A Twisted Tale Reviews

There is a lot to like about Chapter 1 of A Twisted Tale: from the hand drawn art style, decent voice acting (I especially like the antique shop owner) and music which complements. The puzzles were mostly logical with some that were challenging at times. I would have like to have seen some more world building in this chapter but overall I had a fun time. I am very much looking forward to the next instalments.

This game was fun to play. You don't need to catch all the classic references to enjoy it. Long live the genre!

Schönes erstes Kapitel! Gute Rätsel. Und auch wenn einige davon etwas schwierig waren, hatte ich viel Spaß und freue mich auf die nächsten Kapitel.

This game is delightful. Looking forward to further chapters.

Lovely game with a lot attention to detail as well as tricky puzzles.

A Twisted Tale is wonderful, and a joy to play. It's obvious that a lot of love and care has gone into creating this adventure, and I'm taking my time playing it because there's just so much quality on show. I'm very happy to have this in my collection. Recommended.

If you’re going to take influences, why not take them from the best? This is very evident in A Twisted Tale, which pays beautiful homage to the classic adventure games made by LucasArts, and it actually does a pretty fine job at it. The moment the game starts, I’m instantly reminded of The Curse of Monkey Island, so the game is off to a good start. We are instantly greeted with a beautiful opening cutscene which sets up the adventure. The main character Vio is sucked through a portal, and a few seconds later she appears in a forest which connects to a larger floating village. The game doesn’t bother setting up the backstory, but in my opinion, it doesn’t have to. Instead, you’re instantly solving puzzles and exploring the weird surroundings. Because the main sources of inspiration are those classic LucasArts titles, those familiar with these games will feel right at home. The objective is to reactivate the portal you arrived through, but as you probably can already guess, it’s a lot easier said than done. At its current state, A Twisted Tale includes just the first episode. You can expect roughly two hours of gameplay, but you can add in one extra hour if your puzzle solving skills are not top notch. The game has some very tricky puzzles which utilize quite nicely all the general traits of the genre. You talk to NPCs, combine inventory items, and on a few occasions you also need reactions to perform certain actions within a limited timeframe. Overall, the puzzle design is solid, but there are a couple of more outlandish puzzles which require the use of the good old “try everything on everything” approach. If you pit this against any LucasArts title, there’s no question who’s the winner, but when compared to the general quality of modern adventure games, I would say A Twisted Tale does provide a good and fair challenge in terms of the puzzles. The visual inspirations are derived from the already mentioned The Curse of Monkey Island. This LucasArts title is in my books one of the prettiest adventure games of all time. Unfortunately A Twisted Tale doesn’t rise to its level, but the game is very nice to look at. There are some weird choices in some of the animated cutscenes, though. While the introductory cinematic is very well put together, some in-game cutscenes seem to be ripped from a completely other game. These do break the immersion, and I would’ve left them out completely. There are some technical issues as well. I have an ultrawide monitor, which is compatible with the game, but I couldn’t get the screen recording working for the life of me with the game on full screen. Windowed everything worked great, but the game could really use some settings for this one. The game runs only on 1280 by 720 resolution, which made the text borderline unreadable, at least for my old eyes. The game is completely dubbed, in both English and German. While I genuinely admire the effort, I’m not a big fan of spoken dialogue in adventure games. There are subtitles, but it’s very easy to click through the next dialogue line by accident. In more times than once I had no idea what the characters were talking about, because an essential part of the dialogue was clicked away by accident. It would be great if the auto advance of dialogue would be disabled if the user preferred just the text. Now the dialogue advances at the speed of the spoken lines, which is a bit annoying. There should be seven episodes in total, and I’m very optimistic to see how the story continues. Hopefully the small technical hiccups are fixed in future updates, but overall I really enjoyed my time in the weird world of A Twisted Tale.

There is so much to love about this game. From the moment it opens, the world comes to life, bursting with personality and inviting you in. The hand painted backgrounds are adorned in wondrous colors, the small village built on cobblestone streets reminds me of everything we loved about old cell animated Disney films. It feels boutique yet grand, hand-crafted yet cinematic… and as we’re first introduced to Vio, the camera sweeps and pans, intrigues and inspires. There’s a brief moment where the lens’ foreground blurs to bring focus to the subject and it’s absolutely breathtaking to behold. In fact when I first took control of Vio, I started the game over so I could watch it again. The lights in the cafe invited me inside while the pinks and oranges of the sun reminded me of home. Once you begin to explore, there is love and artistry in every detail, each cloud, every stone, the cracks in the walls, the light through the windows—it’s the kind of passion and execution that only an indie game can provide, it feels custom tailored just for you. Walking around to my delight I quickly discovered that everything in the game is a hotspot, so I took my time and savored each new environment, letting Vio paint an ever increasingly rich world as we both explored it together. Vio is a wonderful companion and protagonist. She feels real and there are moments where you can sense developer’s personality is shown through a glint in Vio’s eye and it is remarkably charming. The entire cast of characters in fact are such a treat. The antique shop owner is wickedly funny, he made me laugh out loud a few times and his dynamic with Vio was a lot of fun to be a part of. The chef also got a big laugh from me, his concern for his pet bug Roachy combined with the perfect character animation for the moment, stands out as a favorite moment of mine. Gloria, Ned, Betty, Grumpy Hermann, I remember all of their names with ease because they each have a quirk and spark—none of them are caricatures or personas, they’re all alive in their own right, which adds so much depth and interactivity to the world, you want to hear what they’re going to say and you’re never entirely sure what that may be. The puzzles are in a sweet spot, they’re not handed to you but they can be thought through and they provide quite the dopamine hit when you get them. The “sprinkle of retro” is handled masterfully, the antique shop houses some well-handled references and was such a joy to explore, to point, click and find reward. Perhaps my favorite nod of all was my excitement when I learned from Ned that this golden bead I had been carrying was… let’s say from a certain Atlantean adventure and I just adored that so much, it felt like such a nice, well thought out touch. In summary, this game is very fun. It’s full of love and charm. The characters have charisma and chemistry with one another. The writing is sharp and clever, it’s quite often deeply funny—it made me laugh often and usually unexpectedly. There’s also a whimsical nature to the dialog that weaves nicely with the visual aesthetics and all of this is wrapped in a bow by its score. The world encourages and rewards exploration, it feels tangible yet dreamlike, and when it was over I watched the credits roll with a sense of utter fulfillment. And as the curtain closed, I found myself wanting more.

The game is a nod to the point and click adventures of the 80s and 90s, full of easter eggs and sometimes absurd puzzles. The art style is reminiscent of Monkey Island 3 or Deponia, and the voice acting is very well done in both German and English. The difficulty of the puzzles is average with a few exceptions that are really tough and not very intuitive. The puzzle structure reminded me of Day of the Tentacle more than once, but this might be a subjective take. All in all, I would rate this first chapter with 8 out of 10 points and I'm looking forward to the next chapters Clear recommendation, especially if you played the first generation point and click adventures by LucasArts etc.

WARNING: Not a full game. It is chapter 1 out of 7. I really enjoyed it - the art, the voice-overs and puzzles. Very well written script as well. However, I did feel misled as I thought I was buying a full game. I believe the store page/title needs to state that it is chapter 1 out of 7 and you are actually buying chapter 1, not a full game. Which means more money spent in the future and unknown release dates for next chapters. Thank you