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Genre: Adventure Developer & Publisher: Specialbit Studios Released: April 6, 2021 Requirements: MINIMUM: OS: 64-bit Windows 7 SP1 CPU: 2 GHtz MEMORY: 2 GB RAM VIDEO: Graphics card with DX 10 (shader model 4.0) capabilities DirectX: Version 1o STORAGE: 500 MB available space
Requirements: RECOMMENDED: OS: 64-bit Windows 10 CPU: 2.3 GHtz MEMORY: 4 GB RAM VIDEO: Graphics card with DX 10 (shader model 4.0) capabilities DirectX: Version 11 STORAGE: 500 MB available space
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By flotsam
Specialbit Studios
This is one of those games where there is nothing much wrong, and nothing to make it stand out. The Steam page succinctly describes the goings on: “The protagonist is a man who investigates strange occurrences—a sort of paranormal detective. One day, he receives a letter requesting help: strange creatures are terrorising a village tucked deep in the wilds of the forest. With glowing eyes and an uncanny ability to evade hunters, these creatures may be more than mere beasts”. Needless to say, you are that protagonist, and even more needlessly, you set off to the village to try and uncover what is happening. The 3 to 4 hours of first person perspective that follows is a fairly easy task fest. It isn’t a casual game, but maybe it’s a couple of steps up. If you like tasks, you will be at home. Not epic quests, just things like you need meat, which the butcher will give you if only he had his knives, which the smithy could give you if only … And so on. It isn’t always one task at a time, but it is never much beyond that. And the tasks aren’t terribly difficult, eliminating any sense of frustrating overbearance (is that a word?). Importantly, there was no occasion on which I felt that I had done too many things for no obvious move forward. To the contrary, just head off and poke about a bit more and things will progress. Whilst limited animations provide some movement, the 2D game screens are largely static, yet the overall stillness never felt sterile. That is largely down to the richness of the graphic detail of each screen, a definite high point. You don’t move around within each screen, but can explore it with your mouse, finding the hotspots and talking to the characters within. Exits from the screen will take you to another scene, where the same thing occurs. You never turn around; retracing your steps will be like walking backwards through the earlier scenes. If all that sounds confusing, think of it as a series of slides through which you move back and forth. Some hotspots might take you further into an aspect of the scene (looking inside a drawer perhaps), and a little game window will pop up showing that element. Clicking outside that window will take you back to the broader scene. You gather items, and your inventory ribbon will appear top of screen by moving the mouse there. Drag items to use them in the game world. There is no spoken word, which I never mind. There is ambient sound that is everything you would want it to be, and minimal use of a soundtrack, which I always like. The game saves automatically, and very regularly and its completely point and click. I thought it finished on a less than satisfactory note, but it didn’t detract overly from what came before. The Wild Case won’t likely win prizes, but nor will it disappoint many of its players. I played on: OS: Windows 10, 64 Bit Processor: Intel i7-9700K 3.7GHz RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 32GB Video card: AMD Radeon RX 580 8192MB
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