Time to pick the next community playthrough!

edit: you can still sign up as a leader, just post a comment below.

Which games have you personally played and enjoyed enough to recommend?

I specifically want to know of games with multiple endings.

Along with an approximate amount of endings that are included.

Thanks in advance. 

I follow two great adventure game podcasts: Podcasts | Adventure Game Hotspot (of course) and Adventure Games Podcast.

I found this one searching around, but it seems to be inactive (although the associated YouTube channel is still active):  YakWaxLips - YouTube

Anyone know of any others?

I got to do a podcast, first time ever!

We talk about creating games and my two games that are now on Steam, Intrigue At Oakhaven and Haunting At Cliffhouse.

Check it out here:

https://youtu.be/yFz3kADraik?si=Gdl3ecCckk_WO8Ub

I'm working on a big project about the 1998 FMV game Black Dahlia. In addition to doing my usual "Fair & Balanced" bullshit video where I just rant about the game, I've also been doing interviews with the cast and crew for a "making of" mini-documentary, as well as cutting together a 4 hour movie of all the FMV scenes.

I'm hoping to also get some soundbites from people who actually bought and played the game when it was released. I'm sure the game has fans out there somewhere, even though it wasn't terribly popular upon its release, and I would be very keen to hear from people who played it and still have fond memories of it.

I want to bring Black Dahlia back in a big way. If you want to be part of this multi-tiered deep-dive retrospective and if you have valuable insights to offer as a fan of the game, then please let me know. I'm especially looking for people who want to be interviewed for the mini-documentary I'm putting together to flesh out the perspective of those who actually played it back in the day.

The setting, style and tone for non-gameplay aspects influence even what kind of puzzles end up making sense.  Ofcourse they also really influence just the whole experience. For tone and style, we have cartoony games vs. semi-cartoony vs realistic games, where the former tends to have wackier tones and the last more serious tones, but not always. In terms of general types of settings, there's the ones I placed in the Poll. What I mean here is not something specific as ''It's takes place in Venezuela'' but more broader types of settings.

Personally, I think my favorite is the horror one as well as the little surreal abstract dream like sections. I'm not super big on most horror movies unless they're on the more psychological side. But I just like dark, thrilling tones. The Cat Lady/Downfall (original and remake) and The White Chamber were some I really liked.
Another favorite for me is the mystery/detective side of things.  I have fond memories of watching my mom play CSI games, I know they're not considered the best but I have a soft spot for them .

edit: Modern supernatural or fantasy can both go for urban fantasy like Unavowed! Depends on which aspect you align with more. The horror one may be more like a really broad ''theme'' but you get the idea, it tends to effect the vibe of the whole game a lot I mean there's even people into horror in general regardless of the type of game, but I'm not really into horror games in general.

I'm not sure if this incident is very well known outside of North America, or even through most parts of the US outside of the Great Lakes region, but today marks the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior and I've been thinking about it a lot, so now you're stuck reading about it.

The ship was a massive 700-foot American freighter that got caught in a hurricane-strength storm (not technically a hurricane, but the Great Lakes are so huge they have their own violent weather systems that can rival the oceans) and went down suddenly in Canadian waters with all 29 men aboard without even a final distress call.

Surely not the biggest of naval catastrophes in the world, but perhaps one of the best known because it was immortalized by singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot in his haunting folk ballad "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." I'm old enough to have grown up with the song, and to this day it remains hugely influential in driving interest to the museum in the region that honours the fallen sailors.

The ship has been found but the exact cause of the wreck still isn't known, and further expeditions are largely forbidden. The waters are so cold there that the ship and its crew are still largely preserved, so it's essentially considered a graveyard at sea.

Anyway, it's a fascinating story, and a gut-wrenching tribute song by Lightfoot if you've never heard it. I encourage you to have a listen, and I can't imagine anyone not being moved by it.

Fun fact: The song was recorded only a month or so after the sinking, and the recording was not just from a single take, but the very first take, and even more incredibly, the very first time they actually played it together in full. The drummer didn't even know when to come in, waiting for Lightfoot to nod as a cue, and it went on so long without that he thought Lightfoot had forgotten! They did a few more takes after that, but none captured the magic of that very first attempt.



And as a special bonus, here's a fairly new music video with a cover of the song by an a capella group called Home Free. I was initially skeptical that anyone could do the song justice, but dang they dun good!

What is that one feature in adventure games which makes you automatically gravitate to the purchase button?

For me it's the inclusion of multiple endings. The more, the better.

I've been aware that a point and click game called A Vampyre Story existed for a long time, likely first discovering it from randomly browsing adventure game related Wikipedia pages a long time ago, and that it was somehow related to ex-LucasArts people. However at that time there wasn't much information online about it and it wasn't available digitally so I never thought much more about it. Recently I was reminded it of when during the last big Steam sale I discovered it had been digitally rereleased a few years ago. Since it was going for a really cheap price I just bought it on impulse. The past few weeks I've been casually playing it on and off and I just finished it yesterday so thought I'd write up some thoughts on it.

(By the way, after writing the following I realise I got a bit carried away, I never meant to write so much. I guess long form discussion is one the benefits of forums though... skimming and posting your own thoughts about the game is fine.)

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Note, the following contains no direct spoilers but there are some mild indirect spoilers that naturally occur when describing a game. I also talk about the status of a sequel too near the end.

The story follows Mona, an in denial vampire who is attempting to escape from Baron Shrowdy, the one who turned her and then imprisoned her within his castle. After escaping she wishes to return to her life as an up and coming opera singer in Paris. If you try to imagine what a cartoonish french opera singer from the 19th century may sound like, what you're thinking of is very likely close to how she speaks. Even though it is (I assume deliberately) cliche I thought it worked quite well for her character and the type of game this is. She is joined by her friend and side kick Froderick the bat. Their comic dynamic is similar to other double acts found in quite a few other adventure games.

