Sandra and Woo in the Cursed Adventure Reviews

First to point out: I read the webcomic and like it a lot (I wouldn't have played the game otherwise). I played the game in German - it's my third language, meaning I'm not too good at it, but I'm striving to improve. While I think I understood everything, there could be some jokes I missed because of insufficient language level. Finally, I'm an RPG player, not an adventure player. Before you read further: if you don't know the webcomic, read it first (Sandra and Woo, available in English and German). If you don't like the webcomic, avoid this game. Everything below assumes you're a fan of the webcomic. Story & characters: It's incredibly similar to the webcomic arc stories. You're probably going to like it. There's the well known main characters from the webcomic, while many others make a cameo appearance. You switch control over multiple characters throughout the game. Here comes the first disappointment - in webcomic some characters are quite specific and the game doesn't quite follow that. For example Woo at one point says he can't reach something atop a tree, while in the webcomic he is known as a good class climber and shouldn't have any issue with the tree (he eats few animals, though, so thumbs up there). Also, with Cloud you'd expect to beat up something/someone with a katana (or any other weapon), but that doesn't happen. Larisa is pretty much chaos incarnate the first time you get to play as her, but the second time it's far milder. Gameplay I'm not an adventure player, so I admit I played with the guide - meaning I essentially skiped the part with randomly moving around and attempting to use everything on everything, so I can't comment on that. You'll be doing lot of amazing things, such as making a scarecrow scarier, building a miniaturized power plant, brewing a potion of wisdom, forcing a friend to catch cold, building a rocket and far more. Most of these tasks are funny and kinda insane, exactly as you would expect from the webcomic-inspired game. There's a few minigames, too. I can't honestly say I liked them, but they were okay. Most of them only showed up for a short while and were gone again soon, but one particular minigame was repeated three times, which was kinda boring. Fortunately, though, it was largely skippable. Graphics Here comes the second, and largest, disappointment. While most of the graphics are nice and drawn in Sandra-and-Woo style, the animations are just poor. I used to play games with animations like these twenty years ago. The poor quality of the animations (especially when someone is walking) is sometimes disturbing, so I'm sorry a bit more work wasn't put into that part. Sound In my oppinion the characters speak perfectly, at least in the German version. Larisa's russian accent is just as I always imagined it, Sandra and Cloud speak exactly as you would expect them too. Others, especially the new ones, are also very good. Jokes Here is the thir disappointment. For some reason I expected the game to be funnier. Perhaps I'm too stoic, but for the most parts I just smirked. Honestly, there were a few moments where I just laughed aloud (mostly parts that involved Larisa or the king). I could have missed a few jokes because of German language, but alltogether I expected a bit more. Alltogether: I'm recommending the game, as I enjoyed it even with the few issues mentioned above.

Love the web comic, not a fan of the game. Unlike regular point-and-click adventure games, you don't have the option to run, the animation isn't stellar, and the mini-games get old very quickly, especially the hacker ones. And if that wasn't bad enough, I can't finish the game just stops at the end cutscene after the last hacking mini-game, preventing me from progressing any further (it's not frozen, I can still bring up the menu, but I can't do much else). Extremely disappointed.

Sandra and Woo is a great webcomic. Can't say that about the game though. It is extremely well related to the comic, it have a nice plot idea, but it feels kinda.. inconsistent. The plot seems unfinished. The art is good, but it ceirtainly could use more polishing. Voice acting is fine, but Spuknit seems definitely more russian than Larisa. Humor is there, but it doesn't save the day. And the minigames... well, maybe they're just not my type. Ok for comic fans, but no-go for someone unfamiliar with the comic.

Great puzzles, beautiful graphics and even better storyline! A very enjoyable game worth every penny of its price and more!

