"Today I have something different for you guys. I’ll be talking about a demo. Remember those? They used to be the norm back before the era of misleading “gameplay” trailers, let’s plays and why not, even video reviews
The game I’ll talk about is a throwback in more than just the fact that there’s a demo out for it, it’s also an old-school point-and-click adventure game, similar in humor and approach to the Lucas Arts classics like the Monkey Island Series or Day of the Tentacle.
This is Gibbous - A Cthulhu adventure game... demo.
Gibbous is being developed by a three-man team with a penchant for the charms of Lovecraft, comedy and a deep appreciation for point-and-click adventure games.
Not only have they chosen to make a game in this most-ancient of styles but they’ve also chosen to further this old-school approach and launch an actual demo alongside their Kickstarter, which is way more than what most other devs do when they head to Kickstarter.
Characters
During the demo you’ll only be able to play as Buzz, the unfortunate soul who somehow finds the Necronomicon and unleashes this reference-filled adventure upon us. However, the game description promises that we’ll get to play as three different characters in the completed version. One of the many mechanics that harken back to ye olde adventure game.
If Buzz is playing the role of the somewhat-serious character in this game, he needs an opposite, a foil character. And in Gibbous, that character is none other than Buzz’s cursed cat, Kitteh.
Kitteh seems to be the vocalization of every “cat is the master, human is the slave” meme on the internet and this actually makes the character better because it is much more of an appropriate representation of the relationship between humans and their felines. You expect her to be an asshole, because she’s a cat and as we all know, cats are tremendous assholes.
Animation
The animation is nice and smooth, as one would expect from a game made in 2016. The overall art direction harkens back to the adventure titles of old, minus the pixels of course. I need to make a special note here and mention that Gibbous takes this tribute thing to a higher extent, actually animating the game using the classic frame-by-frame technique. Everything being set against some very nice-looking 2D painted environments..
Whilst keeping in mind that the demo only gives us a very tiny bit of the entire scope of the game. The puzzles weren’t incredibly simple nor were they pants-on-head insane. It appears the devs really enjoy intertwining everything with their dialogue so make sure you talk to the characters around you several times. The game suggest you exhaust all dialogue options as well, so it’s more of a game hint rather than simply wanting to make sure you get to see all the jokes and references in the game, although that’s a part of it as well.
Voice acting and references
The game’s writing seems to be littered not only with 4th wall-breaking lines but also with a veritable metric fuck-tonne of pop culture references. These range from visual meta references to other games to lines the characters deliver relating to anything from Jimi Hendrix to Star Trek. As well as of course the more obvious Lovecraftian ones and references to the classic adventure games that inspired Gibbous to begin with.
Soundtrack and writing
The music in the game is nice, moody yet light-hearted with the songs being generally subdued, at least the ones in the demo. Each screen in the game has its own music and all of them work in tandem with the environmental sounds. This in turn means that they can also transition very smoothly from one screen to another without causing auditory whiplash.
The voice acting also seems to be spot-on, funny and engaging and I have to say that I wasn’t really expecting such a high level of quality from such a young indie dev.
And talking about the dev team, they’re actually seeking funding help on they successfully funded the game through Kickstarter!
Thanks for reading this review, in case you enjoyed it don’t forget to upvote, resteem, comment and follow!"
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I uploaded the original article up on Rugged Gamers: http://ruggedgamers.com/gibbous-cthulhu-adventure-game/
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