overlook some points of interest because they were hidden behind an object. Interacting with an object was also weird by having me open a few icons with a mouse button and then dragging the mouse in the direction of the chosen icon.

This reminded me of Fahrenheit that I tried recently, where something like this was also required.

9/10Developer: Introversion Software | Released: 2017 | Genre: Adventure, Exploration

Finally a game that made me very happy to still be a PC gamer. This one was fascinating and had me glued to the screen for the two hours it lasted. Sure, that’s not exactly long – but the main gimmick does get a little exhausting and so I was actually glad it wasn’t longer.

As a first person exploration game, I spawned in a tent in the bottom of an enormous cave system. The tent itself had the only static light in the entire game. Outside, I picked up VR goggles and a hand-held scanner. The scanner could be activated to shoot out a cluster of lasers for drawing dots on the walls of the cave. Holding the scanner in the same direction added more dots for more details.

It was quite clever and immediately made the cave feel deep, vast and unexplored.