[PC] Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within (1995)

How:
Heard of it since Amiga times, got on GOG during a Halloween sale.
Pros:
- Relaxing gameplay, nice mysterious atmosphere
- Good acting with authentic German speakers
- Some nice puzzles
Cons:
- Many puzzles are just a matter of going back and forth talking to people
- Overly slow cutscenes
- Extremely tedious arcade sequences
- No subtitles
- Some aggravating pixel hunting
- Handwritten letters have keyboard-specific typos, completely ruins immersion

Ending scene, with my tiny 679/679 score in the top-right.

[PC] Her Story (2015)

How:
Got on GOG during a summer sale.
Note:
I uncovered two knock-code messages (BYDHANNAN and LOVEU), but couldn't use them anywhere.
Pros:
- Nice FMV based gameplay, quite immersive
- Interesting investigation
Cons:
- The actress is not very good
- Very difficult to uncover all the tapes, you end up with trying random words

[PC] Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender (1992)

How:
Got on GOG on a Black Friday sale.
Pros:
- Nice sci-fi setting
- Nice minimalistic background music
- Nice graphics and animations
Cons:
- Slow movement, not possible to skip
- Basic inventory-oriented puzzles
- Fonts are large and hard to read

Taking a leak - first time ever in a game?

Cosmic innuendos.

I thought the scribblings would be password or coordinates, but apparently they appear in other Microprose adventures (e.g. Dragonsphere). 

[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] 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] Toonstruck (1996)

How:
Heard of it since forever, played it on ScummVM.
Pros:
- Great graphics, animations, and many funny cut-scenes
- The game manages to find a balance between cute/cartoony and downright odd/violent
- Excellent voice overs, fitting music and sound effects
- Well-balanced puzzles, many of which follow their own crazy logic but are nevertheless very fair
Cons:
- Dialogues tend to be too long
- The few hotspots per screen make the game easier than necessary
- The game starts abruptly with no apparent reason on why Lloyd is sucked in the cartoony world, and he accepts the fact naturally

The scarecrow scene in its "malevolant" version...

...reminds me of this scene from Emerald City Confidential (2009)

[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] Tex Murphy: Martian Memorandum (1991)

How:
Bought in a bundle together with the first one.
Pros:
- Moody sci-fi/noir setting
- Very nice atmosphere and presentation combining 2D graphics and FMV
- Gameplay improvements of the point and click sessions over the previous installment
- Investigation is always fun
- Addition of music is welcome
- Almost all characters have voiceover
Cons:
- Interrogating people involves repeatedly going through dialogue trees until you get the answer that doesn't piss them off
- Music is nice but very low quality
- Many possible dead ends
- The yellow descriptions over location backgrounds are hardly readable
- Some annoying arcade and trial&error parts (kill the snake, pass through the quicksands, ...)

[PC] Tex Murphy: Mean Streets (1989)

Pros:
- A nice investigation game where taking notes is more than critical (and red herrings dominate!)
- A pleasantly clichéd cyberpunk dystopia that succeeds in capturing the player with its tangled plot
- Nice atmosphere overall with believable characters and a constant and dark (yet fitting) sense of humor
- Looking for clues, especially during interrogation, is fun and rewarding
- Alarms in the adventure parts (in the more classical sense) add a nice tension element to gameplay
Cons:
- Too much of the same, again and again
- The fighting scenes are totally useless and annoying
- No music
- Flight simulation totally out of place, or could have made for some memorable parts if better exploited
- While acceptable for the most part, graphics quality is very unbalanced and could be much better
- An incredibly frustrating arcade part in the end (running out of a door with the main character walking)
- Must talk with everybody about everything to get some particular clues
- Cannot save during the adventure parts, which contain unpredictable deaths and easily missable objects
- Many objects are never used and the verb "taste" is there just for fun
- Too much trial & error (e.g. bribe or threaten, pay Lee or wait for clues, push button or ignore it, etc.)
- Some implications are never revealed

[PC] Mystery Case Files: 13th Skull (2010)

Pros:
- Puzzles are well integrated and of average difficulty, making for a pretty casual long game (around 10-11 hours)
- Many human characters to interact with
- Excellent art and production (as always), with human actors well integrated into the environment
- Engaging mystery
Cons:
- The game tells you what needs to be done
- A handful of hints and objects are useless as they refer to the Collector's Edition
- Acting skills are sometimes dubious
- Dialogues are one-shot and there is not much of a choice
- A couple of ill-posed puzzles
- Many silly puzzles, e.g. dispose rubbish, make gumbo and look out for brushes and dusters for the housekeeper
- At times, the diary reveals facts that are still to be discovered

[PC] Mystery Case Files: Dire Grove (2009)

Pro:
- Belle atmosfere
- Ottima grafica
- Ottima musica ed effetti sonori
- Molto avvincente e piuttosto longevo
- Buon uso di FMV sia ingame che nelle scene di intermezzo
- Enigmi non banalissimi e mai frustranti
- Le parti di hidden objects non sono invadenti e hanno un loro perché
Contro:
- Storia già sentita
- Finale un po' brusco
- Recitazione altalenante che a volte lascia un po' a desiderare
- A volte troppo semplice, il gioco dà troppi aiuti
- A volte ci si ritrova a rivisitare a caso le stesse location per cercare nuovi oggetti

[PC] Phantasmagoria (1995)

Pro:
- Suggestivo
- Taglio decisamente cinematografico
- Gore
- Piuttosto longevo
Contro:
- Un bug può rendere impossibile il proseguimento
- In genere per procedere bisogna semplicemente rivisitare tutti i luoghi
- Le parti arcade (verso la fine) possono essere frustranti