I recommend this game to those who read the Sandra and Woo web comic! The most refreshing aspect to me was the hand drawn 2D animations. This has gotten rare today, it may look odd to some players, and it might not be your cup of tea. As a programmer trying to fiddle around with simple game design and animation I find it inspiring. Graphics and animation are more detailed and smoother than in typical games from the historic point and click era. The voice acting is superb and grants additional depth to the characters from the comic! (I only played the English version but I expect nothing less of the German version.) I tend to be frustrated by puzzles from point and click adventures, because the solutions often feel random. This game suffers from this a little bit too. Nonetheless I was able to solve the majority of puzzles on my own. When I did it felt rewarding. I find it better than most games of the genre. For some puzzles I did use the game guide which is available as a free DLC. The game is spiked with a number of simple mini games that look like children games. However they are actually aimed at an adult/teenage audience and are a lot harder than you would expect. I was pleasantly surprised by that! This game is produced by the authors of the original web comic and the characters and humor from the comic fit very well. Although suitable for children, the humor is more grown up than the visual style leads on. The game is positively non-violent but it features some some scenes where small animals get eaten by one of the main characters (a raccoon). If you intend to play this game together with small children (which you can absolutely do!) be prepared for that. This is a lovely independent game production and the authors can be proud of their work!

I like this game for two reasons: I'm a fan of the Sandra and Woo webcomic, and the writing here does reflect the tone and "logic" of the webcomics, which is a huge plus for me; I am also a huge fan of puzzle games, and this game provided some very challenging puzzles which is also another plus for me. However, I find the use of 3D wholly unnecessary, especially when the animations are all very painstakingly slow that every reaction feels like slogging through mud. For reference, the 2000 game Escape from Monkey Island, the first 3D game in the Monkey Island series, has much better 3D animation quality in terms of smoothness, not to mention the 3D models look a lot better as well. The voice acting is abysmal, especially when the voice actors don't even seem to know what tone to take on for their lines. At some points, the difference in Cloud's tone is very obvious, even the voice is not consistent, almost sounding like two different persons are his voice actors. There are also inconsistencies between the voice acting and the subtitles, and you should get the grammar of the game checked by a professional since the message about bonus moves during the mini games is just grammatically wrong, and there was an instance where "Sixth" became "[i]Sixt[/i]" in the game. My advice to the developer would be to ditch the 3D which provides no positive value whatsoever to the user experience; in fact, 2D is more flexible and you can go nuts with it. Take a look at the mobile games White Island and Beyond The Bounds, both by VisualShower Corp; they're both fully 2D, and the visual novel style of making characters pop up when talking also engages the audience better with facial expressions. Speaking of which, sometimes when the characters have speech bubbles for choices, their avatar beside the speech bubble does not match their in-game appearance, most obviously due to their clothing. In conclusion, I would like to say that I enjoyed the game, but at the same time I am also very frustrated by the game's painful animations. The developer should use 2D instead of 3D since the 3D does not improve user experience and instead takes away from user experience, and voice acting direction should be provided, otherwise remove voice acting for background characters. [b]Pros[/b]: [olist] [*]It's a Sandra and Woo story! [*]Hard, challenging puzzles [/olist] [b]Cons[/b]: [olist] [*]Poor animation quality even by 2000 standards - slow, with ugly character models [*]Inconsistent voice acting [/olist]

Sandra and Woo in the Cursed Adventure is a massive pain in the ass. It looks like a fun adventure game, but it is very much from the bad old days of adventure games where the puzzles are pretty much impossible without a walkthrough. Good news, you can get the walkthrough as free DLC! Bad news, that still doesn't help you get past the infuriating minigames and several other trial and error puzzles whose solutions are not documented. This is not a fun game. Some adventures (notably Daedalic) can get away with having very obscure puzzles because the comedy is so good that it becomes part of the game to combine all the things with all the other things and hear the amusing responses. If the dialog is really good, you can get hints about how to actually solve the puzzle from the failed attempts. But that is not the case here. There are no hints what to do. Even something as simple as combining the right items in the wrong order doesn't provide a custom response saying "maybe you should combine X with Y first", it just gives some iteration of "you can't do that". What little comedy is there doesn't work for me at all. The dialog is tedious to click through and it never comes up with any clever or unique gags. I persisted for almost 7 hours on this game hoping it might get funnier or less frustrating, but it really didn't. Finally, near the end, when I was presented with yet another trial and error section that the walkthrough didn't explain how to pass, I gave up. I am a hardcore point and click adventure fan but I can't really see how anyone would enjoy this game. Maybe if you dig the comic that it's based on then the comedy will work for you, but the puzzles are really too much. Nowadays there are so many better adventure games, this one isn't really worth the time or money.

