NoseBound

Bought this as I am a huge Cthulhu/cult fan, so it interested me. So first off, I will admit that the visuals for this game are different and really unique. Definitely a selling point. It also has a a story line that has some backbone to it, but it eventually falls incredibly flat and isn't really fleshed out that well. The voice acting for a couple of the characters (Lemon McCoy, the Bartender for example) sound incredibly slurred and strange to the point of hilarity. Like it has been passed through a filter of some sort. Not even remotely like a human voice. Threw me off having to sit and listen to it. The voice to text was way off. So many spelling errors. Missing words. Wrong words. Capital letters when there shouldn't be. Some of the phrases made no sense. It says in the credits that the English was revised, but it clearly wasn't. The game play itself was fine I guess. Character seems to glide on the spot. Characters have an animation that is repeated, even when they are not talking and is not in time with the text. Finding things to interact with on the screen was a matter of just moving the mouse constantly. The top toolbar should just be locked as well in my opinion. Some of the choices/interactions just made little sense really. Sound and music was generally good. Quite creepy. Although it sounded like there was a Mansions of Madness sound clip towards the end when you receive a certain item. All in all - completed in 2 hours. Pick it up when its on a massive sale, don't expect a lot from it. Needs a hell of a lot of work to be a polished product, and needs to be a lot longer with a deeper narrative.

This game is basically a standard Point & Click adventure game but deals with the occult and has bits of graphic violence. There is some fleeing (slowly) and shooting, but it's really just a matter of figuring out what to shoot or do before time runs out. As such, you can die in this game, and you have to exit and reload a save. It's best to use the manual saves often because the auto saves don't always take you back to the point just before you die. A few minor things: Sometimes hotspots don't appear at first in a scene but appear later so it's easy to miss them. Also there was a place where I thought a puzzle had to be solved, but apparently it didn't. The game is a bit short. My 5+ hour time reflects getting briefly stuck a couple times. Overall, as a Point & Click fan, I enjoyed it. It's worth it's current sale price, but the subject, gore, etc might not be for everyone.

Pros - Decent voice acting, not amazing but still appreciated. - Good art-style. - Noir themes - Solid controls, entirely playable with mouse including saving and exiting the game. - Good atmosphere. Kind of reminds me of the cat lady game series, even has a similar art-style and camera perspective. - Simple but engaging point and click game-play with the typical kind of puzzles. Cons - The subtitles can't be disabled (even though there is a setting.) - There is an annoying clicking sound whenever the mouse hovers over a hot-spot. - Can't skip dialog (even though the game suggests that you can.) - There is an annoying blurriness effect at the edges of the screen, maybe chromatic aberration or something like that. I guess its give the game a dream like kind of atmosphere but it was just distracting and kind of hurts your eyes. - Walking is slow, seems like collision detection is a bit of problem, character seems to get kind of slowed down by objects in the vicinity when moving around. - While I though the voice acting was pretty good, its not entirely normalized. Clearly there was at least two different recording sessions in different studios or with different settings. Some lines are spoken at a much louder volume and seem to have a different quality or ambiance - There doesn't seem to be an ability to get further info for items in your inventory (e.g. right click.) Most point and click games have this feature so its absence is noticeable. Overall its lacking a lot of polish but these are all easy things to fix. [strike] Hopefully the developer will come through with a patch. Unfortunately as of writing they seem pretty quiet in the forums. [/strike] If you like point and clicks then I'd still recommend giving it a try. EDIT: After playing further I'd like to change my comment to state that some voice acting is decent but some is absolutely awful. I still prefer playing with voice acting than without but wow I was not expecting the gangster to sound like a bratty child or the police captain and bar tender to talk like Worf from star trek overdosing on sulfur hexafluoride. EDIT2: Developer says patch is on the way and some of the voice acting should be taken with a quote of humor. I can accept that. EDIT3: Just finished the game and wanted to make a final update. - The voices thing was fine other than the 3 particular characters I mentioned. - The cat-lady vibes I mentioned were based on the initial apartment investigation, the subject matter, the camera perspective the black and white visuals but really the game is not like the cat lady at all. - There is some continuity issues such as dialog trees and even cut-scenes replaying if you revisit areas. - The game is very short, I left the game running a bit so my time is over-stated. Overall I still enjoyed it enough to keep the recommendation