Foolish Mortals

A childhood dream, funded by strangers

Foolish Mortals is the debut release of Inklingwood Studios, led by David and Sophie Younger. David's ambition to make a classic point-and-click adventure dated back to childhood, when he sketched out imaginary game locations on paper and acted out their internal logic for friends; when his career in theme-park design stalled during the pandemic, he and Sophie turned that dormant idea into a real project. A 2023 Kickstarter campaign, seeking £12,000 to help cover voice acting and localisation costs, ultimately raised over four times that goal. The finished game released 5 November 2025 on Windows and Mac, casting players as Murphy McCallan, a young auditor investigating the disappearance of an entire wedding party on the island of Devil's Rock thirty years earlier, in pursuit of the lost treasure of Bellemore Manor. Structurally, it's a classic-style inventory adventure: more than 100 collectible items, over 75 hand-drawn HD locations, and a fully voiced cast of more than 35 characters led by AJ LoCascio, known for voicing Marty McFly in Back to the Future: The Game.

Some of the year's warmest genre reception

The praise dominating Foolish Mortals' review corpus centres overwhelmingly on presentation. Reviewers repeatedly and specifically compare the hand-drawn art to the genre's most beloved touchstones — Monkey Island, Broken Sword, Gabriel Knight — treating those comparisons not as loose flattery but as measures the game is said to genuinely earn through the sheer density and quality of its backgrounds. Voice acting draws some of the corpus's most unreserved credit, with multiple reviewers specifically naming the full cast, LoCascio's lead performance, and the game's musical sequences as highlights independent of every other system. The 1930s Louisiana setting, blending Southern gothic atmosphere with a "spooky not scary" tone the developers explicitly built around no deaths or dead ends, draws consistent praise as a fresh, distinctive choice within a genre that leans heavily on well-worn pirate and noir settings. Multiple built-in hint systems — an in-fiction diary alongside optional ambient character nudges — earn specific credit for keeping the mystery accessible to players with limited time without stripping away the satisfaction of solving puzzles unassisted, and at least one detailed review documents the developers patching a crash and a soft lock quickly after being reported directly by players.

Where the pacing wears thin

Set against that praise, a specific and consistent minority of reviewers raise complaints that cluster tightly around dialogue volume and tone. The most frequently repeated criticism describes conversations as excessive and often impossible to skip, with reviewers reporting that early chapters in particular demand exhausting every line of dialogue with every character before the story can progress — a structural choice that several critical reviews argue undercuts the "cozy" pacing the game's own marketing promises. Tone draws a closely related complaint: a meaningful share of reviewers describe the humour as too gentle and family-friendly, explicitly contrasting it with sharper-edged genre peers like Thimbleweed Park and The Drifter, with one detailed review going so far as to call the overall feel closer to a Disney film than the LucasArts classics it visually evokes. Animation quality draws its own specific, repeated criticism as noticeably weaker than the game's static hand-drawn art, a contrast more than one reviewer frames as a missed opportunity given how strong the underlying artwork already is.

Puzzles built for comfort over challenge

A related, more structural complaint concerns difficulty. Several reviewers, including some who otherwise praise the game highly, describe its puzzles as leaning too easy, with solutions frequently apparent before a player even needs to consult the built-in hint systems already on offer — a criticism that lands differently depending on what a given reviewer wants from the genre. Players who came to Foolish Mortals for story, atmosphere and voice work generally treat the easier difficulty as appropriate to the game's cozy framing; players who came specifically for classic-style puzzle resistance are the ones more likely to find that ease disappointing. A smaller, more technical complaint describes key items occasionally appearing in previously searched locations through unclear triggers, forcing backtracking through already-explored areas to locate newly spawned objects — a frustration one detailed reviewer specifically contrasts with how cleanly the genre's classic era generally handled inventory logic.

A full-length story with room to revisit

Structurally, Foolish Mortals is built as a substantial single-playthrough experience rather than a short genre curio: the developers themselves describe its runtime as comparable to Monkey Island and Broken Sword, and reviewer-reported completion times cluster around ten to twenty hours depending on how thoroughly a player exhausts optional dialogue and side content, spread across three main acts and a shorter fourth act serving as a denouement. Thirty achievements give completionist-minded players a concrete reason to revisit the island beyond the story itself, and more than one detailed review specifically mentions starting a second playthrough immediately after finishing, either to mop up missed achievements or simply to spend more time with the cast. That willingness to return is notable given the genre's usual one-and-done reputation, and it suggests the game's dialogue-heavy pacing — criticised by some as excessive — reads differently to players who came to Foolish Mortals specifically for its characters and setting rather than for a tightly optimised puzzle challenge. Whether that translates into meaningful replay value depends heavily on a given player's appetite for revisiting lengthy voiced conversations a second time, which is precisely the trade-off the game's harsher critics flag as its central weakness.

Value

At NZ$28.99, Foolish Mortals sits at a fair price for a genre where full-length, fully voiced, hand-animated productions of this scale are genuinely rare from a two-person independent studio. The Overwhelmingly Positive score — 694 positive against 35 negative across 729 reviews — reflects a review base that responds to the game's presentation and heart with real enthusiasm, while a specific, detailed and consistent minority makes a fair case that its dialogue pacing, tone and puzzle challenge don't fully match the sharper classics it invites comparison to. For players who prioritise atmosphere, voice work and a gentler, story-first mystery over demanding puzzle design, Foolish Mortals is an easy recommendation; for players who want their point-and-click puzzles genuinely testing and their humour sharper-edged, the review corpus suggests tempering expectations accordingly. </content>