This game was pretty fun. Very challenging, I must admit I needed a guide more than once! But even so I was able to get by often and challenge my thinking and solve things all on my own. The story is based on wacky happenings but still captivating nonetheless. The minigames test your memory and spatial reasoning. The backgrounds are excellent and while the animation is sometimes choppy the characters come alive just like the point and click adventure games of yore. I must admit I haven't played one in a long time but this game definitely brings back memories. And if you're a regular read of the Sandra and Woo comic series I definitely recommend this; it was very neat seeing characters come to life in new ways! Overall, fun story and good adventure gameplay with fitting voice actors (usually) and good music, sometimes VERY catchy. I would recommend this game and am glad I played it.

This game is an obvious recommendation to those that like the web-comic “Sandra and Woo”, but I will also recommend it to those that enjoy classic style point and click adventure games with likeable characters. There’s little doubt in my mind, that you will find enjoyment in the game if you have already fallen in love with the main characters of the comic, but knowledge of the comic is not required to enjoy the game, if you are up for a cute and silly adventure game with a group of likeable preteens. [u]Negative:[/u] Let us begin with the negatives, as I like getting those out of the way first. Some of the animations are a bit stiff, didn’t really bother me much, since I feel the most important thing in the adventure game is the dialogue, and I enjoy playing some adventure games from the 2000s. (And not because of nostalgia. :P I actually only got properly into adventure games a few years ago.) The minigames. The minigames are skippable, so again not a big negative, but yeah, a lot of them were more on the annoying side for me breaking away from the humor and fun of the main game. You might experience them more as a fun variation in gameplay, depends on taste. Larisa’s face looked a bit creepy when she stood facing the camera directly. I don’t know if it was just a poor choice of design for her face, or if it was an intention to give her a “crazy eyes”/ “crazy look”. The thing is, Larisa doesn’t look crazy in the comics. Her actions, and the things she says is often absolutely crazy, but she doesn’t look crazy at a glance. I feel that she does in this game… Then again, that might just be me. Last negatives are only relevant to the webcomic fans: Some of the best side characters are missing. I admit, this negative is a bit more a personal preference, but it is especially annoying since my least favorite side-character Landon has a sizeable role in the story. I’d much rather have seen Cloud’s mom and sister or… Well really anyone other than Landon. :P The guy is dull compared to the rest of the cast... [u]Positive:[/u] The game captures the world of the comics very well, and Sandra and Woo fits very well into a point and click adventure game, even before they get sucked into the “game world”. Since the “real world” in the comic already operates under a different set of rules from our own, natural laws and the fourth wall can be broken for the sake of comedy. Given the protagonists and the world, some of the sillier solutions in this kind of game makes sense, since you are thinking “If I was an imaginative child, how would I solve this?” The game is fully voiced which is nice, though there are sometimes some words that don’t match the subtitles 1:1, but that kind of stuff occurs in a lot of games. Since I didn’t notice any points in the game where what was said and what was written had opposite meaning, then I don’t see any issue. Giving voices to characters from a silent medium is always a challenge. On the one hand fans might be excited to finally hear the characters they love… On the other hand, the voices can’t possibly fit what everyone assumed they sounded like when they read the comic. In my case, I think the voices fit, especially the boys and Sandra. I was surprised that Larisa had an accent, I mean I knew her parents were Russian, but I just assumed she was so young when she came to the country, and given she hung out with kids without accents that she would have grown out of it? By no means an up or a down, and I probably will continue to picture her without one. Just shows how difficult it can be to match people’s expectations, when you go from different medias. The characters are likeable, adorable, and fun. From Cloud trying to be a hero and save his girl, to Larisa being bored whenever she can’t cause chaos, to Woo being his mix of lazy and mischievous, to Sandra being sweet and cute and still very much proactive when she has the opportunity. Okay I don’t like Landon, but he is very much faithful to his portrayal in the comics… I just hope that if they make a new adventure game that Larisa and Landon will have broken up in the comics as he has outstayed his comedic potential a long time ago. :P The jokes with him both in this game and in the comics are pretty much just going on repeat… The personalities of the characters are very much present in the game, and leads to some funny dialogue. Like trying to use handcuffs on Cloud when playing as Larisa (which doesn’t do anything else), she mentions that Sandra would probably kill her. And since the dialogue is the most important thing for me in an adventure game, it is nice to say it fits very well. I’ll just leave a link to the webcomic here in the end, in case any one wants to check that out too. 😊 [url=http://www.sandraandwoo.com]Sandra & Woo[/url]

