Messages

Hi Rik,

That's a good start.
Radom thoughts in no particular order:

Great effort on the presentation. The FMV clips are a very cool and I like seeing NPCs walk around.

Some unnecessary manipulations with the ID card. As long as I have it,  I would like to open a door or take a taxi with just 1 click. I prefer the simpler BASS template (left click=action, right click= look) over the clumsy Sierra interface.

Layouts and directions could be improved.

Spoiler

- at the beginning, you can take a taxi to Section 2. You have absolutely nothing to do there at this point. The cab is more visible than the police station so players are likely to try it first.

- in the house, the access to the bedroom is located opposite to the entrance (makes no sense).

- The game tells me that I need a code for the safe when it's actually a sentence / password.

- I thought I had to use every painting title to form a sentence but some words are left out. I can think of other sentences with these words : « they will not take peace. » « they will not be strong » and so on...

- I cannot open Alex's car with his ID.

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Foreshadowing felt a little cheap :

Spoiler

Guy in the street (in a nutshell) : « Hello, I came here to tell you that I'll have a message for you later. »
Me : « Why didn't you wait until you have it before coming? »

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Some hotspots give no answer (a « hotspot 17 » in the kitchen, the safe after you've opened it....).

I had to reload because of a bug: the hotspot of the safe stopped working before I opened it.

I like the incorporated help system and the conversations with my colleagues.

Keep up the good work.

Congrats on the release.
Here are my first impressions :

Pros :
- nice graphics and animations. Because the resolution is high, it's a bit strange not to see the facial features but I can live with it.
- overall ambiance is compelling.
- good voice acting (the volume for the mother is a little low).

Cons :
- walk speed is too slow. I know you can run, but still.
- unskippable dialogs and uninterruptible actions. Plus, she walks to perform anything.
- I don't like being told everything I have to do.
- linearity. From what I've seen, there's only one way to survive and the interactions are limited.
Examples :

Spoiler

To protect myself, I wasn't able to lock a door for which I had the key.
In the wigs room, I wasn't able to use the scissors to defend myself. That's where I stopped.

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Good luck making the other nights.

Thanks Ian.

Spoiler

Moving the painting resolved the situation. I had looked at every object in the shop but hadn't interacted with them all. In my defense, you get a discouraging general reply every time you try ("I don't need any of this old tat"). Only the painting is different.

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Here I am - stuck in the highlands with you:
I managed to perform 2 tasks out of 3. Got the relic and proof of love.
Still looking for the signet ring. I know roughly where it is and got rid of the tourist.

Spoiler

Probably need some kind of metal detector? Didn't see any at Aladdin's cave. I could probably bargain with the shopkeeper if I had Denis Wyness' autograph. I tried to trace it with toilet paper and pencil but Becky won't let me do it...

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Very cool title screen. Finished it without much trouble. I would have loved to enter the cabin with them.

Anybody here knows the band Vampire Weekend?

I still have their first album. They have a distinctive light-hearted sound.

I recently been listening to this, from the 1975 album The Snow Goose, by prog-rock stalwarts Camel.

Nice.
Coincidentally I have listened to prog rock of the 70s recently:

Without spoiling things, it's not a good idea to reduce the main antagonist, and that's even if you aim to make them a nested figure in your next game in some way; I think that in this type of setting you do require a respectable main antagonist and not one which is reduced to just another target.

I haven't played Blasphemous. But it reminds me of this GDC talk by some of the creators of Owlboy.
At 23:00, they explain that they had prepared a fight against the main antagonist. Yet they feared it would belittle him so they scrapped it. It's a pity but I can understand it. Although the story is generally paper-thin and secondary in these kind of games, I think it's important to maintain a semblance of logic.

That's one aspect I disliked about Iconoclasts: the story didn't make any sense and was just an excuse to throw action sequences at you. As a result, my involvement dwindled over time.

My votes go to MattColes... obviously  
I wonder what lurks in this pool...

Too bad, I liked Snarky's entry, but without being able to look at it again, I couldn't vote for it. 

Just click on the link in Snarky's post to see it.
It's disconcerting that you can get such good results with just a prompt on Midjourney, Stable Diffusion or Dall-E. It makes you rethink the link between efforts and results.
Someone already won an art competition with one of these.

Also, the bit of ground in the bottom front that looks almost like a human liing on the ground and reaching out to the spaceship (intentional?).

A human and horse, yes. I kept the shapes intentionally vague.

I don't know, but I think Twitter was already ruining itself since it tried to enforce people to log in just to read tweets.

Sadly this is the norm nowadays. Pinterest, Instagram, Quora... they won't let you just browse. Registration everywhere.

The "old" owner can take a fraction of his earnings by the sale, hire all the fired personnel and give them better pay, create a new improved platform Twitter 2.0 called "Coollibri" and invite all Twitter users to join... thus killing Twitter

For the price they paid    the new owners certainly requested a non-competition clause.
But some fired employees will certainly go to a competitor.

The problem seems recent (see this topic).
But apparently it's just been fixed.

Unrelated: I've tried to download The Cell but the link seems to be dead.

That looks funky.

Thanyx, it seems that you have trouble embedding a Youtube video here. That happened to me.
You have to paste only the last part of the link or it won't work.

Code: ags

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgwzFcTKIas[/youtube]

Code: ags

[youtube]bgwzFcTKIas[/youtube]

The last games of Jane Jensen (who is also Robert Holmes' wife) didn't sell well.
Pinkerton Road Studio closed after the remake of Gabriel Knight and Moebius: Empire Rising:

I haven't played those but Gray Matter and Erica Reed were good IMO.

[li]

A classic. It took me years to realize that the title is Sliver (and not Silver).

Lately, I've been listening to the Scarlet Furies, the band of Robert Holmes (composer of Gabriel Knight) and his daughter Raleigh.

Long time since I had my last Prairie Ponch. Just as good as I remember.

One spooky background right of the hat:

Thanks my captain.

It's this time of month again. Feed me please!

Yeah, all the details from the 1st picture are lost but the interpretation of the gradients somehow works - which is not the case with the upscaled image.

Also, your character looks like a Playmobil now

As a little experiment, I ran a batch of screenshots (PNG images) from AGS games through Real ESRGAN.

I thought it'd be interesting to share the results:

Apprentice 2:

Spoiler

Original:
ESRGAN:

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Arden's Vale:

Spoiler

Original:
ESRGAN:

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Bury me in the Sand:

Spoiler

Original:
ESRGAN:

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The Excavation of Hob's Barrow:

Spoiler

Original:
ESRGAN:

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Infinity String:

Spoiler

Original :
ESRGAN:
 

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I Want Out:

Spoiler

Original :
ESRGAN :

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Oh du lieber Augustin:

Spoiler

Original :

ESRGAN :
 

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Ossuarium:

Spoiler

Original :

ESRGAN:

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The Potion Master:

Spoiler

Original :

ESRGAN :

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Saturday Night is the Loneliest Night of the Week:

Spoiler

Original:
ESRGAN:

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Tales

Spoiler

Original:
ESRGAN:

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Urban Witch Story:

Spoiler

Original:
ESRGAN:

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Witch Lullaby:

Spoiler

Original :
ESRGAN:

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Some styles fare better than others. The results vary depending on if you feed it an image at the original resolution or if it's already upscaled.
If you take Saturday is the loneliest night of the week , that's what I got when I fed it an upscaled 1593x1002 picture instead of the 320x200 one:

Spoiler

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Too bad only 2 people voted. Well, a vote's a vote: Congrats Hannah!

Feel free to host the next round.