[Android] Detective Grimoire: Secret of the Swamp (2014)

How:
Found on Adventuregamers.com after looking for some nice Android games. Bought from the Play Store.
Pros:
- Outstanding voice acting and soundtrack
- Amazing artwork with fluid, cartoonish animations and high quality cut-scenes that are just a pleasure to look at
- Very likable characters with funny, smart dialogues
- Nice spooky setting
- A lot of attention to detail (e.g. different voice recordings for the same sentences, animated buttons, each character has some small peculiarity)
- Different puzzle mechanisms (e.g. construct deductions from sentence fragments) bring some change to the usual inventory-based puzzles
Cons:
- Too many interface gimmicks that do not get used in the end (e.g. count of suspicious facts for each character, notes, etc.)
- Rather short
- Very easy
- The liquid mini-game has always the same solution (i.e. green)

[Android] ラピスと不思議なラビリンス (2013)

How:
Found by looking for nice Japanese 脱出 games on Google Play.
Note:
Could not finish the game due to a bug (shaking the mobile does not work as expected), nevertheless this happened a couple of puzzles before the ending.
Pros:
- Very nice pixel art
- Some clever puzzles involving the motion sensors of the mobile
Cons:
- The game feels like a random mix-up of fantasy elements and unrelated puzzles
- Item descriptions appear on the bottom-right, which is usually covered by the hand during play
- Some items are only needed for the sake of collection

[Android] The Lost City (2012)

How:
Read some review on Adventuregamers after explicitly looking for more Android games to play.
Pros:
- Beautiful graphics and very fitting animations
- Nice, well-balanced puzzles
- Fitting music
- Immersive atmosphere
- Nice game for some relaxed, light-hearted adventuring
Cons:
- Music is a bit repetitive, could be much better with a different theme per season
- Underwhelming, almost non-existing finale
- The overlaid text is too much in the way
- Essentially a back-tracking game, can get tedious
- Some mechanical puzzles can be solved before the PC has a way to find the solution, but the game does not accept the solution even if correct (e.g. combinatorial puzzles)

[PC] Gemini Rue (2011)

How:
Got with the Bundle-in-a-Box Adventure bundle.
Pros:
- Excellent graphics and music, reminiscent of Beneath a Steel Sky and Blade Runner
- Rather lengthy (took me about one day from start to end)
- Very nice puzzles, including terminal-based investigation
- Memorable setting and writing
- Addictive gameplay, amazing story and turn of events
- Very likable characters
- A lot of cool scripted cutscenes
Cons:
- A few interface glitches
- The action sequences can be frustrating (very akin to the first Tex Murphy games)

Comparisons:

Tex Murphy: Mean Streets (1989)

Gemini Rue (2011)

[PC] Jurassic Heart (2013)

How:
Read about it somewhere, possibly some indie gaming site.
Endings:
Got the good, normal and terrible endings (all endings).
Cool tip:
Play with "Iqtu - Dinosaur Document" looping in the background! Download here. You can listen below.
Pros:
- Very nice, smooth graphics
- Cool, humorous idea and setting
Cons:
- Too short
- No music

[PC] Quantumnauts (2010)

How:
Bought both Quantumnauts games from the official website after playing Oz Orwell.
Note:
Played the Italian version.
Pros:
- Nice puzzles
- Nice story and setting
- Cut-scenes have good quality
- I have a weak spot for this graphical style
- Some cool situations (e.g. the talking statues near the end)
- Gameplay never gets boring or monotonous
- Some red herrings
- The game actually manages to get funny once the player realizes it is meant to be a comedy
Cons:
- Many typos and grammatical errors even in the original language (Italian)
- Text is too small and difficult to read
- The main character often stands in front of interactive objects, must move him away all the time
- Animations are not smooth at all
- No sound effects
- Some annoying pixel hunting (e.g. the crack in the cave)
- Very slow navigation
- Missing descriptions with most actions
- Humor is sometimes out of place

[Browser] Worldgate Ep.1-3 (2012-2013)

How:
Covered in the monthly freeware section on adventuregamers.com.
Pros:
- Immersive world
- Simple and neat graphics, music and sound effects
- Nice puzzles, some of them moderately challenging
- Intriguing twist at the end (chapter 2)
- Cool to meet the ancient beings (chapter 3)
- Cool wrap-up explanations of the puzzles and devices met in the previous episodes (chapter 3)
Cons:
- Some interface problems (e.g. to analyze an inventory item, you click on its bottom-right corner, which can also happen accidentally)
- Small continuity problems (the journal is updated in the middle pages if the player does thing in a different order)
- The inventory can grow out of the allowed space if the player has more items than expected

[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).

[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