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).

Purple Noise Echo (2018) is an early access game still in development, but it has a really great look and will probably end up being a fun game. It's an "ambient tactical" game in which you play a "silicon entity" (sort of a robot?) who has to wander around and gather resources. You can only see a few spaces around your robot body at a time, and it's very dark and semi-spooky (in a scifi kinda way, rather than a gothic horror way). Great background sounds/robot noises, and the robot design itself is awesome.

However, the gameplay still needs work. There's not a lot of instructions and it's not super obvious what you're supposed to do, or why. Maybe rescue somebody? Apparently that's the point, as the description says: "The game is about discovering the hard way: the mechanics, the place, the story and more."


That might work better in a fully-finished game, but in an early access game it just means you're clicking around trying stuff and then the game crashes. And I think even in an exploration game, it's a good idea to have a story element or a specific goal, to make it worth the effort of finding out that stuff in the first place.

Purple Noise Echo made my Mac slow down to the point that I thought it might crash the COMPUTER, so I had to shut it down after 7 minutes. Despite that, I thought it was a good beginning to what seems like a neat game.

Price: $7.00

Available for Windows and macOS. I played the Mac version.

Pokemon Sword/Shield (2019) is the newest (primary) game in the Pokemon franchise and the only one I've really played since Pokemon X/Y (two generations ago). I'm a big Pokemon fan, but some of the gameplay in the last few games have been a bit iffy for me and I never really clicked with them. However, I VERY much enjoyed playing Pokemon Sword and can definitely recommend it for both old and new fans.

You play as a competitor in the Champion League trying to beat everyone else, while also sort of helping a non-Professor character figure out the mystery of why Pokemon can Dynamax in Galar. You of course need to travel around Galar battling gym leaders, fighting henchmen, and catching Pokemon.

( More words and three images )

It took me about 30 hours to beat the main game, including the post-Championship sequence. That feels very short to me, but I also can't remember how long it took to beat any of the other Pokemon games I've played, sooooo.

I haven't bought the expansion pass yet but I do plan to, once I complete the Pokedex in the main game. Right now I'm at 117 Pokemon out of 400 (not including the new ones in the Expansion) and some of these Pokemon are VERY prone to dying before I can throw a Pokeball at them.

Price: $59.99

I played Pokemon Sword because it had the blue Pokemon on it, lmao.

Orion Trail (2015) is an adventure/interactive fiction game that's basically Oregon Trail but set in space! And it's just as difficult to NOT die as the original game!

So, you play as a spaceship captain trying to fly across the galaxy to a particular space hub. You pick your crew, who each have different skills (science, fighting, diplomacy, etc.), and you have to manage your resources while making your way through stars, planets, meteors, aliens, etc. Your resources are: crew members, food, fuel, and hull pieces. Get to zero on any of your resources and you fail the mission.


At each stop, and sometimes between stops (and away missions!), you have encounters where you can either gain or lose resources through basically random chance. You choose an action, and then the probability engine randomly selects an outcome. You can try to win the outcome by picking an action where you have extra skills, but it's not guaranteed you'll win. And if you lose, you lose a LOT of resources.

On my first mission I ran out of hull pieces and my ship exploded. The second mission I kept running out of fuel, had to send an SOS signal, bartered to re-fuel with my BLOOD, ran out of HP and died. On my third time, the ship exploded again.

I do think it's a LITTLE suspicious how the probability engine spins, slowS down, then SPEEDS UP again to round a corner and pick some other square than what it originally looked like it would stop on. Also, super frustrating when I loaded that thing up with skill points but still managed to crit fail MULTIPLE times in a row.

Still, I definitely enjoyed playing this! I really like the retro pixel art, the scifi setting, and the funny dialogue. Played about an hour and didn't manage to live to the end ONCE. The only thing I'd want changed is the stars/planets you stop at; they mostly don't have names or interesting descriptions, and that part could've been flushed out more.

Price: $9.99

Available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. I played the Mac OS version.

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.