Puzzle Me This!

Trying to play Half-Life, but there's only so long I can play that before getting frustrated that it's not as good as HL2. So I've been mixing it up with some puzzle games.

Lume. The lights have gone out in town, and you're at your grandfathers place while he's out dealing with that, so you some puzzles to get him some power. Now, this have a great design quality to it, I love the paper-like graphics and the style of the characters. It's fun just to watch them move. The puzzles are mostly decent, some thinkers in there, and one that's just annoying if you don't spot something and make a huge inference from it. But the main thing about this game: it's short. Real short. For $7US, I would expect this to last longer than an hour. (I got it with a bundle of other games, so not bothered by that, but I would be bothered if I brought this direct.) This is Part 1 of a series, and I'd like to know more, but I hope they sort that price point out.

The Tiny Bang Story. Another game with a nice design sense to it. Yes, I can see why people cite Machinerium. The tiny world has exploded into jigsaw pieces, so you need to find those and solve puzzles to get everything working. There's mostly 'find X pieces', with extra proper puzzles to solve some things. This took me three hours, with only one puzzle irritating enough I had to look it up. (This is $20US, but I got it on sale for $5US.) Am disappointed that there's no nice animated closing segment, just the chance to play all the puzzles again.

Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Persian Carpet. [I picked up a bundle of Holmes games during the Christmas sale, so expect more of these.] This puzzle game is 'hidden item' hunt (a lot of pixel hunting) plus some actual puzzles. Some of them are just strange, but basically straightforward. The Deduction Board is annoying in that a large part of it is just 'click this then this, did that work?' And at no point did I ever understand what the case was, and even the explanation at the end just confused me more when everything was laid out. I did it in two hours, but can't say I felt like Holmes. Buh.

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