Unusual Findings

My first instinct when I loaded Unusual Findings was pure warmth. The pixel art opening, a suburban street bathed in that specific orange-lamp glow that only the 1980s seems to own in memory, told me immediately that Epic Llama Games made this with real affection. Three friends, Vinny, Nick, and Tony, sneak out one Christmas night to watch pay-per-view adult movies on a cable descrambler, intercept an alien signal instead, watch a park ranger get murdered by whatever just fell from the sky, and decide they are the ones to fix it. It is exactly as earnest and slightly unhinged as that sentence sounds, and the writing earns its comedy throughout. Mechanically this is old-school point-and-click in the purest sense: a Look, Grab, and Talk action wheel on every hotspot, an inventory for collecting and combining items, and no hand-holding beyond a faint hotspot revealer built into the UI. The interface is clean and the pixel art is genuinely lovely, especially the comic book store and the arcade, two locations where the background artists clearly had the most fun. The fully voiced cast carries the friendship dynamic well, and the original synthwave score sits nicely underneath everything, filling scenes with the right nervous energy without overpowering the puzzle-thinking space. Licensed tracks also appear, which adds another layer of period authenticity. Here is where I have to be honest with you, though, because the puzzle design is the game's most divisive quality and it will determine everything about your experience. The challenge is old-school in both the good and difficult senses. Solutions frequently require multi-step item chains: find a thing, fix or modify the thing, trade or combine it, then use it. The logic is usually traceable if you explore carefully and listen to dialogue, but a handful of puzzles veer into territory where even attentive players will hit a wall and reach for a guide. Community reception reflects this split cleanly: Steam users sit at a very positive 87% approval rating, while critic scores landed around 70 on OpenCritic, with praise concentrated on presentation and story and frustration concentrated on puzzle opacity. The absence of a task list or journal, which is a deliberate genre-faithful choice, compounds this for players coming from more modern adventure games. What saves the whole thing is that the branching structure is meaningful in a way that actually changes the texture of a second playthrough. How Vinny behaves when facing the wolves early on, whether he protects his friends or scatters, shifts character dynamics and closes off or opens puzzle branches later. There are multiple endings shaped by accumulated choices, and a completion tracker on the results screen makes the replay incentive feel intentional rather than padded. The world itself, a VHS rental store, a lost boys hideout at a trailer park, an arcade full of lightly disguised 80s cabinet references, rewards the kind of player who clicks on everything just to hear what the trio says about it. Every interactable object has voiced commentary, which is a small but real luxury in a game at this scope. Unusual Findings is the kind of game I root for: handcrafted, specific in its obsessions, funny when it earns it, and willing to trust the player to work things out without a glowing breadcrumb trail. It knows exactly what kind of artifact it wants to be. If you have a soft spot for the golden era of LucasArts and Sierra, or if the words alien invasion plus Christmas night plus three kids on bikes produce any kind of feeling in your chest, the rough edges here are very much worth tolerating. If you bounced off old-school adventure games before, this one will not be the conversion experience. Kai, Scout Team