The founders of [redacted] is a charming point and click game. It is the kind of point and click game I enjoy in a genre I usually do not. It achieves this because it has a good story as well as good humour. The game is not simply solving puzzles with little to connect them as I find many in the genre to be. The dialogue is witty and well written. You don't need any prior knowledge of past games to enjoy it but will enjoy certain references more if you have played them. The puzzles themselves are a mixed bag. For the most part I found them logical but there were a couple that I felt I solved simply by trying to combine anything and everything and not because I actually understood it. I'm talking about the fuel puzzle for this one. Other puzzles such as the letter puzzle and heirloom puzzle are very straight forward and made perfect sense. Other things I'll praise is the inventory system. I think having it be Ines' jacket and her opening it to look for an item was genius. I also loved the game's hint system being having Ines call Uncle Lee for advice. The game does have a few things I disliked about it as well. Many times the text is cutoff on the screen for dialogue options and it has to scroll through. The text auto skips ahead while I would prefer to manually move it forward. There is no labelled objective for the things you're currently working on. This isn't some open world game where you'll have fifty quests on the go but it still would have been a nice touch. Another issue I had was with the pixel art style. This game falls into the pit so many do in that the game is so low resolution that I can't make certain items out very well. I had one puzzle where I knew I needed a shovel, just by basic common sense, but I failed to see it was close to where I was and had spent a better part of a half hour searching for it all over and when I finally found it I did so by dumb luck of the cursor happening to hover over it.

I played redacted on Linux. It never crashed and I didn't notice any bugs. There is not much in the way of normal graphics options. There is toggles for high resolution text, fullscreen, and AA. There are also separate volume settings for music and effects.  You can manually save whenever you want aside from when you are in a conversation and there are nine save slots. Performance was fantastic but given pixel style that was to be expected.

Game Engine: Love, Aseprite, Fmod

Graphics API: OpenGL

Game Version Played: 1.1.5

Disk Space Used: 24.9 MB

Graphics Settings Used: AA on, high resolution text on, fullscreen on

GPU Usage: 0-35 %

VRAM Usage: 455-485 MB

CPU Usage: 1-2 %

System RAM Usage: 1.9-2.3 GB

Frame Rate: 147-165 FPS

Overall The founders of [redacted] was a great game that I enjoyed. It wasn't perfect but I will search out the developers other work and will say this is the way I wish more point and click games were. I finsihed the game in two hours and twenty three minutes. It is free but you can also pay for the soundtrack and/or throw the developer some money. I would say the game is easily worth at least $10 CAD.

My Score: 7.5/10

My System:

Intel i5-12600K | 32GB DDR4-3200 | XFX RX 590 Fat Boy 8GB | WD SN850X 2TB | Devuan 5 | Kernel 6.1.0-30 | Mesa 22.3.6