Huge fan of the webcomic. That said, the game was pretty disappointing to me. If you like the webcomic and are always hungry for more like me, then it may be well worth it to go through the game for seeing more of the characters and all that- but they don't quite shine as well here. I finished to the end in anticipation of an interesting story, but the ending felt very abrupt and anticlimatic. Where to start? The graphics are...okay. The animations were pretty awful. They were very stiff slow and choppy and kept making awkward pauses in the dialogue that really interrupted the flow of the action. The sound effects? My ears were bleeding (especially that one re-used kiss sound effect oh god). The voice-acting (in English) was all over the place, some of them were okay or pretty good (thankfully Larisa was still pretty awesome) while some sounded like grandpa in a skype call with a $2 mic. The actual dialogue was pretty amusing. Again, Larisa is best. The point-&-click stuff was pretty neat, though some parts were a bit too nonsensical/abstract to really solve except hoping to stumble onto it by chance. Then again, I haven't played too much point-and-click, so maybe I'm just really bad at them. I often got stuck trying every combination over and over only to finally realize I overlooked the simplest actions. The minigames were simple but challenging enough to be fun imo. Plus, the CD's were a nice touch for when they could get too frustrating. Personally, I would have really enjoyed it if the game's story took place more in the actual setting of the comic and used more of their existing characters that fans would love to see. It would be awesome exploring places that fit into the comic, like the school, cloud's house, the forest, the various places of the city- lots of potential there. Frankly it was hard to feel invested in that medieval setting with its short-lived characters who were little more than walking parodies of a genre. If they made another game established more firmly in the comic's setting with more of its characters, I'd likely go back for more despite the various technical drawbacks. (please please fix that kiss sound effect though or it'll turn otherwise cute scenes into really cringey moments D:) So, overall...I feel they could have invested much more time and effort into the quality of the animation and sound. Either that or lower the price to match what was put into it. Definitely room for improvement in the character models but was passable. Would definitely be more appealing with more focus on the comic's setting/characters imo. Good for some laughs and basking in Larisa's firey glory but probably not recommended for people unfamiliar with the webcomic. (then again, I'd recommend them the comic first). ------------------------------------------ Edit: In hindsight, just thought I'd throw this bit of clarification in. I really wavered over giving this a thumbs up or thumbs down because, honestly, that depends on the context of whether you're going in as a Sandra and Woo fan or not. On one hand, I don't regret buying and playing it- I wanted to support the author anyways, and it was interesting to go through as a fan. I'm also being a bit of a critical arse in that spirit, out of that sort of respect and expectation of a series I love. I would hope that other fans will invest in this as well, and hope a sequel may be made that will outdo the first. That said, I ultimately concluded that this game will probably not appeal to the average Steam user to happen upon it, and decided to vote within that context.