Good Story and Decent Puzzles, Endings Could Be Tighter

User Rating: 8 | A Night at the Watermill LNX

A Night at the Watermill was impressive for a few reasons. First is that the developers managed to make a full fledged point and click game in Ren'Py which is usually used for visual novels. It now has the best of both worlds where it has the traditional puzzle and inventory aspects of a point and click game combined with the dialogue choices and story branching of a visual novel. The puzzles themselves are fairly well done save for one where you make a pen. I found logic in the other puzzles but not that one. The atmosphere, story, music, and visuals were all well done. I would have liked to see more done with the story as each of the endings were decent but all left me wanting more as they don't provide a ton of closure. Aside from the endings the story did a good job of revealing things and does a good job of building tension.

I played A Night at the Watermill on Linux. It never crashed and I didn't notice any spelling errors. You can manually save whenever you want and there are nine save slots. The game ran just fine even on Intel onboard graphics.

Game Engine: Ren'Py 8.1.1.23060707

Game Version Played: 1.0.794

Disk Space Used: 639 MB

Input Used: Keyboard and Mouse

CPU Usage: 1-6 %

RAM Usage: 4.3-6.1 GB

If you enjoy point and click games that focus more on narrative than puzzles then I would recommend A Night at the Watermill. The puzzles are good overall but the story is the better reason to play it. I finished the game in forty eight minutes and paid $5.39 CAD for it so i'd say the value is good. I really would like to see what future projects Neon Tales does. If they can build on this then I think they have a bright future.

My System:

Intel i5-12600K | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | Intel UHD 770 | Mesa 23.0.4 | Western Digital Black SN850 500GB | Trisquel 11 | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 6.7.8-gnu