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Genre: Adventure Developer & Publisher: Blyts Released: February7, 2025 Requirements: OS: Windows 7, 8, 10 Processor: Minimum, Intel Core i3 or equivalent; Recommended, Intel Core i5 or equivalent Memory: Minimum 4 GB RAM; Recommended, 8 GB RAM Graphics: Minimum, Nvidia GTX 460 or equivalent; Recommended, Nvidia GTX 560 or equivalent DirectX: Version 10 Storage: 3 GB available space
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By flotsam Blyts Meet Harvey Green, wannabe writer and book salesman, currently peddling his wares in the town of Villa Ventana. Whatever his dreams of being a successful writer, it’s a different dream that plagues him. A nightly one, that ends with his head mounted on a wall. What to do? Take a walk perhaps, whereupon events conspire to ensnare him in a paranormal web of fate. Can he escape its talons? Only time and your adventuring will tell. This is a colourful animated blend of 2D and 3D art, creating a side scrolling diorama that is an engaging place to be. An engagement that is made all the more so by the sound pallet, an effective blend of underlying soundtrack and ambient effects. Add in the top notch voice acting and the elongated nature of the character art, and Villa Ventana and its surrounds is a place well suited to the weird goings on. Harvey in particular stands out. His possible fate drives him on, and I was quickly on his side, the unfortunate car accident notwithstanding. There is a lot to explore in the town, and plenty of people to interact with. Not everyone and everywhere is essential, but a lot of it is worth your attention. It all adds a little something to the tapestry. Slender Threads is point and click, supplemented by some keyboard commands. Click to move Harvey, or click and hold to have him follow the mouse left or right. In a few locations he moves in other planes, and these are predominantly generated by the little footprints that indicate a different location to access. While his walking speed is decent, double-clicking will speed him up, and double clicking the footprint icon will immediately generate the next screen. Hotspots (which the ‘S’ key will highlight) will generate a cursor indicating the primary action that can be taken (e.g., look, talk, take). Left click to utilise, or right click to bring up the other action icons. While I tended to largely ignore the right click, on occasion it produced an interesting or amusing interaction, so don’t forsake it completely. The auto-generated icon though is likely the one you need. If you do take an item, they can be accessed in the little briefcase sitting top-right. Drag items within the inventory to combine, or left click to use in the game world. They get discarded from the briefcase once they are no longer needed, and I rarely had more than about ten to deal with. Which was good if I had to resort to try everything everywhere, which did occur at times but not too often. While I was lost at times as to what to do next, this was mitigated by the hint system available through your notebook, one that starts broad and gets narrower with each hint requested. I also kept a walkthrough handy to keep things moving. Pretty much all of the town is open to you from the start, but various locations around the town will be closed until you achieve the relevant trigger. A map you acquire early on will enable you to fast travel, once you have been to a location. It works well, and is activated either with the ‘M’ key or clicking the icon sitting next to your briefcase. However it’s worth completely walking the streets at least once, as clues and the people who possess them can be found in many places. The bulk of the puzzling is inventory based, but other sorts of puzzles occur, several of which I found particularly appealing (the conveyor belt being an example). Conversations can also be important triggers so be sure to be chatty. Many solutions require gathering items and information from all over, but there are times to when your efforts are constrained to the location you find yourself in. All in all, it’s a satisfying mix. The narrative took turns I didn’t see coming, utilising flashbacks and even a mushroom induced hallucinatory experience in its telling. It isn’t scary, but the paranormal nature of some of the events keeps things a little spookily off-kilter. It's yet another reason to play. And if you like cats, you might scare up a few 😊 The game autosaves at key points but you can save at will, and numerous save slots are available. Its length depends a bit on how much exploring you do, but I reckon 8-10 hours awaits most players. I had a very good time with Harvey. I played on: OS: Windows 11, 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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