Simon the Sorcerer (1993)

Even by adventure game remaster standards, this is atrocious. They used the xBRZ filter, which turns the game’s graphics into an unintelligible mess. But that's only half the problem, as the filter can be disabled. The other half is that the game itself is bad.

Major parts of the map are forest zones, which, while beautiful in a pixel-art sense, are mostly pointless. Then, you have very vague goals (find the mage Calysto, find the necromancer's staff) and even vaguer means to achieve them. There are 20+ items in my inventory, and I have no clue when any of them might be useful.

At one point, you meet a barbarian in the forest, and you're given a whistle in case you ever need his help. Then you meet a troll blocking a bridge, and that troll asks for goat stew. How do you get goat stew? You don’t. How do you use the whistle? You don’t. You need to talk to the troll a second time, and then he will grab the whistle and use it himself, beckoning his own demise. It’s funny, but I stumbled upon this solution by chance, not through any logical process.

I ended up using a guide at Goblin Cave, because I thought I might have softlocked my playthrough. I hadn’t, but it turns out I tried to "give" the bucket to the druid, instead of "using" the bucket on the druid. Or maybe I did try to "use" it, but Simon walked over to him instead, and I assumed it did nothing and didn’t try again.

In any case, I think I’m done with this game. The only positive aspect is the custom animations. Those are impressive, especially considering they’re only used once, and they’re genuinely funny—like when Simon pops out of an Iron Maiden, where he was hiding from the goblins, takes a sip of water, and it starts leaking from different places. Or when Rapunzel drops her braid on him, and he becomes just a hat with shoes for a few moments.