Tardy Review (Genghis Pawn)
Tardy is a strange game. I'd recommend it on sale, but not at full price.
I liked the soundtrack and pixel art, but you might not. There's not a ton of super interesting pixel art, for reasons described below. Settings/options are adequate, with volume sliders and such.
The interface is point-and-click-ish, but there's no adventuring or exploring. I would agree with Fermi's description of the game as a "PUZZLE RUSH." You're stuck in a room until you solve the puzzle(s) that bring you to the next room. The only thing to do in any room is solve the puzzle(s). All interaction-points are marked by obvious hotspots. While inside a room, you can collect some objects/texts that you use to solve that room's puzzles, but there's no inventory bar, you just drag stuff wherever you want on the screen. All collected objects disappear when you arrive in the next room. There are perhaps a dozen rooms, and ~1-3 puzzles per room. So, the game is a bit short.
The puzzles are... alright. Most were not super challenging (which, as best I can tell, is what most annoyed Negative Reviewer #1 of 5 -- only 5 negative reviews at the time I'm writing mine). Some puzzles have you do interesting stuff by moving a collected object to the right spot on the screen: you "use" some objects by layering them over the gameplay area, which sometimes reveals useful info. The most difficult puzzles are difficult because you have to try to work out the (sometimes cryptic) logic behind them, but once you've done that, they're pretty straightforward. Chapter 3 (out of 4 Chapters) contained the puzzle that gave me the most trouble, and probably added ~45m to my playtime. That one felt tedious. Many puzzles involve finding codewords or passcodes in texts you find lying around. Some are logic-y or math-y. You push a lot of buttons. You play a handful of classic arcade games, for reasons unknown. There was one pretty annoying pipe-maze-type puzzle.
When you step up to a puzzle hotspot, the screen is dominated by that puzzle --usually a pixelated console of some kind. This -- combined with really tiny pixel-fonts for all in-game text -- made the whole game feel really cramped, in ways that were not entirely enjoyable. Silver lining: Since there's not much exploring, the painfully slow walking speed displayed in the trailer wasn't much of a deal-breaker: you don't really have to go anywhere, you just move from one (cramped) hotspot to another. Very rarely did walking speed become a burden. (So, Negative Reviewer #2 should calm down... especially since they only played 0.1 hours.)
What does more to interrupt pacing is the dialogue/story. Between puzzles you're bombarded with so much text. Ultimately, the core of the story is interesting, but it's a needle in the haystack of a lot of filler that doesn't need to be there. I think this is part of what has annoyed the last 3 out of 5 negative reviewers (see Fermi's review, and Dehexed's review, and stz's review). I wish the story had been streamlined a bit to cut out the flab and dodge reviews like those. Don't get me wrong, the writing isn't great -- the Store Page Description is more clever than most of the in-game writing. But for me, it was the sheer amount of in-game writing that was the main issue -- and the Store Page Description offers examples of the kind of useless filler I'm talking about.
Where do we land? There's not enough adventuring to appeal to the classic P&C fan, and not enough puzzles to appeal to the hardcore puzzle fan. The story is too flabby to fill out the gameplay and justify the price-point, and so again, I say: "Yea" if on sale, "nay" if not.