[PC] Randal's Monday (2014)

How:
Got it on GOG during a winter sale.
Pros:
- Very smooth animations
- Some nice puzzles
Cons:
- Overly long and tedious, had to use a walkthrough to stop the pain
- Tries hard to be funny
- Unlikable characters
- Uninteresting plot
- Too much f*cking dialogue
- Some illogical puzzles
- Too many in-game citations to pop culture

The only fun part was to see Death in game.

[PC] Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (1987)

How:
Played Larry 3 in the past, got the entire collection on GOG.

Pros:
- Some fun situations (e.g. the flasher, the dance)
- Some nice puzzles
- Just the right game length

Cons:
- Slow movement
- Some walking dead scenarios
- Some random encounters carry important items
- Need precise wording for solving puzzles

Once again, I didn't get a full score in a Sierra game.

[PC] Fallout 2 (1998)

How:
Got during a Fallout series giveaway at GOG.com.

Pros:
- Limited items and money make resource management useful
- Well written and darkly fun dialogues
- Great graphics, fitting dark ambient / industrial music
- Lots of nonlinearity and side quests

Cons:
- Cumbersome and annoying inventory management
- Using items can be confusing, the "use" functionality is not always the correct way
- Brutal difficulty encourages save scumming
- NPCs keep getting in the way
- Several glitches and bugs

[PS4] Heavy Rain (2010)

How:
Heard of it on Adventuregamers, got on a PSN sale in a bundle with Detroit: Become Human.
Endings:
Saved the kid, the father, the FBI investigator; also had the FBI investigator die.
Pros:
- Excellent graphics and very immersive mood
- Cool FBI investigation mode
Cons:
- Terrible, awful controls
- Several gameplay and graphics glitches
- Annoying camera movement
- Gameplay is mostly reaction-based movie watching
- Too serious and self-aware tone

[PS4] Catherine: Full Body (2019)

How:
Wanted more after finishing the first Catherine, got it on PSN during sales.
Endings:
- I got the Rin true ending.
- I got to Rapunzel stage 22.
Pros:
- Sympathetic and likable characters
- Cool setting and overall style
- A very good challenge with clever puzzles
- Tons of level variations with high replay value, including the new blocks and Remix mode
Cons:
- A bit too silly in the finale

[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] I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (1995)

How:
Read about it on videogame magazines at the time, bought it on GOG during a winter sale.
Pros:
- Very cool graphics
- Six different settings with cool story, cool characters, great dialogues, and nice puzzles
- Amazing mood overall
- Different ways to do things
- Very good voice-overs
Cons:
- Some glitches and dead ends. I had to resort to a walkthrough to get the correct sequence of actions to finish Garrister's episode (even though I did the same things on my own, but in a different order).
- Some showstopping bugs
- The MIDI soundtrack is a bit neutral

Cool Alien-ish prehistoric 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..."

[PS3] Catherine (2011)

How:
Heard about it on Adventuregamers, found it on sale at Gamespot.
Endings:
I got the Katherine (Good) ending.
Pros:
- Cool and creepy atmosphere, nice characters, very stylish presentation
- A mixture of gameplay elements (including dating sim)
- The block sliding mechanics allow for unexpected strategies and techniques
- Lots of cutscenes
- Nicely written story and dialogues
- The jukebox in the bar features unlockable songs from the SMT franchise
- Quite some replay value (get gold statues, 2-players mode, Babel, finish the Rapunzel levels)
Cons:
- Very difficult to play when on the hidden side of the blocks. Controls are kind of reversed, and cannot see a thing; would have been nice to have a see-through button.
- Sometimes the music is louder than the voice-over
- The undo button sometimes places you in the wrong position
- In the later levels there are random, unfair events

[PC] Still Life (2005)

How:
Played the demo when the game was out, bought it during Anuman Games sales at GOG.com.
Pros:
- All dialogues are recorded and readable through the in-game log
- Cool music and graphics, perfectly fitting the mood
- Several cinematic cut-scenes
- Nice story, keeps the interest high
- Excellent voice-overs
Cons:
- Dialogue trees are non-existent, you just keep clicking and the main character decides what to say
- Almost trivial puzzles, alternated with very obscure ones (e.g. the lockpicking puzzle)
- Very little items to interact with
- The investigative aspects are limited and concentrated in the initial part. What happened to the photo taking feature?

