Game Review: Gemini Rue

Wadjet Eye is one of those names I've heard multiple times in connection with the revival of point-and-click adventure games as a mainstream concern. Not that they ever went anywhere, really--Hardcoregaming101's Guide to Classic Adventure Games points out that the problem was never that adventure games were losing popularity. They just weren't growing much, and back in the 90s when everyone was chasing graphics because all those extra polygons were objectively superior leading to bigger and bigger budgets, that just wasn't enough. Like interactive fiction, though, adventure gaming never really died. But studies like Wadjet Eye and Telltale Games are responsible for for a lot of that. Loom's Brian Moriarty even mentioned in a GDC talk he did on Loom that he'd be willing to turn over the rights to Wadjet Eye to the sequel that LucasArts never did, which for my view is pretty high praise. Sadly, the rights are lost in intra-company IP agreement hell, but it speaks to Wadjet Eye's quality that he'd consider it.

Gemini Rue isn't actually made by Wadjet Eye, just published by them, but their logo does flash up at the start of the game and it's all the things I associate with Wadjet Eye games. A pixel art point-and-click adventure in the style of the games I played of old, but with modern sensibilities. Not as many bullshit deaths as Sierra games, not as many obscure puzzles as LucasArts games. A happy medium, bringing the old genre into the modern age. Old adventure games aren't as bad as many people make them out to be--not everything was the cat hair mustache puzzle--but Gemini Rue does a lot to smooth over the old problematic aspects. You can't get stuck, it's pretty hard to die, and there are no puzzles where the creator assumes you'll either think in exactly the same sort of twisted logic as they do or else click literally everything on everything else in order to figure them out.

Well, maybe a little of the latter. It is a point-and-click adventure game.

Walk in the rain.

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Darker than Black, Week 13: Theo Chocolate Black Rice Quinoa Crunch

Back in 2013, schoolpsychnerd went to Seattle as part of a psychology conference for NASP. I didn't go, because she was in grad school and we didn't have much money and I wasn't sure I wanted to spare the vacation days, but while we were there she told me about this amazing chocolate she found there. We talked about bringing it back, but eventually decided against it because I am a penny-pinching miser and I figured that a few chocolate bars wasn't worth the cost. I figured that I'd end up visiting Seattle and get to try Theo Chocolate at some point in my life, and that point turned out to be a lot sooner than I thought--a few months later, True Nature (our local hippie organic food co-op, before Whole Foods opened up nearby and they moved away) started carrying Theo Chocolate, and now Whole Foods carries it too.
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