Armed & Delirious

The Good
This game's has two redeeming features .. the graphics and the soundtrack (background music). The voice acting is good in parts and very uninspired in others but better than average overall.

The idea of viewing the world through the eyes of a senile old woman is certainly novel and will present an experience that you probably haven't gotten from another adventure game.

The Bad
The gameplay itself is very bad .. unless, of course, you don't mind having to have a walkthrough available at many points throughout the game. You probably will not get far without one. Therein lies the problem. The puzzles in the game (mostly inventory based) are so obscure and un-intuitive that they won't even make sense to you after you have been given the solution. Another serious drawback to this game is that there are critical sequences that can only be surpassed by exact timing of mouse clicks when absolutely no clues exist as to the nature or reason for those sequences. Arrrrgh! To be honest, this is one of those games that leave you with little satisfaction upon completion. It may leave you with a sense of relief that the frustration is finally over, however.

The Bottom Line
The idea of viewing the world through the eyes of a senile old woman is certainly novel and will present an experience that you probably haven't gotten from another adventure game. If you are easily offended by somewhat insensitive stereotypes, the overplaying of bodily functions and/or off color sexual innuendo then stay away from this one. If you are looking for silly off beat entertainment and don't mind having to refer to walkthroughs to accomplish many of the games tasks then give it a go. The game will make you smile one minute and may gross you out the next.

The Good
The many surreal worlds, sub-worlds and characters in this game are its defining feature for sure. The art style really helps; Everything is pre-rendered 3D, but while the backgrounds and items are rendered with relative realism, the characters are all cartoony, made of simple shapes. The game is fully-voiced and the performances, while not great, are also cartoony and add to the weird feel.

The music is nice, too; lots of standard keyboard stuff which is decent, but its highlights are whenever vocals come out, like in the sung gibberish of "Mumble Blues" or "Vocalese Blues". There's some unique and technical guitar playing too.

The Bad
The game isn't all that big, but it spans across 5 CDs. So if you want to wander around and figure out things for yourself, be prepared to swap discs a lot.

To make matters worse, the puzzles are so nonsensical that you pretty much require a walkthrough. Sometimes, they require pixel-hunting, are time-based, want you to drag an object instead of just click it, or even to click the same thing multiple times. The design is so bad that the game's own lead tester wrote one and stuck it on the official CD.

The Bottom Line
This was an ambitious, unique point & click adventure game. But thanks to its obscure difficulty, I'd recommend watching a playthrough of it instead of actually playing it.