Review: One-Eyed Lee and the Dinner Party (2019) [pixietails.club]

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====== Review: One-Eyed Lee and the Dinner Party (2019) ======
Original post: https://misthold.dreamwidth.org/7389.html

**[[https://darkchibishadow.itch.io/one-eyed-lee-and-the-dinner-party|One-Eyed Lee and the Dinner Party]] (2019)** is a puzzle/visual novel game set in a fantasy world where spirits exist and, sometimes, merge with living humans to become...something else. One-Eyed Lee is a something else, and Beracus is the doctor trying to figure out how to change him back. Or at least make him less volatile...

Beracus and Lee get tipped off about a whole heap of spirits in an abandoned bunker-- only to become trapped inside with a family of living skeletons. You (playing as Beracus) must solve puzzles, talk to the skeletons (whether they like it or not), and keep Lee alive to get out of the bunker!

I had heaps of fun playing this game. The art is fantastic, Beracus and Lee have a very interesting partnership, and the bunker-skeleton family setting was great. It starts off uncanny, as a post-apocolyptic bunker without an apocalypse to go with it, and then gets super creepy by the time you leave and find out wtf really happened.

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The puzzles are solved through finding clues (e.g. clicking on everything), talking to the skeletons, and matching clue to mystery in a specific order. I'm not sure if it was just my computer or if it's part of the game, but there was a small amount of lag between hovering over a clue and the highlight turning on, which mean I had to go a little slower than I usually do. Also, the highlight was a dark red color, which was a little difficult to see even for a non-colorblind person like me. (The whole bunker is heavy on red/orange tones.)

Side note that you can click on objects multiple times, and some of them lead to funny interactions! Or new clues! So that's cool. 

Because you're also talking to people, you have some choices on how to proceed through the puzzles. For instance, there's some tricky situations where you could lock yourself out of a set of dialogue cues that change interactions between Beracus and Lee. Or you could leave behind an item that would come in handy at the very end! There are 8 total endings, so it's worth going back and trying different routes to try and get them all. 

To make it easier to get the different endings, the game has a History option (to read back through the text), a Skip option (to zoom past text you've already seen), and a Back button if you immediately regret choosing a specific option. There's also a Journal tab, which keeps short notes about the story/clues, and even gives a few subtle hints on where to go next if you're a little stuck.

It took me about 3 hours to get all 8 endings; I used some hints from the dev (on the Itch.io page) to figure out what I needed to do at the end, and made sure to try different options than I did the first time. The last part is very tricky! I did notice that once I got the happiest ending, the loading screen illustration was also happy! When I got the bummer ending(s), it was super sad. Such a nice little touch in an already detail-filled game.

Great characters, good writing, humorous moments and spooky ones, too: I really enjoyed playing this and highly recommend checking it out!

Price: $4.99

This is apparently the first of a series of games the dev is planning on making with Beracus and Lee, and I can't wait to play them! 

Available for Windows, Mac and Linux. I played the Mac OS version.