[TV] Bandersnatch (2018)

How:
Found it on Netflix.
Pros:
- Very good shooting, player choices fit smoothly in
- Cool and authentic overall feel
Cons:
- A big conspiracy theory
- Unlikable actors
- Overall underwhelming

The Bandersnatch game is a first-person blobber!

[PS3] Beyond: Two Souls (2013)

How:
Read about it on Adventuregamers.
Pros:
- Stunning graphics and settings (snow, underwater, guerrilla, etc.)
- Engrossing and captivating storyline
- Diversified gameplay throughout the story, mixing different genres
Cons:
- Limited interaction, mostly just a matter of following instructions
- Some annoying timed reaction moments with confusing mechanics
- No puzzles
- 90% sad / depressing mood

[PC] Harvester (1996)

How:
Got in on GOG during a winter sale.
Pros:
- Multiple ways to do things, and optional paths
- Captivating story, cool endings
- Nice in-game videos
- Some nice puzzles
Cons:
- While you can type questions in dialogue, each NPC only understand specific keywords (e.g. you can not ask your brother about "dad"). Then it is useless, just keep all the keywords in the list.
- Lots of game glitches
- Uninspired, repetitive music
- Tedious action sequences that just consist in button smashing
- Some annoying pixel hunting

Might as well be taken from a Lynch movie

[PC] Papers, please (2013)

How:
Saw the trailer on GOG, got it from a friend in a Humble Bundle.
Pros:
- Great totalitarian / dystopian atmosphere
- Cool fitting music and sound effects
- Cool pixel graphics
- Nice gameplay, a mixture of puzzle gaming and casual time management
- The story is nicely injected
- Includes mini-quests and achievements (in the form of tokens)
Cons:
- Missing details can get quite frustrating
- Starts hard
- Some descriptions and tasks are not clear, had to find out by trial and error
- Easy to misclick

"Aspetta prendi il mio tesserino, prima che..."

[PC] Tex Murphy: Under a Killing Moon (1994)

How:
Had the title in my head since forever, found and got it from GOG.com.
Pros:
- Cool sci-fi / noir atmosphere
- An interesting unfolding story of conspiracy and mystery
- Some nice puzzles, including optional ones
- Amusing dialogue system, where you get to choose a "way" of saying things rather than the specific sentence
Cons:
- The sloggy movements make me feel nauseous after a while
- The game takes a while to kick off (at least the entire Day 1)
- Commands can get frustrating, especially adjusting the motion speed with the mouse
- Basically the first 3 days take place in the same few locations
- A few time-based puzzles

An amusing Alien reference. The little beast here is referred to as a "geigger".

[PC] Space Quest V: The Next Mutation (1993)

How:
Got with the Activision Quests sale at GOG.com.
Pros:
- Music and sound effects are much better than the previous episodes, and a pleasure to hear
- Very good graphics and animations
- Gameplay is relaxing and offers some variety. Even just sitting in the spaceship giving orders is fun and rewarding.
- You visit several locations
- Interesting, slowly unfolding story
- Cool comic-style cutscenes
- Nice puzzles
- Fewer dead ends and sudden deaths make the game much more enjoyable
- Cool climatic ending
Cons:
- You spend very limited time in each location

Alien references are my favorite!

[PC] Puzzle Agent 2 (2011)

How:
Got with the Humble Weekly Sale: Telltale Games.
Pros:
- Immersive, creepy atmosphere
- The amusing dialogues, funny characters and excellent writing never let the interest down
- The hand-drawn graphics and fitting music contribute to create a unique game experience
- Several scripted sequences bring about a cinematic feel to the game
- Excellent voice acting
- Compelling mystery
Cons:
- Some puzzles are extremely easy, and in general they are quite repetitive
- Too linear, the game basically tells you where to go and what to do

[PC] Deus Ex (2000)

How:
Played the demo when it came out after finishing Half-Life. Didn't like the game, expecting it to be a shooter, came back to it out of curiosity with a Steam sale.
Ending:
I played through all three endings.
Pros:
- Very cool graphics, just the kind I like
- Amazing music
- Very fine dystopic sci-fi story with surprising turns of events and cool characters
- Excellent voice-overs and acting for the most part
- Exploration is rewarded
- Game difficulty and length depend on the way it is played (stealth vs shooter)
- Taken in small doses, the game offers a unique, fun and rewarding experience
- Plenty of optional content and highly non-linear
- The game offers several possible ways to reach objectives and do things. For example, I couldn't enter an area due to a game-crashing bug, but I took an alternative (more difficult) path and still made it.
Cons:
- Several graphic (collisions) and sound (music / sound efx balance) glitches
- The game is extremely dark 90% of the time
- Ending cut-scenes are underwhelming
- Some conversations are not logged
- If you attack or otherwise damage a character and do not kill him, everyone instantly knows where you are
- Not many cut-scenes
- The game is excessively long, more like a game and its sequel
- Some showstopping bugs (I couldn't enter Canal Road in HK without losing all inventory and crashing the game - had to take the difficult path)
- Enemies do not give the alarm if they see a door opening, a dead fellow, or other suspicious events
- The game misjudges your behavior with no good reason. Some NPCs (Carter, Navarre) described me as a naturally born assassin even though I didn't kill anyone, but Navarre did as a consequence of me being spotted by the enemy.

