Girl Genius: Adventures In Castle Heterodyne

Adventure, Romance, Mad Science! This game has it all! A Stunning look inside the Infamous Castle Heterodyne from the Girl Genius web comic with great care taken for the story's lore. I felt I was in the middle of the lost chapter of the story. Responsive game play with adequate forewarning of new mechanics and plenty of optional secrets to find. I always felt that the failures were on me (although the default camera could stand to be a bit less murdery, but what do you really expect from Castle Heterodyne). A stunning conclusion to the Heterodyne Boys and the Mystery of the Vanishing Game Developer series.

This is super fun. Lots of clever things to figure out, exactly like I would expect from this castle. Fantastic little guys trying to kill you all the time, having to use actual mechanics to get through to the next area. Challenging, but I didn't die nearly as much as I normally do. Seems like most of the negative reviews dislike it for exactly those reasons. Maybe it's just not the type of game for them, you know? This was a game for having fun, and not everyone is into that.

This is a fan game with lots of love but not enough production value. The setting is great, the comic it's based on is great, the art is great, the puzzles are okay at best, the main gimmick of cubes that you transform is good but there aren't enough of them, you could have ten times the puzzles, the combat is bad and repetitive, the boss fights are actually good and challenging (they were hard for me on hard mode, though ultimately doable), but there are very few of them, the castle feels, ultimately, too small, and yet there are annoying loading times all the time, the character models are atrocious, you can barely tell them apart, they look like wii avatars, sheesh, also there's barely any interactions, although they do try to be faithful to the comic, bless their hearts, and there are silly grinding achievements that took too long after I beat the final boss. All in all it's a solid effort that ultimately falls short. I give it two out of four hats and that's just barely.