All right, I'm biased in that I don't really enjoy most point-and-click adventure games. It's not that I strongly dislike the genre in general, it's just that I've had too many poor experiences with mediocre games that fail completely in giving me an entertaining experience.
Alum is an example of such a game. If I had to guess I'd say I picked it up aas part of some cheap-as-dirt bundle back when I had more money to spend, and eventually picked up and played because I had nothing but a fairly old laptop to play on. Going through my Steam library and looking for a game with a small filesize that wouldn't be very demanding, I ended up having to decide between this and Bunker - The Underground Game (which I ended up never finishing (though I plan on finishing it... one of these days).
The main reason I ended up picking Alum becomes quite clear if you compare the two pages on the Steam store. For all it's shortcomings, Alum looks absolutely fantastic. It stays true to the adventure point-and-click look of the 90s, with wonderful, detailed and colorful landscapes accompanied by for the most part fantastic music. I thought I hit a nice little gem the first time I started playing. The first chapter serves up an original idea and story, but also introduces you to one of the biggest problems in the game - lackluster voice acting. It's never great, and far too often absolutely terrible, and it completely ruins the immersion throughout the entire game.
I figured I could live with some poor voicing, the game still looked great, and while the puzzles were for the most part fairly simple, the pacing was fairly decent, and the story progressed steadily. It didn't take too long till I started feeling uneasy about the story. I initially brushed it off as just my imagination, but after reading some reviews and comments elsewhere, I quickly found it wasn't just something I imagined.
The religious undertones are so obvious and apparent that calling them undertones isn't really fair. As the story progressed I was reminded over and over about the same sermons I've heard oer and over, constant reminders that the modern lifestyle has left people without real meaning and how the faith is what can bring the meaning, and thus the will to live, back. I wouldn't even mind this being a religious game, I just mind that unless you look up reviews first, you wouldn't know till after the money had left your account and you'd wasted a good couple hours on the game.
1.5