The Long Reach

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This is overall a good, retro-looking, psychological-horror adventure game. It is neither easy or hard, especially for the regular point & click adventurer. I must say; for a retro inspired pixel game, graphics are great, especially the color and the lighting, contributing a lot to the ambiance. Still, the ambiance owes most of its dept and thrill to the sound design and music score. As an audiophile, I was very surprised and found this 80's John Carpenter-inspired score just GREAT, but take note that you'll need a sub or large headphones to enjoy it to its full extend. Once past the artistic good stuff, things get less glorious. Gameplay wise, well; this is a point & click type adventure, just without the pointing and clicking... You read that right; you do not use the mouse. Why? Well, this is unjustified 95% of the time. Then, maybe 5% of the time at best, you'll have a sudden "run for your life" moment where you have to flee or hide from a surprise enemy. I don't know what to think about that, I'll let you judge for yourself. Furthermore, conversations could be optimised quite a bit, and the choice of what you say is totally irrelevant until the very last part / near-conclusion of the game. This is kind of insulting, to a lesser extend, to have to choose answers that will not change anything, so you may very well be ending like me, just blindly mashing the « A » button to get ahead. Inventory / problem-solving / interaction with the levels is different but okay. Scenario and writing is interesting but very obtuse and confusing, and the second half of the game left me much less motivated and interested. I also need to mention that I had a hard time swallowing the blasphemous delirium and overall just crude and gratuitous dialog between characters. Like so many things these days, it sometimes felt like it was written by a 13 years old; just plain immature « adulting » attitude way too often for my taste, with redundant swearing, as if it would make things look more serious (quite the opposite). As a french-canadian, I did try the French translation and got even more confused; I suspect the translators did not get the story much either. But to give the writers some credits, I did apreciate the humoristic touch quite a lot, and I wish there was more. The conclusion was perplexing and definitely original, but not breathtaking or memorable. Game time (a decent 4 hours) was okay for me, for the price I paid. I'd encourage the developpers again if they...