[PC] Fahrenheit (2005)

How:
Heard about it on Adventuregamers.com, and got at a Holiday sale on GOG.com.
Pros:
- Excellent voice acting and dialogues
- Well worth playing just for the story and the cinematic presentation; keeps you in front of the screen to see how the story unfolds
- Excellent animations
- Great original score by Angelo Badalamenti
- Cool multiple character interaction
- Some truly memorable sequences (e.g. the hypnotization sequence with Agatha)
- Some nice, dynamic, and well animated sequences (e.g. basketball one-on-one match, fighting on a ring, bugs attack)
Cons:
- Frustratingly irritating controls and camera movements
- Some very annoying arcade sequences
- Almost no puzzles at all
- One reaction sequence actually requires you to NOT do it correctly (interrogation scene in the office), but I only found out by reading a walkthrough after finishing the game
- Timed dialogue system is just annoying and gives you no time to ponder about choices; a true pity one cannot explore the whole dialogue tree
- Cannot explore all dialogue options, and some of them are ambiguous; picking the right or most informative answer is mostly chance

[PC] Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers (CD-ROM version) (1992)

How:
Got with the Activision Quests sale at GOG.com.
Pros:
- Very nice graphics and animations, the best of the series so far (as much as I love EGA)
- Amusing idea of time-traveling across the previous and future episodes of the game
Cons:
- The high-pitched music can get quite annoying
- Cannot have voice and subtitles at the same time, had to play with no voiceover
- Two out of five possible actions have no use whatsoever
- Several frustrating trial-and-error arcade sequences
- Not many puzzles and not many locations to visit, the story just drives along on its own

You can visit SQIII if you input the correct code - which I did on my first random code trial!

My final score. This time I didn't play the Astro Chicken game in the arcade.

[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)

[Amiga][PC] Nippon Safes Inc. (1993)

How:
Played it on the Amiga several times as a kid, but never managed to finish it.
Pros:
- Excellent graphics and nice animations
- Overall a pleasant and relaxing adventure
- The Amiga version, although with no music, has simple sound effects which somehow help to establish the right adventurous mood
- The "Parallaction" system is actually nice: you play a parallel sequence of events from three different perspectives, with the characters interacting with each other
- Some nice puzzles
Cons:
- Pixel hunting needed in several occasions
- Few hot spots, and repetitive locations
- In-game jokes about the programmers and the game itself completely break the mood
- Not clear which places can be explored (e.g. in front of the prison at the beginning you can go left or right, but it all looks the same), can leap places by accident (this happens frequently)
- Not very intuitive interface, especially for combining objects
- Actions cannot be interrupted, plus path-finding is sometimes annoying
- Some graphical glitches and bugs
- Japanese language is used incorrectly
- Items have no description
- Some obtuse puzzles
- The PC version has some very annoying and distracting music, and no sound effects

The "Kinza" ticket is in fact a ticket for Ueno (上野).

Not surprisingly, this Italian game also features political references.
A statue of Andreotti is also appearing in the museum.

And this is where the title of the game comes from.

[PC88] Cosmic Soldier (1985)

How:
Found about this game after reading of Psychic War on the レトロゲームの塔 blog.
Pros:
- Nice setting
- The character leveling system is mildly interesting
- You can recruit allies among the enemies
- Generally well balanced, requires some strategy
- Nice variety of monsters
- The accompanying android idea is not bad
Cons:
- No music at all
- The few sound effects are unpleasant
- Requires a considerable amount of grinding
- Junk shops are totally useless
- Limited variety of weapons and armors, and no special attacks whatsoever
- Very limited and repetitive gameplay mechanics
- Only one save slot per party
- Very high encounter rate
- Ugly interface, the game could have looked much better with a bigger first-person view

My winning party. This must have been my fourth or fifth party overall.

The End. All playing characters and enemy sprites are seen dancing with pom-poms as if nothing ever happened.

[PC98] Venus - ヴィーナス (1994)

How:
Read about the game from the True Love review on Hardcoregaming101.
Ending:
I finished the game with 3 out of 4 girls without walkthrough in one go.
Pros:
- Very nice character pixel graphics, fitting very well with the backgrounds
- Generally fitting music
- Many endings (each ending is an AV recorded by the main character for his almost bankrupt company)
Cons:
- Gameplay is very simplistic, just set a date and go there
- Very few places to visit
- Very few events
- House items have descriptions but no use at all

[PC] True Love (1995)

How:
Came to know of it while chatting with my brother and got a downloaded version directly from him.
Note:
The English translation is the official Windows port.
Endings:
I got the Remi ending on my own and then saw all the others at once by following a walkthrough.
Pros:
- Mostly nice pixel graphics for both backgrounds and characters
- Some nice endings
- Some unexpected routes (e.g. saving a girl drowning in the ocean)
- Grinding skills can be rewarding
- There is a cameo of Akane from the game Venus
Cons:
- Music can get very repetitive
- Some typos
- Some continuity bugs
- A few ugly character drawing, few background scenes (most of them are just recolored)
- Very dumb, clichéd setting
- Unlikable main character
- Unrealistic dialogues

This character here is 茜 from Venus (1994).

[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