Amanda the Adventurer has been a crowning success for Dread XP. It’s been a popular title, especially amongst the theory crowds, due to its intricate and obfuscated storyline, its analogue horror elements, and the general high quality of the games themselves. Well, our Amanda the Adventurer 3 review will let you know if the series ends with a bang or a whimper.
What is Amanda the Adventurer 3?
Amanda the Adventurer 3 is a first-person horror puzzle game that sees you interacting with various “haunted” VHS tapes to solve puzzles and progress the story. It comes to us from Dread XP, famed publisher of indie horror, and dev team MANGLEDmaw, known primarily as the creator of the Amanda the Adventurer series.
With this, the third entry in the franchise, we’re rejoining the story where the last game ended. Having escaped from our local library through a mysterious underground hatch, we find ourselves inside the offices of Hamlyn Entertainment itself, the evil company behind much of the depraved goings-on in the series. It’s still a race to attempt to decipher exactly what has happened to create the possessed tapes, and if any good can be derived from these events.
Bite-Sized Fun
As with the other two games, Amanda the Adventurer 3 can best be described as a bite-sized experience. In fact, these games have been close to episodic with how short they are and how quickly the turnaround is between games. Luckily, to aid in this final chapter successfully wrapping up the story, you’ve got the option of a recap baked right into the main menu of the game. It’s a nice touch, especially if it’s been a while since you last played.
Getting back into the gameplay is a breeze, mostly because the mechanics are simple enough to be explained by a child’s drawing pinned to a corkboard. You can move and sprint about the place, duck, and interact with objects. That’s pretty much it, outside of an exciting moment when you can use another button to place little strings between pictures. Jokes aside, it’s a tried and tested formula, but it’s the execution that sets the series apart.
Something Wicked This Way Comes
As you start out the game, you’re already put in a high-pressure scenario. The prologue actually predates the first game in the series (as far as I can tell) and sets up what is to come for our main character. You’re exploring the belly of the beast, as it were, and the prologue does as good a job of letting you peek into the dark goings-on at the company, without completely blowing its load in the opening scene.
That said, you’ll also be left with some questions by the end. Things are wrapped up in a suitably satisfying way, but it’s not like you come across a journal or diary that just simply explains all of the minutiae of the world and what happened to all of the characters. There will still be enough room for YouTuber theorists to make videos about the hidden meanings, and frankly, I gather that’s half of the charm for a lot of people.
Puzzling, and Puzzling
In terms of raw puzzle performance, Amanda The Adventurer 3 might be my favorite of the series so far. You get a little helper in this one who can spit out a clue if you’re feeling a bit stuck on stuff, which nicely greases the wheels on some of the puzzles if you’re having a slow day or just took a bludgeon to the head. Perhaps it’s that which made me feel less like I was bogged down. I distinctly remember in both of the other games having points where I was stuck for a long time, and in the end, I’m pretty sure it was dumb luck that saved me.
In this entry, the only pauses I took were due to my own lack of perspective, rather than something missing from the game. Getting too rigidly stuck in an idea can cause you to lose sight of all of your options, and that caught me out once or twice. In the end, I was left saying “ahh, I get it” more than I said “oh, that’s stupid,” and that’s the mark of a great puzzle game.
Maybe the puzzles were just generally easier, though; it’s hard to judge objective ‘difficulty’ in these cases, but I can at least report that I ended the game feeling like I’d had a good time without much piddling about.
Audio and Visuals
Amanda the Adventurer 3 is a relatively competent game from a visual perspective. Either as part of trying to make it run well on weaker hardware, or for purely aesthetic reasons, the graphics are kept simple and relatively low poly, and that does mean that the characters can look a little warped or janky at times. That said, I never really found it taking me out of the experience, and the times that moving figures are actually shown in the real world worked well enough for the experience.
Sound design is universally pretty excellent. There’s not a lot of music on display here, as the atmosphere is paramount, but the creepy little details you can hear as you move around the offices are an insanely nice touch that does much more to improve immersion and “creep factor” than the visuals could ever do to ruin them. While it won’t be going away with any soundtrack or visual awards anytime soon, the devs should be proud of what they accomplished and the story it managed to tell.
Amanda the Adventurer 3 Review | Final Thoughts
Amanda the Adventurer 3 is a great entry to cap off one of indie horror’s most endearing recent series. While the gameplay style might seemingly lack innovation, there’s always something unique to the way that you’re interacting with the mechanics, and the mysterious storyline and engrossing atmosphere turn the entire thing into a superlative horror experience. Now I’m just waiting for the “definitive edition” where you can play through all three parts in one go.
Amanda the Adventurer 3 was reviewed on PC with a copy provided by the publisher over the course of 7 hours of gameplay. All screenshots were taken during the process of review.
Disclaimer: Our reviews editor, Sam Guglielmo, works at publisher DreadXP but did not edit or view this piece prior to publication.
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