The Charnel House Trilogy is one of my favourite point and click games to date. It is not my preferred genre but this game did what I prefer which is have a strong narrative and not have convoluted puzzles. Not once did I feel like having to randomly combine items to progress. The story was creepy and full of lore and great characters. The voice acting was superb aside from the voices of Carli and Sofia whose voices felt like they were not recorded properly. Everyone else was fantastic. There were a few points that lacked a detailed explanation but I have my own theories and sometimes that is just as good. The first episode was fairly good and served to set things up. The second episode felt a bit weak but wasn’t bad. It had a lot of backtracking and the less interesting of the stories. It was still better than some point and click games I have played. The third episode was the best and really ended on a high note with some big reveals.
I played The Charnel House Trilogy on Linux using Valve’s Proton. It crashed if I used version 5.13-6 but when I switched to the experimental branch it worked. I did have to choose “Setup” and then “save and run” even with the experimental branch though. If I just chose to run it without setup it would never launch. There are three settings to tinker with. Overall it is pixel graphics so don’t expect to be amazed. You can manually save whenever you want. Alt-Tab works.
Game Engine: Adventure Game Studio Version 3.3.3.0
Disk Space Used: 587 MB
Settings Used: Direct Draw 5; 8x Nearest Neighbour Filter; 100MB Sprite Cache
GPU Usage: 1-18 %
VRAM Usage: 434-550 MB
CPU Usage: 27-36 %
RAM Usage: 2.4-2.8 GB
I got vibes of Event Horizon and Cthulhu from this game and I say that with a compliment. The story and voice acting make the game and the game play was an enjoyable experience that avoided common pitfalls of the genre. I paid $0.87 for this and Richard and Alice as a bundle so I guess you could say I paid $0.44 CAD for it. It is worth the full current price of $6.49 CAD in my eyes. I finished all three episodes in a total of two hours and forty minutes. It felt like a good length although a bit more time to add some detail in would have been nice as well.
My Score: 8.5/10
My System:
AMD FX-6100 | 16GB DDR3-1600 CL9 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 20.3.4 | Samsung 870 QVO 1TB | Manjaro 20.2.1 | Mate 1.24.1 | Kernel 5.10.15-1-MANJARO