izigame.me

Amanda the Adventurer is a retro themed puzzle horror box game that isn't bad, but makes a few missteps that prevent it from being truly great.

First and foremost, this isn't a scary game. At most, it's a little creepy, and it has an interesting monster design, but you can only ever see it once, in a cutscene that locks you in place, so it's hardly terrifying.

The puzzles the game offers up are pretty hit or miss. Most of them are too simple, a few are a little too hard to figure out what is being asked of you, and the rest rely on you finding something hidden without any real clues as to where they are. I didn't hate the puzzles, but I did end up using a guide for a lot of them because the game isn't engaging enough for me to want to deep delve into it.

Now, the main things that I think keep this game from being truly stellar are the lore components and the ramping up of horror. I thought this was a slow burn horror that would slowly morph from a cheesy kids show into unknowable horror, but the kids TV show aspect is pulled out from under you immediately. This takes it from slow burn to no burn, and the horror isn't good enough to justify this rapid shift. Also, and I know this likely has ties to lore in the grand scheme of things, but I felt like there was a fantastic opportunity to make the player the cause of chaos in the game, but that's not really the case. The game has lots of input opportunities during the videos you watch, and most of them are extremely straight forward, but sometimes you can input something that isn't "right" but is still valid. I think the game would have been far more interesting if the kids show was pretty straight forward until YOU started messing with the answers and causing the characters to morph into monsters. Instead, the characters are just creepy and you can sometimes either ignore their creepiness or be complicit with them, but the game doesn't really care either way. The only real changes based on your answers are some secrets, some puzzle solutions, and one or two changes to dialogue that don't effect anything. A missed opportunity if I ever saw one

Now, I still think this game is pretty good, it's just not as good as I was hoping it would be, and it fails to be a great puzzle game or horror game. I'd prefer to give this game a middling score, but thumbs up or down is all we get.