Dinner with an Owl
Year: 2021
Rating: N/A
Time Played: 0.5 hours
Dinner with an Owl feels like one of those throwback games from the era when adventure games just started having point-and-click capability and good enough sound cards to do voice acting. Of course, the length of this game is more on the side of a demo than a full game. If anything, it shows that small or solo teams of developers can release games of all sorts these days. It’s functional, even if there isn’t a lot of it to experience.
One aspect of point-and-click games I always found frustrating was how many different things you had to click to find the right item to progress the story. Dinner with an Owl is peculiar in that you can’t interact with much. Again, it’s a simple game that doesn’t get bogged down in the extras that don’t add to the narrative. This also means the interaction options with the characters are fairly limited as well, since there are only a few options with the handful of people you can talk to.
I can appreciate the interesting way this game deals with looping mechanics, but I wish there had been perhaps a few different paths that I could have explored. After all, once the solution “clicks,” it becomes obvious what to do, and it’s just a matter of executing it as fast as possible. But for a game with a roughly 30-minute playtime, it’s not like you’re wasting too much of your time exploring what it has to offer. Perhaps those who are more interested in interactive stories or visual novels would appreciate what Dinner with an Owl can give them.
A bare-bones point-and-click mystery, I give Dinner with an Owl 3.0 stars out of 5.
