Backstreets of the Mind Reviews

Artwork good, mini games ok except not challenging enough, but man, the thing that stands out most to me is the panning. I really hate having to hold the mouse button to pan. It ruins the whole game for me. Zoom would have been so much better. There are some errors in some of the story text and I can't figure out why you needed Unity to make this game...

Really just a very boring game, with long, unskippable, badly acted cutscenes, and the gameplay is just the same thing over and over... Don't bother.

I'm a huge a fan of HOGs, and I like the style that this one is in. I like how you can pan around and kind of "extend" your view a little to find the objects you need to. They're not easy to find, but they're also not difficult; I know once I found something that I've been looking for for the past five minutes, I feel completely stupid afterward, but that's just my experience. It's par for the course for me. The story is the part that I hate. Like, cool, the character can apparently go back in time and make different choices so that his life isn't complete and utter s**t, and maybe this is just me, but I want to know how that's even possible? Time machine? Magic? Or are we just in this dude's imagination and none of what we're helping him chance is actually happening? I don't know, but I'd like to.

I got this on sale for 50 cents, and that's about the right price point. Anyone who plays hidden object games will be used to corny storylines and poor logic, but oof. There are some neat ideas in the gameplay, like scrolling the picture and watching the town modernize, but the whole thing where they give you only incorrect tools to solve each problem the first time you attempt it was pointless and annoying. Were they trying to make the point that "fixing the past is harder than you think"? If so, they did a terrible job. I'm also not convinced about a couple of typical childhood errors in judgment altering the entire course of protagonist's family's future. The kid didn't accidentally burn down the family home, he broke his skateboard. And now all of a sudden the family fortunes are looking up? What? P.s. "Stickers" apparently means "sticky notes" and "wafers" means "waffles"

Worst UI I've ever seen, and I play Logistical religously. It's just bad. Repeated, tedious cutscenes you cannot skip. Annoying way of moving in a HO scene (you have to pan but it really turns into frustrated click and drags that move your vision a milimeter at a time), plus when you screw up in a minigame you can't just restart it, you're forced to go through the entire process before it will let you retry. I really wanted to give indie HO games a try but damn. This was bad. I even got it on sale and it wasn't worth it. It's just not a good game, story wise or functionally.

If I wanted to play arcade games, I would buy them! When I play HO games, I want HO scenes, puzzles, and thinking mini-games, not arcade games, especially ones with achievements attached (at least the achievement is for a total score of 10,000, not 10,000 in one play). The space invaders type game controls sucks - the ship movement speed is turtle-slow with no apparent option to change it. The HO scenes are good except for the slow movement speed. The HO part of the game is relaxing and of good graphical quality.

[b][u]Overall Rating:[/u][/b] 6.5/10 Only buy on sale, not worth full price. Hesitantly giving this a thumbs up. It wasn't awful, but it wasn't that good either. [b]Pros:[/b] [list][*]Art is nice, crisp and clean, but nothing amazing to be seen. [*]HOG scenes are nicely done, but not challenging, with no misclick penalties or timers. (good and bad, depending on how easy you like it...) [*]Pleasant music throughout, not overwhelming, good controls for voume if it feels too distracting. [*]Runs great even on a taoster, an old, broken down toaster. No performance or technical issues at all for me and my 5 year old low-mid range rig. [*]Interesting blend of HOG and visual novel, with interesting movement in the HOG scenes.[/list] [b]Cons:[/b] [list][*]Choices did not matter, I played many scenes over with different choices, the result was always the same. [*]The only place your choices mattered was at the end, which was very short, felt cut off. And you can replay the scene again and have the other ending and achievement in under 3 minutes from the first ending. [*]Little to no replay value. This is a one-shot deal, there is nothing special enough to make you want to replay the whole game again. [*]Minigames were ridiculously hard compared to the HOG scenes. The discrepancy was extremely obvious. Not difficult to complete the minigames, but to get the score needed for the achievements... prepare to replay them quite a few times. Controls for the 2 video game minigames sucked, to be honest. Getting high enough scores was down to pure luck and multiple replays.[*]The game was too short, and felt like the story skipped a great deal. The beginning flowed nicely, but it just jumped forward to a too aburpt ending, like the ending was slapped on when the dev ran out of money.[*]Too many odd translations and oddly spelled words. Some of it felt very American, some of the words and phrases felt like archaic UK/EU terms from the 19th century. Example- a tire was labelled tyre, high top sneakers were called gumshoes. It was odd and made finding some objects by name very confusing.[/list] [b]TL;DR[/b] Not a terrible game, if you don't expect much from it. But too short, too many oddities with language and names for items. Minigames were fun, but the high scores needed for achievements made them frustrating, with many replays needed just to get them. I enjoyed it, for the most part, but wouldn't buy it again, even at 50% off. Maybe 75%. Just not compelling enough to give high recommendations for. But fine for a 2-3 hours time killer. It was different, but not special enough to ever pay full price for. Buy it at a deep discount, or search the Internet and Giveaway groups for free keys. [Edits made for typos, and more may remain to be found. My dyslexia is for reals acting up tonight...)

Finally a HOG that isn't "save your child from the evil wizard" and then it ends up with an extremely bad UI in the HOG scenes, where it's clear that it was designed for a touch screen. The mini-puzzles were mainly arcade games, but when one of the final ones ended up being a spreadsheet stock trader game, you couldn't skip, I had had enough. The story and graphics seems solid, but the rest is just not worth the time and money.

Not terrible, story is a bit wishy washy dull, the HOGs are fairly easy and that's most of the game. The minigames are nice, the scrolling shoot-em-up requires good dexterity if you want the no-skip achievement. A bit short at under 2 hours to complete the game, might have to replay the game a few times to get the high score shmup game achievement. 6/10

Make no mistake: this is a “FIND THE HIDDEN OBJECT” game, in case it wasn’t clear by the game’s video trailer and description. (It wasn’t clear to me, anyway) If these “hidden object” games are not your cup of tea, then you might want to pass this game by. As far as “hidden object” games go, this one’s pretty decent, but with a VERY SHORT play time. It has nice “photorealistic” graphics, an interesting (although a bit melancholy) storyline, and a few mildly-amusing minigames. One twist in the gameplay/graphics was the “multi-plane” scrolling of each level; moving around shifts the perspective a little, possibly revealing a hidden object. Another twist: hidden letters in the scene, often in the form of misspelled signs, often must be found. The story is entirely linear (except the final level), so the “time-shifting” aspect is just part of the linear storyline; you can’t “time shift” on your own. This game has a psychological/meaning-of-life motif that seems to be in vogue these days, but I found the story intriguing enough to want to play the game to the end. The game is very short, and can be beaten in about 2 or three hours. So yeah, I liked it. It's a short but decent casual game. Consider the cost of the game versus the two/three-hour playtime, though.