I have been playing The Spectrum Retreat, The Case of the Golden Idol, and West of Loathing.
The Spectrum Retreat
I don't think this game is good! Not terrible, not a complete failure, but not good. It feels very heavily inspired by Portal, with the gameplay loop of puzzle chambers and the story beats of outwitting an AI. But because it invites the comparison, you keep noticing that The Spectrum Retreat gets a lot of subtle things wrong, things that Portal got right and you never noticed. It's flawed, but it's interestingly flawed; trying to work out why it chafes in ways that Portal didn't could teach you a lot about how hard game design is, I think.
The story is where The Spectrum Retreat really tries to distinguish itself, and I think I like how it goes about it. Instead of going for comedy like Portal, The Spectrum Retreat plays it for suspense. Between puzzle segments, you're exploring a hotel run by AI, prying in places where you shouldn't pry. The voice actor who guides you to objectives and does the dramatic heavy lifting is very good. The suspense is pretty good too, with a couple of jumpscares to punctuate it (not the "a big monster screams at you" kind of jumpscare, but the "something's behind you that wasn't there before" kind). A tragic backstory is slowly revealed, which will hit home for a few people. But there's a plot twist to the backstory which might work for some people, but which was a very funny mood shift to me. I see how it follows from what came before, but it also feels incongruous, and is in very questionable taste. I'm not sure it's a good twist, but it does give the story a real shot in the arm.
The puzzles themselves are, unfortunately, bad. The gimmick is that you shuffle colours between cubes scattered about each puzzle; you can only carry one colour at a time, and carrying a colour lets you through gates of the same colour. A teleportation mechanic and a gravity-switching mechanic get added later on, but it's mostly colour switching. There are very few "aha" moments where you suddenly realise something cool about the mechanics, because there are not enough different physical puzzle elements to have surprising interactions with each other. Instead, most puzzles are about working out what order you have to do things in. You can have a few puzzles of this type and they can be fun, but too many and they become samey. There are a few structures that appear over and over again (e.g. a long corridor of different gates and a line of cubes next to them, so that you have to set up the colours you'll need before entering the corridor), but they never get any more difficult. Do one and you've done them all. The puzzles don't usually feel like brainteasers, they feel like tasks.
A lot of other things about the puzzles needed refining. There's a little bit of first-person puzzle platforming; you can't change the momentum of your jump in mid-air and if you land too close to a ledge you slide off uncontrollably, so it sucks to platform. At least one puzzle is easily broken, letting you skip past much of it by grabbing a colour from an angle the developer didn't block. It's possible to make puzzles unwinnable and have to restart them; that's fine, that can be a valid design choice to make the player think about a puzzle and not try to guess their way through it (my favourite puzzle game series DROD does this), but when you have a long puzzle in winding corridors where the player can't see the whole thing at once, they work on it for 10-20 minutes, and then they get caught out by a gotcha that they weren't able to see until the end of the level and they have to restart the whole thing because of no mid-level checkpoints... then they might get upset.
I don't know, it's not completely miserable to play and the story is a good yarn, but the puzzle gimmick isn't flexible enough to be interesting, and the Portal comparisons are impossible to avoid and just make you think about how good Portal was. To be fair, the developer was 15 when he started work, so fine, it's not fair to compare the work of one teenager to the work of studios with full staff and QA testing. God I wish The Spectrum Retreat was more fun though.
The Case of the Golden Idol
Hoohoo. I liked this one. It's an Obra Dinn-like, except segmented more into standalone puzzles, and also grotesque. Lumpy characters quiver and grovel and writhe, and there's no such thing as a beautiful corpse. I don't usually go in for grotesque art styles (Nidhogg 2 has still not grown on me like I hoped it would), but I feel like it's perfect for this game.
You play the game by exploring a tableaux of the moment of somebody's death, clicking on words and names that appear in written texts to add them to a word bank. You use the words to fill in the blanks of a description of the murder, and you can also use them to put names to faces, label maps with people's locations at the time of the murder, fill in timelines, and other side-tasks designed to help you keep track. It's murder by Mad Libs, essentially; it's like if Obra Dinn not only asked you who killed who and how, but also when, where, why, on whose orders, and in what emotional state.
Puzzles are good, just the right level of difficulty for me to get through without hints and still feel like I fought for it. Some of the levels are very close to classic logic puzzles (figure out where everyone was sat at a dining table, that kind of thing); others need you to infer what happened between scenes and work out the hidden motivations of the characters. I think my favourite puzzle is either that dining table murder (which is much bigger in scope than just the table, and which has a couple of devious red herrings to work out) or the one with the constable's notes in the late game. Special mention to the best tutorial detective puzzle outside of Ace Attorney, which manages to be as simple as possible and still let you feel smart for working it out. (But fair warning for some of you: there's a late-game puzzle that makes you do maths.)
Don't really want to say much about the plot, since the plot is the puzzles, but I enjoyed how it unfolds, and it rewards paying attention. I liked the stinger, the last thing you see in the epilogue. A reminder that, for all the supernatural elements and political intrigue, this is just a sad and sordid tale about rich and powerful people who can't imagine anything other than more wealth and power.
Lmao I just opened Steam and it's trying to recommend me Heavy Rain because I played The Case of the Golden Idol. Fuck off, Steam
West of Loathing
So, uh, I bought this game in 2017. In 2019 a lot came out about Zack Johnson and other key members of Asymmetric (content warning on that link for abuse and sexual assault). The last couple of months, I played through West of Loathing for the first time, not remembering how bad the allegations were and reasoning that I already gave them my money anyway and I'm not getting a refund at this point. While writing this post about it, I looked up the allegations to fact-check, and learned how bad they were. It's worse than that Reddit post lets on, which devotes a lot of space to Asymmetric's apologies and hides many of the allegations themselves behind links, some of which are now broken.
I enjoyed my time with West of Loathing, and I know that not everyone who worked on it is guilty, and their work deserves better. But, like. I can't write a post recommending it in good conscience. A shame.