Alum Reviews

A wasted opportunity on a Christian game. Now, I must say this has nothing to do with my lack of religious faith. I love myself a good Christian game if it's made well. But this one is really a wasted opportunity. I am not even sure whether to hit "recommend" or "not recommend" at this point, as it has fewer negatives than positives, however, the negatives are much stronger. "If you want to scold someone - compliment them at first", one play said, and this is exactly what I'm going to do. For one, the game brings back nostalgia feels. Most of the pixel point-and-clicks are made in RPGmaker these days, and have generally the same feel to it. This one brings me back to my "Kyrandia" and "Monkey Island" days. It is simple, intuitive, I loved the premise and the world created, and the music is pretty good, as the matter of fact. It was even moderately funny at times, and I loved it. But the most important thing - it's intuitive. You don't have to solve crazy puzzles that require a lot of mental strength - they are simple, understandable, you don't have to worry or use hints to solve them, and they are never over the top, as some quests do - you always have a general idea of what you have to do. It's a rarity in modern overly sophisticated quests, and you have to enjoy the intuitively of this quest. People here did good jobs in testing as well, given the budget (not a perfect one - a few bugs that crashed the game for me I still caught, but it's far less than is usually found in indie games - no disrespect to them, I am, after all, working on an indie project myself and know the budget). However, it suffers from some major minuses. First two chapters of the game were amazing, but they soon rolled down the hill into a thin, and extremely boring story. It started as a nice Biblical allusion, that made me think "Oh, this should be nice, it is rather subtle and interesting, I wonder if there would be some people who just see it as a fairy tale, and not a retell of what Christianity is", but the further you go, the thinner the plot is, and the more your eyes roll up. The writer created the absolute bad guys and absolute good guys. Every good guy is oved, forgiven, they turn to their god after a mere taste of it (pun intended); and the bad guys are bad just because they're bad. Should I really explain that "he's evil because he's evil" is a tremendous flaw? At the end, I actually did expect for their god to turn out to be the second villain who just tricked everyone (which would make for a banal plot twist, but at least it would be a plot twist… at least it would make the game more fun), but n-n-nope. Good guys are good because they're good; bad guys are bad because they're bad. No reasons, no undertones or halftones, it's whether you're with us, or we kill you. Do you forget that everyone has reasons to do something? For crying out loud, even Lucifer had reasons to challenge your god! And good ones, might I add. But I will not discuss this on a gaming website, of course. All and all, it could have been a great, fun, and exciting allusion on religion in general, if it didn't turn into preaching, and, honestly? - quite childish "this is the white prince and he's a good guy, and this is a black king, and he is a bad guy". Might suit for pre-teens, but I am sure adults wrote this game. Even the dialogues weakened with each chapter, each episode and location, becoming more and more long, banal, and boring. Second-best (worst?) negative aspect is the voice actors. I don't think they even tried. I just found two who had any potential, and they were side characters. But the main character, guys! Don't you think the main character should have had the best voice actor? Why did he get the worst one? There was not a single intonation, not a single emotion in his voice. And I am not even exaggerating, as I was paying attention specifically to that. My original theory was that he would sound blank and unemotional for the intro of the game, because he's infected by in-game sickness (basically, depression), and when he gets out of it, he'll become more active and human-like, but... till the very end he had nothing. How can you actually let a person voice The Main Character if a cue that should have been said in a hysterical anger, in disappointment of being left behind by the person he loved the most in his life, sounds like he's reading an instruction to a nasal spray?! Not to mention, actors weren't provided by good mikes, and about a third of them sound like they're sitting on a toilet, echoing around the tiles? Or the sound manager didn't see what the problem was and ask for another take? Another mic? Another actor? An attempt to fix it? There's no acting here, just two people tried to act, and it looks like characters just read their cues. I point it out: character read their cues, not voice actors read their cues. How can you speak about immersion with that? Also, free brushes you can find on DeviantArt. Seriously, it takes an hour to hand-draw a map of those sizes, did you really have to use well-known Daphne Arcadius brushes? If you would take Chapter One, and the most part of Chapter Two, and go in that direction, keeping allusions and hints from those parts, it would've been a great game. It is light, and simple, and intuitive, and great amount of work is put into it - I can see that. Everyone can. But it lacks on both story and voiceover fronts. One might think that in this case art can pull it through, but... it's not quality art, and art was never the point of this game. So with art not being th point, we look for a story, which after Chapter Two... well, it sucks, sorry for being blunt. It might be fitting for crazily religious people, or radicals who see the world in black and white, but that's a very narrow target audience. Too narrow to make a game for. If you want to make a good Christian game, look no further than "That Dragon Cancer" - look at those allusions, and those hints, they managed to create a compelling story about religion. You made a story about religion, but it's not interesting or compelling. You have potential, please, don't let it get wasted by zealotry. PS: [insert sarcastic comment about portraying Christians as oppressed ones here]

