Customer Reviews

Delaware St. John Volume 2: The Town with No Name

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There are two games in the Delaware series, the first game is The Curse of Midnight Manor and it's a creepy tale of a building with a dark history of violence and murder. I played that game when it came out last year and I liked it.

I just finished playing the second game, The Town With No Name and now I am really a fan of this series! This game was everything I enjoyed about the first game and more! I was creeped out with the environment noises and the ghosts were very menacing! (Especially a certain evil nun).

While I was scared at times there is no foul language or gore in the game which made it perfect for me to enjoy with my 11 year old niece! I would recommend this game to anyone who enjoys games with great stories and isn't afraid to go exploring in a haunted town!

I bought these two Delaware St John games after a recommendation from a friend. I have to say, the first game is very entertaining but this second game is even better! The atmosphere is very creepy, I had to turn on my lights a few times! The voice acting is wonderful, especially Delaware. I love the story and I'm really looking forward to Delaware 3!

A very solid game experience with good storytelling. Great spooky atmosphere! Very enjoyable second outing for Delaware.

Egad! There are a lot of locked doors in this game. Normally, this would not be so bad, but Delaware has to say either "The door is locked" or "Surprise, surprise, the door is locked" at every. single. one... I don't need commentary to understand a locked door, thank you very much. Beyond that...

***Gameplay:
There are two chapters in this game, and each chapter is spent in a single building. Mostly you wander around trying to open locked doors. You also get to talk to ghosts who are actually quite helpful. There are a very few objects to find and use, including at one point, a key! When I saw the key all I could think about was how many doors there were, until Delaware said he didn't think it was for any of the bedrooms. That narrowed it down some.

You can get killed in this game, but it's not too painful, and the game takes you right back to try again.

***Navigation:
This is a first-person game. Navigation is point-to-point slideshow type. It can get a little dicey when you are trying to run from a monster and think you are going one place and end up facing the wrong way.

***Puzzles:
There are very few activities in this game that can be accurately described as puzzles. There are a couple of "fetch" puzzles, a couple of inventory puzzles, and a few very simple interactive tasks, like a crude crossword and a coloring task.

The most puzzling thing about this game is guessing what to do next.

***Graphics:
The scenes are often very dark, but overall the graphics were decent.

****Sound:
The music was good and the voice acting was not bad. There was not too much dialog.

*****Story:
While I don't put a lot of emphasis on storylines, I liked this story a lot. It may not be good press for nuns, though.

This wasn't a bad game, although it was awfully short. In fact, shortness may be a good thing, because otherwise I tend to play and play for unhealthy durations. I think fans of both Myst and Syberia will be able to take some enjoyment from this game. Mine was free with a coupon from Bigfish so I easily got my money's worth. Thanks, Bigfish!

I finished this game from install to final credit roll in about 3 hours 45 min. And that isn't counting 3 leave-the-computer interruptions, 1 stroll to pick up the mail, 1 bathroom break, and fixing lunch. If I had to guess, I would say I put in 2 hours of game play, including install & reading credits, and I'm not a particularly fast player. At $20 a pop, this is disgustingly short for a game. I'm really feeling as if I've been ripped off. The company should put both 1&2 together for that price. This is why I gave the game an overall 3 star rating. If it was of decent length, it would get a 5, even without 3D super spectacular animation because the story is so good, and I like ghost hunting.

The interface is exactly like the first, point & click, inventory, Voice Imagery Control (which allows you to take pictures, record, and communicate with Kelly, you partner), and 2D scenes with very limited animation and no mouth movement. The scenes themselves are much more detailed and better looking than the first game, which is to be expected.

Voice acting is convincingly done by the same actors as from the first game. The music is appropriately creepy and does enhance the scary atmosphere of the game without becoming distracting. This game seemed to have less puzzle solving than the first. Mostly, you just follow the directions of the ghosts who are helping you or follow clues. A couple of times I just wandered around without direction until I came across another cut scene where a ghost directed me.

The strength of this game lies in the story itself. It's an engaging story, the core of which is continued from the first part. This alone really makes this series one of the few that are truly memorable and enjoyable. But, as much as I like discovering the story with my character, I would really like more to do. For the most part, all you do is wander around finding objects the ghosts lost and returning it to them, thereby "releasing" them from this plane, or reading books for story progression. There is very little problem solving or exploration and releasing ghosts is just getting boring without anything to break that monotony. The title implies you will be in the town, but in reality, you only explore the movie theater, and then the orphanage, and you don't go outside once you are in.

