Blood Nova

I really enjoyed Blood Nova. Gorgeous pixel art, rad music, and interesting writing. The story is about an aloof space-princess-queen-to-be who escapes her assassination and must unravel the mystery in a sparsly populated intergalactic lighthouse. The esoteric magic meets sci-fi brought The Incal to mind in way of vibes. And I liked the lore and political intrigue. Cosmic Void does a lot in it's short run time (which is a perfect length for the story they wanted to tell). The puzzles are pretty decent poink adventure stuff. Nothing too difficult though a couple I had to brute force my way through because esoteric sci-fi logic. Nothing egregious. This is the first game I've played from Cosmic Void and certainly won't be my last! Great first impression and I really look forward to playing more from them! Huge recommendation for poink adventure fans!

A bite-sized point and click adventure, Blood Nova packs a tremendous amount of sci-fi fantasy world building into its short playtime. The writing is great, a blend of Douglas Adams and Frank Herbert in its inspirations, and delivers some wonderful character moments. The pixel art, with its dreamlike colour palette, is as expressive as it is beautiful. Big recommend for any adventure game fans.

Don't let the "1.1h" playtime on this review fool you - I played the game through Steam library sharing feature on my main account. This is a very fun first person POV point & click adventure game, albeit be prepared for a LOT of reading. Princess Love has thoughts on a lot of subjects, including just about any hot spot you click on, and she is not shy at monologuing them. Sure, you can skip all the inner (and outer) dialogue, but then you wouldn't get the proper experience of the game. The story is exciting, with some twists that, at least to me, were unexpected. I don't agree with some of the choices Love made, but then I'm not Love so that's to be expected. I do wish that she'd have explained the reason for those choices better (or, at all, in the case of a very big one at the end), as for once she was unexpectedly silent there. Having said that, there are some plot holes (or at least there's lack of explanations for why those wouldn't be plot holes, though it wouldn't be too hard to think of them). The setting is one of science fantasy, with space travel, space aliens, and space magic. There is a strange mix of serious and ... ridiculously silly, which might put some people off. For example, there's a character with a snow globe for a head. A literal snow globe, with snow and a snowman and everything. No explanation given. And they're otherwise a very serious character, not a joke one. You can see them in the game trailer video on the store page. The puzzles are, for the most part, pretty easy if you pay attention. There are still a few though where I went "Huh? How I was supposed to think of that?", particularly when it came to the "magic" side of things. And one "puzzle" towards the end was a board game against an A.I. that took me far too many tries until I finally baaarely won. The board game in question has identical rules to the ancient 1993 DOS game Hexxagon, though the board is smaller and doesn't have gaps. Usually I stay away from first person adventure games, especially ones where you click to go to other room rather than smooth-moving to them, as I quickly lose my bearings and which rooms connect to which, but Blood Nova makes it simple by having you move to rooms by clicking on the minimap, so that solved that particular personal issue of mine. On a technical side, I didn't encounter any bugs. The graphics are ... well, you can see them in the screenshots. If you like the style, great. If you don't, the game may not be for you. The music is great, though not always quite fitting what's happening, especially near the beginning. There is unfortunately no voice acting, I imagine the dev simply didn't have the budget for professional voice actors who would do the characters justice, and decided that silence was better than amateurishly voicing the characters themselves. On the whole, I enjoyed the game, and would be interested in a sequel.

A very cool point & click adventure with fun puzzles. The story is very exciting, and has some plot twists in store. The pixel art style is awesome and uses a nice color palette. The soundtrack is also very good and supports the game's atmosphere well. All in all I can only recommend this game.

Gorgeous and fun! A classic point-and-click in the spirit of Legend of Kyrandia and OG Monkey Island, with a synthwave color palette and an engaging storyline. The puzzles took were easy in some parts, harder in others, and overall not TOO easy but not screamingly difficult. I got stuck a few times, but not STUCK stuck, which is just the right amount of effort for me to enjoy.

I enjoyed this one immensely. I actually installed and uninstalled it a few times prior to starting the game because adult life is unforgiving and I just couldn’t find the time or energy to play it *cries. I wanted to set aside some time to play this in one sitting because I knew I would get sucked in. And oh, how right I was. The art style and colours were right up my alley and Love had just the right amount of sass to make her courageous but not annoying. It was truly fantastic to watch her come into her own and become someone fit to be empress. The story was well-crafted and I did guess certain events correctly, while others surprised me. That being said, the parts I successfully deduced did not take away from my enjoyment of watching the story unfold. The puzzles were not too difficult and the plot was linear enough that it wasn’t too hard to figure out the next steps - though I do admit one or two solutions did have me stumped (just a little). I really liked the UI and the map navigation was unique and simple. The cursor was very pretty as well. The talking prophetic fish was a nice touch and Love remarking on how certain things actually worked was funny too. All in all, I’m glad I gave up going to an art market to play (and finish) this game. I’ll be sure to check out other games by the developer :)

the "blood" in "blood nova" is the same as the "blood" in "blood diamond"