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Wales Interactive have firmly established themselves as some of the most prolific FMV developers out there, putting out three titles on the App Store last year and already ushering in an absurd virtual party-turned-murder-investigation with Who Muted Uncle Marcus? in early 2022. This game puts you in the shoes of Abby as she grills her eccentric relatives after a family meeting where a deadly plot unfolded. Despite a concept that should set the stage for a fun locked-door mystery, Who Muted Uncle Marcus? feels forced and arbitrary at almost every turn.

Family farce

Who Muted Uncle Marcus? is a game that takes place over a virtual meeting in celebration of Abby's mother's birthday. The game quickly establishes that this kind of call is a family tradition and that it is also conducted in the format of a quiz game, with each family member taking turns to host a round of questions while the others compete for points.

As Abby prepares for this call, she gets another from the black sheep of the family: Uncle Marcus. Marcus calls to tell Abby that he has been poisoned and that the culprit has to be someone in the family. This sets you off on an adventure where you not only try to navigate the quiz game and Abby's family drama, but also try to identify the killer and discover how to prevent Marcus from dying.

Quiz or question?

Like most conventional FMV games, Who Muted Uncle Marcus? presents you, the player, with video clips of all of this action playing out with real-life actors. The action only somewhat pauses (or actually pauses if you use the “Streamer Mode” game option) when you–as Abby–can make a choice about how to proceed forward. For the vast majority of this game, your choices revolve around who you want Abby to pair up for certain quiz rounds with and whether or not you want to try and play the family quiz or shift the conversation toward gathering information about the family meeting that led to Marcus's poisoning.

By the end of the game, you get the chance to accuse certain family members of doing the foul deed, provided you've gathered enough evidence to make a case against them. Then you are treated to one of the game's many endings before being invited to play the game again to try gathering new evidence to unlock other endings.

Abitrary arbitration

Right from the outset of Who Muted Uncle Marcus?, it feels like the creators are not confident in their setup. The script has Uncle Marcus comment on the weird rules of the quiz game (which are clearly the way they are so that you can rotate between people to talk to), and the choices in the game don't align with any particular logic to allow you to actually play detective like you might expect. As a result, the whole thing feels like an arduous and random choose-your-own adventure as opposed to an adventure that asks you to investigate or clue-in on certain aspects of character behavior.

After my second playthrough of the game, I realized that I didn't really care at that point who tried to kill Uncle Marcus. The process of revisiting conversations to unlock new evidence from Abby's cartoonishly horrible family would have been a big ask even if there was a logic to intuit about how to get each character to spill the beans. Instead, some unlocks come by purposely getting certain quiz answers incorrect or not even trying to ask about the family meeting at all. There are also some logic holes I discovered where certain clips talk about information that you may not have actually discovered yet. This all gets exacerbated by the frustrating way in which a clip-skipping system works on repeat playthroughs (which only allows you to pass by certain sections of the game in a blink but makes you watch other segments in their entirety for reasons that don't make a ton of sense).

The bottom line

The concept for Who Muted Uncle Marcus? is fun and full of intrigue, but all that feels squandered when you don't actually feel like you're in control of any investigating. It feels more like a toy you are supposed to poke and prod at until you eventually find out what happens, though it's easy to lose interest in doing that considering the characters and game features you have to deal with to do that.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/who-muted-uncle-marcus-review/

Calling this game Cat Museum is almost a misnomer. Although this breezily paced adventure game features cute cats and a museum of sorts, its landscape also contains a ton of surreal and messed up creatures and locations that are constantly at odds with the game's pleasant color palette and storybook aesthetic. This clash is one of many intriguing aspects of Cat Museum, though the game doesn't quite stick around long enough to feel like it follows through on all of the ideas it plays with.

Eerie exhibits

In Cat Museum, you play as a mysterious boy who just so happens to find themselves in the most bizarre “museum” you can think of. It has artwork on display, but all of them are grotesque interpretations or reimaginings famous works. Some of them are simply hanging on the walls, but others are turned into peek-through photo spots, have eyes that follow you, or are just paintings that have literally come to life and can speak with you.

On top of the strange art there are giant killer monsters with hands for feet, a room built out of giant red blood cells, beds made out of body parts, etc. There's nothing about this place that isn't unsettling, save for some cats. It's not entirely clear why you are in this museum, but making your way through it with the help of a magical, glowing cat seems to be the key to discovering something about the main character and his past.

Streamlined spooks

To make your way through Cat Museum, all you have to do is tap on which side of the screen you want the boy to move in and interact with the objects you come across. Many objects simply add some more flavor and commentary on the game world, but others initiate puzzles that unlock new ways forward. None of these puzzles are particularly challenging from a design perspective, but almost all of them feature you interacting with some horrific tools or creatures.

On that note, I wouldn't say Cat Museum is a particularly scary game. It is clearly designed to make players uncomfortable, but–even with a few designed monster chase sequences–no part of the game feels especially tense or stressful. In fact, the puzzles and challenges seem deliberately low-stakes and straightforward, even though they can involve popping zits on a face embedded in a creatures back or scooping worm-laced popcorn out of a claw machine with human hands for claws.

Curious conclusion

Cat Museum seems very intentionally designed to keep you from ever getting hung up on its simple challenges. With the exception of one puzzle I had to look up the answer to (as the game has no hint system whatsoever), it is very easy to blaze through the game in one sitting. From an exploration perspective, this is wonderful. It keeps any its visuals from losing their shock value and provides momentum to carry you through the whole thing quite easily.

That said, the one barrier I ran into while playing was a doozy and disrupted my flow through the experience considerably. I'll also say that Cat Museum could have done a little more work at the end to connect the dots and spell out its ending a bit more. I'm all for stories that want to leave things up for interpretation, but not when the conclusion being suggested is so vague that you don't have much to interpret.

The bottom line

All told, I'm very taken with Cat Museum's dedication to bizarre art design and swift pacing in the adventure game format. I would have loved to see a little more refinement on the puzzle design or perhaps some convenience features to prevent any downtime and perhaps a but more substance to the narrative payoff, but the tone and presentation of Cat Museum's bizarre adventure is still plenty satisfying as it is.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/cat-museum-review/