Wailing Heights

Clunky, but fun. Wailing Heights is a game about music disguised as an old-school point-and-click adventure game. The musical portions are very well done, even though music and dialogue volumes vary wildly, which can get annoying. The adventure gaming portions...mostly work. You've got your dialogue trees, pieces of things to combine, multiple characters to swap between, a handful of places, 2.5D navigating, etc. Movement can be clunky, and the only icon for action is a dialogue prompt, even if you're not talking. Sometimes you get temporarily stuck, sometimes your dialogue is off the screen, etc. No actual lipsync, which is a little distracting when characters are singing, but this is an indie game, so it's fine. The humor is great, the achievements are fairly easy, and it's short enough that the cons don't outweigh the pros.

A charming oddity. There's a too much walking around, and the climax isn't very fun, but the art and unique gameplay are enough for me to give it a marginal recommendation. The switching between characters does get pretty tedious, and they could have used a few more voice actors. I did really like the art and most of the music, though. If you like campy horror stuff like Scooby Doo and Rocky Horror you will probably enjoy this. It isn't too long and is admirably ambitious.

I've grabbed it while it was on sale. It wasn't working on Linux at all and therefore I've tried to get it working with the emulator. This is how I got a bug report before the game started to crash and sent it to the creators then. But I've faced 2 problems with that and therefore I've decided to let others here know about those too: 1. Their email contact isn't valid anymore so alright, I've used then instead the contact-function on their website. 2. After one week I still didn't get a response from them, but thank goodness Steam gave me my money back. Therefore this bad review isn't about the game itself: It's about the creator(s) way to deal with customers.

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Really wanted to enjoy this but just couldn't. The controls are worse than clunky and while the music is charming the first few times you hear it, having to hear the entire possession tune every single time you swap between characters pushed me straight over the edge. it wasn't bad enough that movement was unpleasant, not bad enough that how you interact with things/npcs and use your monster ability was all done with an infuriating control scheme, no - they have to trap me for seconds at a time while I wait repeatedly to swap to someone else to solve strangely constructed puzzles. No master list of what I've got for each person huh? Cool... I'll trial and error my way through everything because interaction-friendly things don't stand out against the back, middle, or foreground. Hidden things offscreen when you don't make clear in set design where I am and am not allowed to move? Two hours of this is good. No more for me.