I loved the game even though I've been stuck in some levels like the sniper mini game. The story is great and people complaining about a lot of cutscenes should consider buying puzzle game instead if they want to just get puzzles. I'm not a big fan of point and click games, I've tried Edna and Harvey Breakout and it was too hard and boring for me. I've played syberia 1 & 2 like 6 years ago and it was boring as well. People complaining about bad voice acting are partially right because it's for sure not as great as AAA games but it's not the worst.,"the altruist" or a little robot "GOBO" that I loved after hearing its voice even though its modified with software its great. But even other characters voice acting fits really good with this game retro style. Cutscenes with "altruist" feel great, voice is soft and the art in these cutscenes feels really warm. Controls aren't bad, changing actions with right mouse click or mouse scroll was useful. Ending somehow hit me hard and with credits and the beautiful song which followed it I almost cried. The game took me around 8 hours to complete and I enjoyed every minute I spent playing.

Cringeworthy Christian fable. Puzzles & world-building are decent but dialogues & voice-acting ruin this. Arguably worth it for the cult factor: the increasingly questionable actions it has you do in the name of its divine saviour (pestering children to proselytise them, attacking unbelievers for no reason other than their faith) raised a chuckle or two.

Alum is a nice little retro point & click, but the story is a bit heavy on religious matters.

I'm really disappointed. This game started out so well, with good puzzles, an engaging story, and good pacing. When the Unfeigned Altruist first showed up, I really hoped the game would turn into a good metaphysical allegory I don't know something. But it just gets more and more preachy and it becomes unavoidably obvious that Unfeigned = Jesus, and the way the various characters interact with him gets more and more fervent and hard to ignore. I finally gave up in Chapter 6, I think most of the way through. So, if the preachy aspect wouldn't bother you, then it's a good game. It does have some weird timed sequences but some of them can be bypassed.

Excellent point-and-click adventure game! Puzzles are generally fun and intuitive. Artwork is beautiful. Pays homage to the LucasArts and Sierra greats of yore. A superb entry in the genre. PROS: - Excellent puzzles for the most part - Full voice acting - Very few bugs - User interface easy to use CONS: - Some of the action sequences were a little off-putting as part of an adventure game, but are fortunately skippable. Very minor issue Overall, 5 out of 5! =)

This is a very long, relatively good point-and-click adventure created by (I assume) Evangelical Christians. The art quality, puzzles, and music are all very good. The voice acting quality is mediocre, and the voice acting direction is rather poor. The mini-games are a crime against humanity. I feel as if this is a C+ game. With just a bit better voice direction, it would be in B range. The thing that prevents it from being a solid A is the rather heavy-handed almost-but-not-quite-Christian rhetoric and imagery, and the very stark good-vs-evil story. The two main villains are not believable as anything other than very basic bad-guys - their basic motivation just seems to be to do *evil* as much as they can. The heroes can't quite help but come off as a bit smug. There was a really good game lurking under the surface, here, but it just couldn't *quite* be properly excavated. As it is, this game is still well-worth playing for any point-and-click enthusiast. Just, you know, brace yourself.

The puzzles and setting are pretty interesting and well done, but the voice acting and story being told is so clumsily handled that it becomes increasingly annoying to endure. I did have to toggle it into windowed mode at a fairly small resolution to even get it to run as some aspects of the build haven't aged well. I would be interested in what this developer could put out with a touch more polish and subtlety.

It's surprisingly good game! Only few minor annoyances Pros: + Lengthy! + Fully voiced with good actors + Great story + Likable characters + Good puzzles + Option to skip action sequences + Beautiful visuals Cons: - Death scenarios are sometimes frustrating - Completely linear dialogue structure - Issues with music/dialogue volume. If you're fan of classic point & click games, this one needs at least to be tried! I loved the demo and ended up paying for the full game. The price is quite reasonable too, which is not exactly common in today's games.

It's a great graphic adventure, one that puts the narrative at the center of the stage, and does so successfully.