While the story is mostly light hearted, one small detail about Mona's character that I liked was her constant denials of being a vampire to Froderick and her resorting to other explanations like she is just 'cursed' and so has to drink special 'wine'. As the game continues these denials start to lessen with each small step towards her goal of returning to her former life, perhaps in some way showing that she is slowly realising that goal may not actually be possible given she is now a walking corpse and while getting away is still the plan, she will have to 'live' with her new life (but I've no idea how this is actually resolved, but back to this later when I mention the sequel). It's not a dark game though so definitely do not get the wrong impression, it's just a subtle thing I noticed underneath the wacky cartoon comedy atmosphere that makes up the vast majority of the game.


For interactions the game features a click and hold wheel to pick actions from, a style I've always liked and which really reminds me of the mid to late era LucasArts games. In Mona's case hers features a 'fly' action that is used to attempt to use her bat transformation ability on things - I always appreciate it when characters have unique abilities that fit the theme of the game. One detail I liked is how large items are handled with your inventory, Mona does not immediately pick them up but instead keeps a mental note and when you do eventually find what you're meant to use the large item for, she quickly travels back to grab it. One annoying thing that I noticed in the first few minutes of gameplay is Mona's walking speed is very slow, but I quickly found that the cancel button also cancels animation and can be used to 'teleport' her to the target location she is walking towards. Right clicking arrows for location changes also works.

For puzzles I quite liked them for the most part. Nothing too insane but still with some challenge to give that bit of frication that makes point and click games enjoyable. However there was one puzzle around the middle of the game that did verge close to being irritating and I suspect someone that isn't used to 'adventure game logic' may struggle with it and give up. In the second half of the game it 'opens up' a little, allowing you to work on several different tasks at the same time over a slightly larger series of locations and this part felt better designed than the first half.

The art of the game uses a mix of detailed 2D backgrounds with animated 3D characters and interactive elements overlaid on top of them. I think it looks rather nice, and the approach reminds me of games like Full Throttle and The Curse of Monkey Island which each use a more distinctive style over the nostalgia driven 'chunky pixels' look that so many 2D adventures go for (that may be a controversial thing to say...). This comparison makes sense given that, after I completed the game, I looked up information on it and found that the main LucasArts connection is Bill Tiller who worked on the art for these LucasArts titles.


While I don't want to include direct spoilers I have to mention how the game ends. It ends suddenly. The credits come out of nowhere right after a cinematic that was seemingly setting up the next location the story was going to progress to. It's almost like the end of an episode in an episodic game. Despite deliberately not looking up information on the game up right before playing it so I could go in as 'blind' as possible, one detail I did still remember about it was that it was a commercial failure so as soon as I seen the credits I was sure there was no way it got a sequel. After the credits ended (which included a message saying Mona and Froderick will return in A Vampyre Story 2) I immediately looked it up and yes, a sequel was planned but never happened. It's rather unfortunate as there was clearly set up for where the story was going and even a bit of foreshadowing of one character that would likely appear in this sequel and may have a large role based on them being featured in the drawn story book illustrations that appear during the opening cinematic, and who seems to be referred to and given a name in some random Mona and Froderick bantering in the second half of the game.

I then looked the game up on Steam to check the reviews/forum (I put this off until finishing the game so I could form my own opinion on it) and while doing so a new upcoming game called 'A Vampyre Story: A Bat's Tale' appeared in the search results which has a store page with trailers, screenshots and recent news updates. It turns out that a sequel just so happens to actually be happening now and being made by a new team with the blessing of the original creator, with some of the voice cast returning (including Mona's), and there is even a AGH interview about it: https://adventuregamehotspot.com/intervi...unas-ledas (which I haven't watched yet). So I guess I'll need to keep my eye out for whenever that releases now that I'm somewhat invested in the story...

I enjoyed playing the game and I can't help but wonder if its failure was down to the unfortunate timing of when it came out. If it came out in the 2010s instead of the late 2000s it may have found more success.

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Technical issues with the game
I thought it was worth mentioning a few technical issues I encountered while playing. The biggest one was the game taking a long time to initially load locations, while I never timed it these loading times can could be around 30 seconds or more, during which the game freezes on a black screen with the background music still playing in a very broken this-game-has-crashed way. This does not reoccur when revisiting locations until you restart the game. I actually thought this was some kind of issue caused by running the game through proton (the game is listed as Steam Deck verified but that's not really a complete guarantee) and since it only happened once per location per game load I just lived with it. However after finishing it and reading the Steam forums I found this is just a problem that can happen with the game itself.

Another issue I found was a crash when attempting to use Froderick on a specific thing in one location. It happened a few times in a row from the same save but after doing some other things and then later reattempting it, it worked fine after that. In that specific case if it had not 'fixed itself' it would not have been game breaking as this specific interaction just triggered some dialogue.

Some random examples off the top of my head:  Space Quest x, Thimbleweed Park, x Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, LSL, Paradigm, Darkside Detective, Deponia, and on and on.

Very campy with varying degrees of cartoonish humor, often with spooky/supernatural themes.  

I know there are lots of other examples, but I perceive that the "spooky campy" genre dominates the field.

Why is this?  I think it's because these storylines are easy to make self-contained. The details of the spooky/supernatural stuff sort of fill in themselves because these tropes are familiar. In contrast, for example, the techno-noir themes that Wadjet likes require quite a lot more exposition that's hard to get into games without tons of reading. Even those games often have the supernatural component. 

As for the camp, I think it's just easier to get the comedy in when the theme is campy, and funny games are just more fun to play.