In the article about “Justin Wack”, I already mentioned that we recently have played several games from the classic point & click genre. The selling point here (besides the shameless exploitation of romanticized memories of old times) is that you bring back the brilliant humor, the innovative puzzles and the good storytelling of the masterpieces of the time. You can read here whether and how today’s game, “Beyond the Edge of Owlsgard”, succeeds.

Let’s go over the basics first. While “Justin Wack” sees itself more as a further development that takes up the classic elements of the games of the time, today’s title goes even further and basically tries to imitate the feeling of the classics: the lower third of the screen is our inventory and the control commands and everything is designed quite pixelatedly. Only the sound has been upgraded; the German voice output is crystal clear.

The game also tries to find its own humor. While “Justin Wack” simply makes excessive use of references and “remember those”-objects, there are hardly any in this game; It’s more of an attempt to apply the old principles and logic of classic point & click adventures to its own story, which I think is very nice. Here and there, of course, the classic socially critical commentary is thrown in, but it’s rather minor and, in my opinion, not really consistent – if the game was supposed to have an overarching message, I didn’t get it.

Technically speaking, there are not really any special features. Such a lightweight game hardly causes any problems, there were no bugs or crashes. Only the full screen mode was quite idiosyncratic: by default the game started as a window, in full screen mode the size remained relatively the same (also due to the resolutions of the old games), but was not centered. This cost me a lot of nerves, in the end I couldn’t solve it and it just remained in the top left corner of the screen – definitely a little strange for a game released at the end of 2022.

The story of the game is actually quite irrelevant to this post. It’s relatively difficult to describe without giving spoilers, so I’ll leave it at this: we’re a young deer, we come home to our parents and they’re suddenly gone – probably kidnapped. We try to save them and discover a much bigger problem that we have to solve – the premise was nothing special, but definitely not a bad start either. I was definitely interested at first.

The initial puzzles and story elements were good – that’s all I can say. Not bad, not just mediocre, but not outstanding either. There were one or two puzzles that didn’t immediately make sense to me and sometimes required a strange solution, but all in all I was quite impressed. It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece every time, but this game definitely seemed to me to be in the upper echelons.

Unfortunately, my opinion changed relatively quickly when we played the third and especially the fourth act. The story suffered in some places, but above all the puzzles became more and more frustrating and illogical. I said it often here, and I’ve mentioned it several times on stream – the logic of point & click adventures is idiosyncratic, but always understandable if you think outside the box or take things literally and act accordingly. Unfortunately, this was not the case here.

An example: if you moved the cursor over objects, a corresponding action was indicated in the bar at the bottom – usually the correct option. Pick up a pebble, press a switch, and so on. It always showed what kind of object it was. However, at a certain point in the game this changed – objects that were not marked as such suddenly had to be clicked on. There was no indication whatsoever, to me it looked like pure background. And since there wasn’t a single example of this in the first two acts, I only found out about it with the help of a walkthrough – I found that very frustrating, because here (I can’t explain it other than being done on purpose) playing time was definitely wasted, which was purely based on the player’s confusion.

Another example was clickable objects in general. Let’s talk stones: almost everywhere you could click on stones and use them with various objects, which was always commented with “that’s just a stone”. This logically led to me simply ignoring them after the twentieth stone or so – but also to a problem when there was a particular stone that didn’t appeared to be different in any way, but activated an important function. Here, too, I know of no other reason than to waste time to explain this design decision.

There were a few other points that at least irritated me, but in some places were just plain annoying. Towards the end we just played according to the walkthrough because the puzzles became too illogical for me. I found that to be a shame, because I actually saw great potential in the game in the first two acts – I can’t explain why it went so downhill after about half of it.

The game has 133 reviews at the time of this post, and only two of them are negative. I would like to highlight one of them in particular: Review In my opinion, this person sums it up exactly – the only thing I can’t confirm is the poor English translation because I played the game in German.

Overall, I’m rather disappointed by the game. It seems to me that some developers are resting on the seal of “just like the masterpieces of old” and hoping for the favor of people who, seeing the action buttons and a cross as a cursor, feel a strong enough nostalgia to be fooled by the weaknesses of it. Because if you leave those aspects out, you’re left with a mediocre point & click adventure that weakens towards the end, an you would simply ignore it. I therefore do not recommend it.

What did you think of the game? Can you understand my criticism or are you big fans? Have you played it yourself? Feel free to join the discussion on Discord!