One of the three endings. Here I merge with Helios AI.

My final skill set.

My final set of augmentations. I mostly used the subdermal radar transparency, silent running, and the spy drone. Auto-healing also helped in the final chapters.

[PSP] Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together (2011)

How:
The game was frequently mentioned on review websites and forums, bought it for 5€ at Gamestop as a first game for the PSP for long trips.
Pros:
- Huge replayability value with loads of extra contents
- Extremely non-linear
- Can be very challenging
- Epic final battle
- Some very good in-game graphics and special effects especially near the end
- Very good character portraits
- Can revisit past events and undertake new paths to get different outcomes
- A lot of different classes, skills, magic spells, items, and so on
- Many special moves that gradually unlock with experience
- Economy works well
- The game records all previous events, dialogues and cut-scenes
Cons:
- The story is very contrived, full of difficult-to-memorize names, and dialogues that are extremely hard to follow
- Sometimes when action happens at the borders of the screen, you cannot see who's aiming at who and what's the induced effect (you only know a posteriori)
- Music is boringly epic
- Some of the game mechanics are too tedious to be actually usable (e.g. recipes, beast hunting)
- Some character classes cannot use certain magic spells for no apparent reason, even if the spell can be learned and the character has the right magic skills
- Not being able to see the map/enemies before entering the battle field greatly reduces the strategic value of the game (e.g. entering a map full of undead without bringing someone able to exorcize them)
- Grinding new characters for experience can be very difficult as the game progresses, since enemy strength is balanced with the player's strength

[PC] Flight of the Amazon Queen (1995)

How:
Didn't know the game before it was given for free on Ubuntu together with Beneath a Steel Sky. Finally played it after getting it (for free) on Gog.com.
Pros:
- Very nice animations and graphics
- Nice overworld map idea (Joe looks at the jungle from a pinnacle, with a nice parallax effect)
- Very good voice overs
- Several cutscenes
- Some amusing sections (e.g. dialogue with Death before taking the boat)
Cons:
- Cannot skip dialogues
- Mostly inventory oriented puzzles, with tons of inventory items
- Graphics, music and overall tone are too much reminiscent of Monkey Island and Indiana Jones
- Uninspired, sometimes annoying music
- Some bad jokes
- Must mouse over items twice to get a description

[PC] King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow (1992)

How:
Often heard of it as one of the best adventure games ever, got on Gog.com with the King's Quest 4+5+6 pack.
Points:
I managed to finish the game with 228/231 points without using a walkthrough (I actually needed a walkthrough just to open the ink bottle...). The only puzzle I missed was feigning death in front of the black cloaked man, since I got the correct lamp by trial & error. Still got the best ending possible.
Pros:
- Some memorable and diversified music
- Generally good voiceovers
- You get to ride a black winged horse to the realm of the dead!
- Direct references to previous episodes of the series
- Rather lengthy, with a great amount of optional content
- The second half of the game is amazing (realm of the dead + castle)
- Very nice and logical puzzles
- Great graphics and cool cutscenes
- The possibility to die or get dead ends makes gameplay more exciting
Cons:
- Some super-fast animation glitches
- Some audio glitches (sometimes the music volume covers the narrator's voice)
- Using an item or using an item on the main character give different results only with some items (e.g. the ink bottle must be used directly on Alexander to open it)
- The Isle of Wonder seems more like the deus-ex-machina of missing inventory items
- Once again a final love ballad
- Some tedious backtracking required
- Trial & error required to solve certain puzzles
- Dead ends (usually quite clear though)

[PC] Hector: Badge of Carnage - Episodes 1-3 (2011)

How:
Heard about it on Adventuregamers as a iOS exclusive, then got it with the Humble Weekly Sale: Telltale Games.
Pros:
- Nice puzzles
- Very good voiceovers
- Smooth animations and graphics integrating well characters and background
- Cool cut-scenes
- Some amusing characters and situations
- Lots of humor
- Nice music fitting well the different areas and situations
- Surprisingly lengthy
- Overall fun, colorful and well balanced
Cons:
- Perhaps exceedingly rude at times (e.g. fill used condom with pee)
- Some glitches
- Some annoying characters (the DJ in the last episode, the kids in the park)