The smart cursor doesn't seem as particular as the first, either because I've gotten used to it or it's been improved. I did have one instance where I'm looking over a room without any change in the cursor. It turns out there was a large cabinet with a drawer I needed to open. Because I was looking at an overall image of the room, I had no idea that this tiny drawer near the bottom was clickable, even with my cursor on the cabinet itself.I had to put my cursor just exactly on the right spot to activate the change in the icon. Most games would make the whole cabinet clickable, then give you a close up where you can then find the appropriate drawer to click. Another issue is with the movement icons and clickable areas of the doors. The handles are in the same area as the about-face icon, so that you need to be ON the handle when clicking. More than once I accidentally activated the about-face move when trying to open a door. Please note, I consider this to be nit-picking, but new players should keep this in mind if they find themselves stuck. It may just be you need to pixel hunt a little.

Overall, I really do like this game, and it's predecessor. I like the premise, I like the interface, and I like how the puzzles, for the most part, do fit the story itself. It's a laid back game, with less scares than the first. But I can't really recommend it for the price, it just isn't worth even $10, let alone $15-20. A real shame because I do like this series so far, a lot.

"The Town with No Name" is the second installment in the Delaware St. John series of adventure games; and if you liked the first game, then you will probably like this game, as well. Although it has a few new quirks that the first game managed to avoid, this game also fixed a few of the issues that the first game had. It follows up where the first game left off, although I suppose you could play this game without having played the first.

STORY - This game takes place in a town that doesn't appear on any maps of the area and doesn't seem to be known to anyone in the surrounding area. Delaware, a psychic with a tendency to free trapped spirits, finds his way to the town after having a strange incident with an atlas in his ghost-hunting friend's bookshop. His friend Kelly stays behind as he races off to find the location he saw in a vision during the atlas incident.

Like the previous game, there are two stories with this game, and they each take place in a different location and are a bit more unattached than the stories in the first game were. Story 1 is in the theater of the town while Story 2 is in an orphanage. Both have Delaware find the truth behind strange occurrences that happened years before. The stories are the best part of the game as they are creepy, well written, and engrossing. I only wish that there would have been more exploration of the other buildings in the town; there were so many buildings that were locked.

GAMEPLAY - The entire Delaware St. John series thus far is a first person, point and click adventure. You take on the person of Delaware and go through the still-image, slideshow images. The premise of the game is that you go from room to room in your current location, helping ghosts and finding clues as to what happened in the previous years. Different from the first game, you can actually interact with the ghosts and have conversations with them; you will actually have a choice of what to say to them and what questions to ask them.

The puzzles included in this game are all mostly easy to figure out, but like the first game, if you get stuck, you simply call Kelly and receive a hint.

However, the few times that I did get stuck, it wasn't on a puzzle but rather on pixel hunting. The pixel hunting in this game is terrible! There are so many times that I wandered around for hours before finally consulting a walkthrough and realizing I had missed the tiniest object. Although these searches made my overall gameplay time about 5 hours, the actual game (knowing what to do the whole way through) is only about 2 hours long, which is a bit too short.

Another area of the gameplay that I didn't like was just the fact that so many places were locked. I'm not just talking about the buildings in the town, though; in the orphanage, there were about literally 40 rooms, 30 of which would remain locked the entire game.

As a final note, the chase scenes from the first game are in this game as well. And that's all I'm going to say to avoid spoilers.

GRAPHICS/SOUND - The graphics were pretty much the same; well done overall but not incredibly impressive for 2005. There was more movement, though, by the ghosts and sometimes in the backgrounds.

My major excitement, however, was over the fact that the voice acting improved tremendously! I hated it pretty much in the first game, but everyone really got into their lines for this game!

Also, the music was just as good as the first game, although it did seem a bit more repetitions in this game.

OVERALL - Delaware St. John will probably never even make you jump, but it still is a genuinely creepy game to play that is perfect for kids 10 years old to adults who love ghost stories and adventure games. The pixel hunting, overabundance of locked rooms, and short gameplay time was all a bit negative, but the rest of the game was pretty much fantastic. I still, however, highly recommend getting this game!

Yes it was a little short but well made and fun to play. Music, graphics, atmosphere, story line and voice acting all very good. Nice little relaxing game.

I thought the game was a good game I just had problems find my way around in the game, I am still playing the game because it is just that much fun. It will be a challange but I guess you could say it is a good challange. I would highly recomend this game to anyone who likes adventure games.