Al Emmo's Postcards from Anozira

Duration: Just short of 3 hours This is not a HOPA. It is a HOP. There is no adventure or mystery here to uncover. Just cheesy narrative between HOP scenes. Between each HOP is also a mini-game, either spot the difference, 18 piece puzzle etc... they are not challenging and just time wasting to fill-in between. You may replay with one of 5 different narrators and try to beat your score. I'd rather play something else. 4/10

"Al Emmo's Postcards from Anozira" is an ancient game from 2010. It's a whopping 13 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks support for any modern gaming display resolutions (or widescreen monitors), hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on modern gaming PCs. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an ancient game. This seems to have been put on Steam as a nostalgia gouge, or just a cash grab to try profit from abandonware. It's a Hidden Object puzzle game, the type you normally see on mobile app stores or even as browser apps. There's literally hundreds of these on Steam, mostly published by Artifex Mundi, many of them free on mobile app stores, but this one will cost you money on Steam. There's a wild west theme to the game, but this is a just a veneer over a tired and overdone set of hidden object minigames and Adobe Flash tier puzzles, wrapped together with a bunch of static screens that you "move" through by tapping your finger on your iPhone screen. While these kinds of games are popular amongst casual gamers, it's difficult to argue this is a great value proposition as a PC game, especially considering the price of this compared to the hundreds of free HOGs on the mobile app stores. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. The artwork here is terrible, it's a hodge-podge of amateurish "My First Wacom Tablet" style drawings used instead professional looking game assets. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can create graphical assets properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low, enough on its own to deter gamers. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The game only displays in 4:3 pillarboxed aspect ratio. It's possible they developed this using an old CRT they found in a dumpster, or this game has been specifically designed for people gaming on PC's from 1995... either way, this isn't really acceptable in the modern era of PC gaming. The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here. Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the video game construction kit/toolset, Adventure Game Studio. This is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur/unskilled developers as it doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. This is a really old game, and if they had made it today, it would be on the mobile app stores, but it predates those. It's not clear why they didn't try to dump this on the app stores (since it clearly seems to be here as some kind of nostalgia gouge). Maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all). Regardless, for all intents and purposes "Al Emmo's Postcards from Anozira" might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards. "Al Emmo's Postcards from Anozira" is relatively expensive for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at $5 USD, and it's not worth it. The game is just too old, hasn't been modernised. And as the old saying goes, you can't go home again.