Misthold Welcomes You

Jenny LeClue, Detectivu (2019) is an adventure/mystery/puzzle game starring the titular character, a kid detective living in what only SEEMS to be a boring small town.

I picked this up for the Switch as a) I love mystery games, b) it has (excellent) full-cast voice acting, and c) it's kinda more on the visual novel end of things, such as having dialogue choices. And it's 80% off right now: score!

Immediately got sucked into the story, which is framed through the narrator/mystery writer whose book series which Jenny is a character in. He's forced to change up his regular book formula due to abysmal sales, including adding a murder and REAL mystery plot points. The whole game has his narration running throughout, and there's even some neat scenes where the book text hovers in the physical world as Jenny moves through it. It's very meta.


Jenny is dealing with a lot of personal stuff in this game, and her dialogue choices all involve either being kind, mean, friendly or distrustful. Normally I play as nice as possible, but tbh Jenny isn't a very nice person right now and so I thought it'd be more true to her character to be more stand-offish. That said, the major plot points seem to happen no matter what you do. Like, I refused the walkie-talkie but it shows up later anyway as it's a necessary plot point. Also stuff in your journal changes, such as a page with your personality type, but I don't know how that ties into the rest of the game. Reviews from other players say there IS no differences and it doesn't matter what you choose, so I guess it's not that important.

I'm planning on playing it again and trying the other dialogue option route, just to see. I also need to go back and find the rest of the stickers and postcard scraps. (I love it when games have little collecting side quest things.)


The puzzles are, for the most part, pretty easy to solve if you pay attention to your surroundings. I only used help guides twice, when I was nearing the ending and too impatient for the mystery to be solved to properly look around.

Honestly, I'd have liked to have seen slightly more difficult puzzles the further you went into the game. For instance, the "connect these wires to jump start this thing" puzzle appears three times, and it's all the same difficulty. Mostly puzzles become more difficult due to running back and forth between pieces, which takes forever because...

A couple niggles: the setting/tone screams kid-friendly game, but the dialogue is aimed more at teens/adults. There's also an extended section in a collapsed mine full of ghosts and skeletons that aren't exactly kid-friendly...

Walking is PAINFULLY slow, and running is just a slow gallop. It felt like moving through molasses. It took SO much longer to move through places than it needed to, especially considering there are several times you have to backtrack to get somewhere else.

And finally, the ending is a cliffhanger! It turns out this is an episodic game-- not something mentioned anywhere except in the reviews I didn't read until I already finished the game. Whoops.

Still, despite the disappointment of having an incomplete ending, I really enjoyed playing Jenny LeClue, Detectivu. It feels substantial, unlike some other puzzle games which tend to be shallow. And I love how the story gets more and more twisty the further you go into it. I'm planning on picking up the next part to this series, whenever it comes out!

Price: $24.99 (on sale regularly)

Available for Windows, macOS, iOS, Linux, Nintendo Switch, and Playstation 4(?). I played the Switch version and it took me about 5 hours to complete the story (with 83% completion for stickers/postcards).

Oxenfree (2016) is a supernatural thriller adventure game starring a group of teens who try to have an illicit beach party on what turns out to be a hideously haunted island. You play as Alex, a junior in high school who recently lost her brother. With you are Jonas, Alex's new step-brother, Ren, Alex's childhood best friend, Nona, Ren's crush, and Clarissa, Nona's friend and Alex's brother's ex-girlfriend.

So basically the gameplay is entirely talking and walking, with some clicking and scrolling. There's not really any puzzles, though there IS two trivia mini-games that depend on having paid attention in the earlier part of the game.

There's also three ways you can choose to play your interactions with other characters: friendly, mean, and neutral. Picking one way over the other changes certain plot developments and generates different endings, so there's some replayability. I, of course, chose to play the friendly route.

Though it's a thriller, it's not a horror game. It's spooky, but the character design is slightly cartoony-- and tiny-- so it's not as scary as it might've been if they were hovering super close to the camera, as it were. There are a lot of blinking/juddering/shaking movements, which I think you can turn off or dampen. There's also a subtitles option, which I turned on.

I think originally this game was made for a console, e.g. something you play with a controller. The PC/Mac port has some playability issues. First, walking is VERY slow. There are no options to go faster; you can't run or dash. (This might be the same as the console version.) Since basically the entire game is just walking from one place to another, and then backtracking, it feels a little like playing in molasses. ( More words and one image )

I really liked the story, the characters, and the setting, but I don't recommend playing it on PC/Mac if you can help it.

Price: $9.99

Available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Playstation, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox. I played the Mac OS version.

Agent A: A Puzzle in Disguise (2019) is a point-and-click puzzle adventure game with a SPY theme! You play as a genderless secret agent trying to track down international spy Ruby La Rouge, who recently blew up your boss and is threatening to blow up your coworkers. I played the Nintendo Switch version.

The basic game is to click through a set of rooms looking for clues to solve puzzles to move the storyline along. I enjoyed the brightly-colored locations, the background music, and the subtitles for any speaking parts. The puzzles were, for the most part, not too difficult to solve-- the built-in screenshot button on the Switch definitely helped me keep track of clues I found three rooms away. Some of them were really fun, like dialing a phone to call a spy supply store to get a thing to solve the next-to-last puzzle.

I think I only had to look for help two or three times, and only because I couldn't figure out that there was another path off to the side of one screen. Most of the puzzles involved finding pieces in interesting places and bringing them back to a main location to unlock the next part of the game.

Which brings me to my main problem: actually DOING that is really annoying, because you can really only solve MAYBE two puzzles at a time. ( 1 image under here and the rest of the review of course )

That said, overall I did enjoy playing this game. It took maybe four hours to beat? I recommend using a stylus to speed some of the point-and-clicking up-- or just grabbing the mobile version, I suppose.

Price: $19.99, but I bought it on sale for $2 which it does pretty frequently.

Originally posted at my personal journal.