The Epsilon Outcome

Probably the best point-and-click game I have played. The story is incredibly immersive, without taking itself too seriously, and the amount of polish this game has is impressive. If you are looking for an afternoon of nostalgia-filled gameplay, this is it. Don't mistake the old-school style for a lack of production value, this game has been engineered to check all the nostalgia boxes. The puzzles mesh with the story so well it doesn't even feel like you are solving a puzzle. For 8 bucks at the time of writing this review, and the 5 hours it took to go through the story, I'm happy to say it was money well spent.

I was skeptical about this game but the outCome wAs totAlly epsIlon! P.S. don't wander in the wilds without compass

Interesting game. Some puzzles were not so easy to solve, but the story is pretty nice.

What a delightful game! It’s a love letter to the point-and-click, Sierra-Online-style adventure games I played as a kid. The hand drawn graphics and dry humor make this feel like a very personal, interactive art project as much as it is a game. I enjoyed solving the puzzles—always felt taken care of by the designer, in that things were hard enough to be interesting but not so hard as to be frustrating. Even the manual is fun!

Tentative recommendation! Mildly amusing if you like goofy science fiction and a sort of retro computer game. Actually science fiction only comes late in the story. In the meantime you have a number of simple characters wandering around a very simply drawn area of woods and swamp with a couple of metal towers, a utility closet, an underground bunker, and so on. It looks simple but right and left and up and down never quite seem to match the directions chosen for the character to move. I got lost over and over. Dialog appearing on the screen is extensive, but silent. The background sounds of frogs and birds make you think you are there, but you have to move your character slowly, tediously over the paths to interact with objects and other characters, and it's possible to waste lots of time traveling about. It's hard to measure your progress. It's also apparently possible to do things out of sequence. This seemed to happen to me, and I had to go to a video walkthrough to find my place and figure out what I had missed. The lengthy chats toward the end explain how, at least in the author's mind, the mundane first part fits into a time-travel narrative. But the action almost stops at the end as a result of inserting so much narration at once, with just one break where the main character carries the action forward. There were a lot of minor annoyances such as delay in switching from the "Look" icon to the "Move" icon and back. There is some difficulty in interacting correctly with objects in inventory. Sometimes the game tells you an item can't be used, even though a pixel or two to the left or the right you certainly can use it. This is just too annoying to ignore when evaluating the game play.

Good fun

Nice throwback to the old Sierra games. Gets tricky at times, but there's a ROT1-encoded helpsheet online from the author.