When I am coming to the forum, I have an issues to find a new posts, which I didnt read until now. On mainpage I can recognize by white/grey dot, if there is something new. If I am in thread list, I can see by icon if there are new posts or not. But thats all. It should be good to have easily visible read/unread messages and also have a direct link which will move you to the oldest unread message in that particular thread.

Or this function is somewhere there and I only didnt found it?

Alum: 6.5/10. Difficulty level: 6/10.

 ~8h gospel about good vs. evil.

First things first, it's a game from the team that made Wildwood Down, a game in my top 3 best p'n'c games of 2025. Honestly, I didn't know it was from the same developers until I finished the game. What a surprise.

Second, this game has a 67% rating on Steam, which is pretty bad for Steam and especially bad for p'n'c games, which are pretty beloved by those who play them. To be sure, I looked through ~200 games that came out in the last three years (yes, really), and only 10 of them had a mixed rating.

So why is that? From the negative reviews, it seems that people don't like that this game has a religious theme. It's not a secret; it says so on the Steam page. But people still didn't like it.
As for me (I'm not a religious nut nor a raging atheist)  I found it kinda refreshing. We have an OCEAN of murder mysteries and eldritch horrors, but games heavy on theism? Yeah, they're pretty rare.
That said, while I won't call this game preachy, it's not exactly subtle either. Some of the exposition was delivered pretty heavy-handedly, and some of the ideas were, well, silly. My favorite was magic blue Kool-Aid, which makes you speak with God after drinking it, and God tells you not to be sad about your recently dead love once, because you will die soon and meet them again. 

But how is the game?
Similar to Wildwood Down, the puzzles can be clever, tricky, and challenging. Unfortunately, the game suffers from a "few screens at a time" chapter structure. This means that at any given time, you are confined to a very limited space, and no matter how challenging the puzzles may be, they can still be beaten by brute forcing your way through them. I'm glad they changed it in Wildwood Down, and I hope they will keep it that way in the future.

Characters can range from "I believe in Jesus" to "Kidnapping kids is fun because I'm evil." There are more nuanced ones, but you will quickly realize where everyone falls on the good-evil spectrum. 

The visuals are nice, and the music is good. The voice acting is... well... wooden.  With a small cast of voice actors, everyone sounds the same. There's even a child character with a dude-bro voice in his mid-20s. It was hilarious.


Anyway, pretty fun game, play it if you not gonna melt because there is notJesus in the game.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/338420/Alum/

As far as I can tell, there isn't a spoiler tag available to add via the toolbar/BBCode: This would be useful given how plot and puzzle driven most adventure games are?

One of the main things I enjoy collecting are classic strategy guides, especially ones for 1990s PC games. I find them fascinating and almost always fun reads. They would often get really creative with their presentation, doing things like turning games into novelisations and including a bunch of behind the scenes info. I would take these any day over an internet walkthrough.

As we got towards the 2000s, the format changed to be larger full-colour guides and some of them are works of art.

I particular enjoy Prima's 'Secrets of the Games' series. But in the 1990s, before Prima and BradyGames really took over, it was fairly common for companies to produce their own guides with big ones coming from Sierra and Origin.

Anybody else collect game books?

Would it be worth having a sub-forum dedicated to adventure game devs? A place where people can both show off what they're working on as well as ask for help and guidance in getting started with it?

We all know that the best way to play classic point-and-click games is with a mouse. Consoles have historically been lacking in that regard.
Nevertheless, I played a lot of adventure games on my original Switch. That was probably because of its convenience, portability, huge library, and the fact that I don’t enjoy sitting at a PC as much nowadays (it feels a little too much like work).
With the new Switch adding mouse controls through the Joy-Con, I’m really excited to see how they might be implemented in adventure games. So far, I haven’t seen any titles take advantage of it, but I hope they do soon.
What are your thoughts on this?

I played through "The Expanse" from Telltale. 5 episodes plus the bonus episode.
Took about 9 hours.
It was typical Telltale fair with QTE's (although very easy) a couple of sneak past drones bits, but mostly explore and solve puzzles or talk to people.
Being in space means there is a element of verticality when looking for stuff. Float around in weightlessness.
I really like the IP, the books and TV show are great. It is a prequel as one of the characters appears at the start of the Show.
I liked it

Do appreciate this is an edge case, but it doesn't  happen with the main website so thought I'd mention it.
When a window goes over 2550px (I think), the whole forum jumps to the right of the screen rather than staying centre aligned.

From Dev of Lair of the Clockwork God and Gentleman Time Please



[b]Earth Must Die[/b] is the story of my glorious rise to power (off the back of my adored father’s passing), my subsequent accidental surrender to the Terranoids, and my infamous revenge against Earth and everything it stands for.
Apparently the story is retold in the form of one of those old point and click adventure games that people gave a sh*t about in the 1990s, I wanna say? But in 2025. Doesn’t sound like a good idea to me, but what do I know – I’m just a benevolent, terrifying leader of worlds who everyone loves and also super respects.
I’m also not sure what the phrase “British comedy royalty” is supposed to mean, but I guess they got a bunch of “funny” f*ckwits to dub over my glorious voyage to feed the Terranoids their own bumholes? Let me just copy/paste the list here so I don’t have to give them any more time and effort than they deserve:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/36397..._Must_Die/

The annual Halloween adventure game tourney is coming soon.  For anyone who's interested, here's a link to the announcement poster:
https://www.mysterymanor.net/forum/viewt...96#p201396