Edna & Harvey: The Breakout

Fun game. Took me a long time to beat it. Make sure to save after Edna escaped her bedroom near the ending when Edna is sending Harvey to check up on the father downstair. There are two endings to the game

What a trip...as we used to say in the '60s. Anyway, this game is one of the very best iPad Point & Click game ports I've played and that's saying a lot. It's one of the finest in almost every way, with one caveat (mentioned at the end of this review), including its story, brilliantly funny dialogue, charming graphics, superb voice acting, and many creative, tough, and wacky problems to solve. This is one of just a few out of hundreds of games where I would award nine out of ten (not five) stars if I could. I won't lavish praise beyond this because, if you believe me, you will want to try it for yourself if you love Point & Click Adventures - You won't regret it! Okay, the caveat is that you will most likely need to use an online walkthrough at least several times during the game since excellent wackiness doesn't always invite intuitiveness into the picture ;-) The game's lack of a good hint system is why I did not fantasize about giving it ten (instead of nine) stars. Other reviewers have discussed this in detail, so, 'nuff said.

This is a classic adventure game in every respect, very long and well acted with a lot to explore and do, with great art to round it out. The biggest downside is that it's not very fair at all, lots of hair-pulling moments, but it's high quality, and while it does crash from time to time, the autosave always puts you right back where you left off, and I didn't run into any constant problems. It's chock-full of silly lines and sillier achievements, and basically 99% of every possible action is fully voice-acted by the main characters. There's hours of dialogue here! Unfortunately, after a while I started getting tired of Edna & Harvey's extremely dorky jokes, given how much there is to do and how long the game is. Like I said, you're in for lots of hair-pulling for puzzles that hardly make any sense. There are lots of fun little digs at classic adventure games and tropes, but nearly every other puzzle is a stumper, making this a game that falls squarely into the same tropes. I still look forward to the next games, because I had fun despite it all.

This game offers a lot of playing time for very little money, which is great. It features funny characters in funny situations and you can tell the creators paid a lot of attention to adding entertaining details and asides. The problem I found is that game play is not very intuitive, and that's why I'm not giving it a higher score. It is nearly impossible to figure out what you need to do in many situations, and there are so many pointless interactions/items to interact with that gameplay becomes tedious. The hint function doesn't actually give hints pointing to which items to interact with in order to move you along, it just gives a general picture of what can be interacted with--and sometimes it is every object onscreen. The dialogue interactions are so copious that, while funny, they often don't give clear directions of how to proceed, and they take forever. I think it would be impossible to get through this game without going online and finding a walkthrough, which is what I had to do. I think the developers need to work on some clarity.

I loved this game! Great characters, intriguing story, and challenging intellectual gameplay. However, after hours of investment in playing, and just when I had finally reached the denouement, the game crashes!! Repeatedly! Very frustrating, to say the least. Tried every crash fix I could think of short of reinstalling, as I didn't want to start all over again. This could just be my device, though. I was playing it on a 1st Gen iPad. Hopefully others have more luck.