Review from "TheRPGmakerAddict" from the RPG Maker.net homepage:
"Good Christmas day!
Today... will I play and discuss a Christmas game? NO! Not at all!
Today I'm going to remember when I was little and I played some old-school adventure games: there were both text adventures and point-and-click adventures like those by ICOM Simulations (that used the MacVenture interface and engine).
Ok, that wa 1985-1987, but why I am mentioning this game? Because Swans In The Wallow, Norpoleon's Rpgmaker2003 adventure game, totally reminds to me of these old classics: we have immersive first person visuals of the various locations with sometimes animations, limited exploration (usually you can go north, south, est or west, entering new rooms/locations), and various commands that let us explore the surroundings and interact with the items and people.
The plot also reminds to me of "Deja Vu: a Nightmare Comes True", but while there we played as an amnesiac detective in 1941, here we play an amnesiac wife, Regina, looking for her husband Erik during a vacation in east Germany. As she investigates and looks for him, she encounters many weird characters and soon it will be clear that something is not right at all! Strange creatures, animals that do not stay dead and weird cults are involved.
To solve the situation and find Erik, our heroine has to explore the countryside, that includes a farm, a forest, a swamp and a hostel where a group of metalheads are partying. These places, together with the holiday home, have to be explored several times, to solve various tasks and look for items that often have to be combined in order to solve the previously mentioned tasks.
But this games includes also some Rpgmaker 2003 classic battles that I think fit pretty well the atmosphere of the game: Regina is lonely but determined to find the missing husband, so she will use anything she can find to fight and kill animals, people or even weird creatures.
Regina starts the game with almost no equipment, but she has a couple of useful battle skills (and one useful to recover the stamina, needed to use them), and while she won't get experience from battles, the money earned (it's odd but even animals have money!) will be indispensable to buy useful items, consumables and even new battle skills.
Anyway remember TWO important things: a warm bath will restore your life and stamina, so you can spare the consumables for the most needed moments, and also remember to save often at the mirror in the living room of the holiday home. Ok, you can save in some other locations too, but it will detract some points. I'm not so sure this will change something, since I encountered just oa couple of choices during the game, but after finishing it I noticed, from the ending credits, that I missed encountering some characters and/or visiting some places, so I guess there is something more you can find or avoid. Maybe even another ending? I don't know!
Visually the game uses 100% custom made visuals that are rather colorful but also simple/stylized (just like in those 1985-1987 games) and still really fit with the creepyness of the scenario. It's a really unsettling game with different influence from Call of Cthulhu, the backdoors and other modern myths, and I like how besides the many bizarre visuals and events, the sounds and music well complement the graphics in creating a mysterious and immersive adventure.
I also found lots of descriptions that shows the attention to the details of the author, see for example the description of Regina each time she looks into the mirror, or how the conditions of the fridge changes over the days, the writing is surely as important as graphics in this kind of adventure.
Only problem is that I found a couple of untranslated parts, for example when the red woman speaks or when you face the trials with the three cultists, but I guess this is something that will soon and easily corrected. No other problems, in my opinion!
Final Verdict
Swans In The Wallow is a cool short adventure, well I admit that some parts took me some time to be solved (like finding the gasoline or the card) because it's necessary to examine some particular places more than once. I did not expect this, anyway I was able to finish the game without need of walkthroughs (even if the first opponent was a bit tough, but I guess it's because I was not prepared, still I killed it on my third try. Other enemies instead fell without problems).
The only thing I did not like very much of this GOOD game was the abrupt ending, so I will end abruptly here too.
And if you are curious... MY FINAL SCORE WAS: 44"
4/5 stars!!