Game Review: Gibbous
Sometimes, YouTube livestream embeds don’t work on my Squarespace site, so you can go here to watch the VOD (video on demand) of me playing “Gibbous”: https://youtube.com/live/yCjNv5pm6CE
BUY GIBBOUS
That’s the review in a nutshell.
Gibbous is a point-and-click adventure game in the classical sense, reminiscent of old-school LucasArts games, but released in 2019. It’s firmly a horror comedy game in the best of ways, with gorgeous illustrations and full voice acting.
Gibbous has everything.
Good length: It’s about 10 hours long if you don’t use guides. We used a guide for two or three puzzles because of time restrictions, but the puzzles were really fair and if you’re not trying to fit the game into a single stream, you will not need the guides.
Great voice acting. No bad voice acting to be found. There’s a lot of cut scenes, and some are really long, but I don’t find that to be a fault.
Rich world building. There’s so much content to explore and read that isn’t necessary to the basic gameplay. You can go a run without, for instance, reading all the extra files in the detective’s information cabinet, or translation a simple font cipher in Chapter 6, but all that extra content isn’t filler. It helps make the world of Gibbous feel real and lived-in through its material culture (I am not using that term correctly.)
No stand-out unfair puzzles. There are very few times where you just need to click semi-randomly to solve a puzzle. I think there were a few puzzles where you had to reinspect something multiple times to solve a puzzle, which I’m not a fan of, but it’s not egregiously unfair, and it’s not an uncommon feature in this genre of game.
Classic point-and-click adventure game gameplay. More than one (so, two) viewers commented that the game looked like something they’d play on an elementary school computer.
Good QOL features. The eye button that appears when you hover over a hotspot lets you inspect said hotspot. Some hotspots can be inspected multiple times for different text. The text cycles, and when you’ve exhausted all possible unique inspections, the eye goes from open to half-closed, but you can re-inspect the hotspots again if you want. The only thing I wish there was: a way to replay individual chapters for people that messed up specific achievements, and more autosave slots. I wanted to replay the ending and make different choices.
Beautiful, unique illustration style. It’s not quite Disney, not quite LucasArts, and there are so many great unique animations in the game, of people (and Other Things) doing so many unique things.
Unique puzzles. The puzzles and mechanics that start out Chapter 7, in particular, are very unique, as is the mechanic unlocked in Chapter 4. I don’t want to spoil it because the two sets of mechanics are really great.
Funniest Lovecraft jokes ever. The Festival chapter had me howling.
COOL ROMANIA SECTION. The devs for this game are Romanian and I love that they had a great way to show their culture in the game in a way that made sense for the plot.
Humor and horror in equal measure. The horror aesthetics comes later in the game, from about Chapter 6 onwards, but it’s very well done.