[PC] Beneath a Steel Sky (1994)

How:
Played the Amiga demo as a kid, finally got it for free on GOG.
Pros:
- Excellent graphics and animations
- The Virtual Teathre engine retains all the good points from Lure of the Temptress and hugely improves upon them
- Voiceovers are so good and enriching that this is probably the first time I leave them on when given the option
- Amazing, compelling story with a great pace
- Very good and moderately challenging puzzles with some well placed red herrings
- Memorable characters and lines
- Some very humorous parts (e.g. the trial)
Cons:
- People tend to get in the way (especially Joey)
- Music quality could be better
- Some bugs and crashes

[PC] Dragonsphere (1994)

How:
Promoted on Gog.com as a freeware game, got it without knowing anything about it. Played it after reading hg101 review.
Additional comment:
Not quite as short as most reviews mention (I think I needed around 10-11 hours from start to finish). The slow movements might have contributed.
Pros:
- Very good graphics and excellent in-game animations
- Very good (sometimes creepy) music
- The game has a very immersing, serious atmosphere differentiating it from most other adventures in similar fantasy settings
- Great dialogues and overall very likable characters
- A very deep and intriguing story with cool ideas thrown everywhere and a dramatic turn of events
- There are some rather challenging (but fair) puzzles
- Some puzzles can be solved in multiple ways
- Death is automatically undone, with no need to reload
- Lots of interactive elements, with long text descriptions
Cons:
- Movements are rather slow and unskippable (e.g. when climbing the mountain)
- Mediocre voice acting, thankfully it can be turned off
- Perhaps too many red herrings (both useless inventory items and misleading puzzle solutions, e.g. the poems)
- The story can be "broken" in a couple of ways (e.g. by going to the Spirit Plane without knowing about the Soul Egg)
- The interface can be confusing as some objects have item-specific default actions, e.g. a hidden button on the wall has "Activate" as default action, and "directions" can also be examined (this is especially important towards the end of the game when a door must be examined to reveal the symbol of a crown)

[PC] The Rail (2012)

How:
Got with the AGS Bake Sale.
Pros:
- Excellent graphics and animations
- Nice setting
- Good puzzles
Cons:
- Music and sound effects are barely audible
- A couple of graphical glitches
- Too bad it's so short

[PC] 11-11-11 (2011)

How:
Probably heard about it on Adventuregamers.com monthly freeware feature and downloaded it right away.
Pros:
- Very cool graphics and cutscenes, in general very good production values
- Nice story
Cons:
- Way too dark
- Just a few puzzles
- Very few interactive items
- Some interface glitches

[PC] Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh (1996)

How:
Had as a Christmas gift by my brother from my GoG wishlist.
Pros:
- Cool music fitting the b-movie atmosphere
- The final part (the alien planet) is nice and more adventure-like
- Some cool cut-scenes, especially at the end (meeting the alien, etc.)
- Decent special effects
Cons:
- Dull story even for a b-movie
- Very unlikable characters, the main character in particular
- Boring and very repetitive gameplay, consisting on clicking on everything everywhere
- Very few puzzles
- Only 5 places to visit on the map

[PC] AlternativA (2010)

Pros:
- Neat graphics
- An interesting, moody dystopia
Cons:
- Ugly cutscenes
- The main character looks handicapped
- Dubbing is below average
- The humor present at parts doesn't fit at all with the general mood
- Puzzles are too immediate
- Death is very annoying and totally useless
- Art is sometimes ruined by a bad framing choice
- The plot is not totally clear and not fully explained in the end
- Some bugs

[PC] Next to Evil (2010)

Pro:
- Grafica minimale simpatica
- L'idea dello split è interessante
Contro:
- Ha qualche bug
- Troppo semplice e immediato

[PC] Secret Files: Tunguska (2006)

Pro:
- Storia coinvolgente, ottima longevità
- Grafica stupenda e ambientazioni suggestive
- Cut-scene ottimamente realizzate, dal taglio cinematografico
- Si viaggia molto e la protagonista si cambia anche i vestiti
- Si arriva a controllare due personaggi
Contro:
- Enigmi non ben bilanciati (alcuni molto facili, altri ostici)
- Gli enigmi basati su inventario sono banali in quanto non è possibile provare combinazioni errate
- A ogni modo spesso le combinazioni giuste sono insensate
- Alcune sessioni di pixel hunting