Bilkins' Folly

This game is a charismatic grab-bag of various puzzle sub-games, with a family drama narrative driving it forward. You could think of it as an open-world Adventure game featuring the kinds of puzzles you'd find in the back pages of a newspaper, rather than the signature Adventure-genre "puzzles" design of "rub every inventory item on every character in order to progress". It's a very welcome evolution! The majority of the puzzles are in the form of actual "paper" maps, which is incredibly novel, and the most interesting part is that all of them were created by the illiterate and ignorant pirate-folk that inhabit the isles, so were often missing the crucial pieces of information like "where do you use this map" or "what does this line mean?!" that presumably lived in the pirate's head before the map changed hands, and so you've got to try and figure that stuff out before you can finally use the map and dig up the bits of olden, golden pirate stuff. Sometimes you even have to break ou...

This is mostly a review against me and warning to similar people, not largely against the game. I really don't have the head for this type of game, I managed ok in the start so I thought maybe I could, but I really should have trusted my gut. At a certain point it just gets tedious for me and no longer fun as I don't have the head for this particular type of puzzle game - although I'm very good at other types. One point that is a criticism though there are some puzzles that really have the kind of feeling that they assume the player knows the solution to the puzzle just as well as the dev does. A few of them I randomly stumbled into the correct one and couldn't for the life of me reverse-engineer how I was supposed to know, and a few just were baffling.