Hexuma

Amiga Joker gave the Amiga version of Hexuma an overall score of 82%, noting its fantasy setting as 'dated' but "fun", expressing that "Admittedly, old ruins, strange dimensions and broken rocks are nothing new in adventure games, but the story is full of fantasy, has atmosphere and is fun." Amiga Joker praised Hexuma's 'bright' graphics and noted that in contrast to other text adventure games, "the textbox manages to avoid looking ugly and grey". Amiga Joker praises Hexuma's music as "harmonious", however they express that in the absence of sound effects, Hexuma's feelies provide the atmosphere that sound effects would. Amiga Joker praises Hexuma's UI, noting the compass as 'convenient' and automapping to be "very good", furthermore calling Hexuma's controls 'user-friendly', and noting its text input as "much easier to edit than in Die Kathedrale." Amiga Joker concludes their review by expressing Hexuma to be a 'complete experience', stating that "So what's missing in Hexuma? Well, in Hexuma there's basically nothing missing, but maybe Hexuma is missing – in your game collection!" Aktueller Software Markt gave the DOS version of Hexuma an overall score of 9.8 out of 12, labelling it as an ASM Hit; it was reviewed by two reviewers: Klaus Trafford and Michael Anton. Trafford praised the game's "many mysteries" and puzzles, as well as its 'intuitive' inputs and UI, expressing that "When you type [commands], you can edit individual letters without having to retype the whole thing. [The player can] re-input previous commands and click important words", and particularly praised Hexuma's auto-mapping feature. Trafford expressed that Hexuma improves upon Die Kathedrale, particularly citing its "evidently" improved graphics; Trafford also praised its "great" gameplay & "very extensive" parser, and expressed that Hexuma is more intuitive than Die Kathedrale, stating that "the common commands from Die Kathedrale have been optimised." Trafford notes Hexuma's writing as "casual" and "not as serious as its predecessors", something that they note as a detriment to the game's "eerie" atmosphere. Trafford criticizes Hexuma's soundtrack, stating that "Not so great is Chris Hülsbeck's music: every world has a different soundtrack, but tracks feel indistinct from one another. In addition, only two tracks are memorable." In his conclusion, Trafford summarised Hexuma as a "superb German language graphics-accompanied text adventure game that has definitely earned the ASM Hit star." Michael Anton from ASM was more critical of Hexuma, criticising its "unoriginal" gameplay and comparing it to House II: The Second Story. Anton criticised Hexuma's music as being a detriment to the game's otherwise "eerie" atmosphere, expressing that the music quality deteriorated as part of porting the game from Amiga to DOS, and stated that "the translation to PC is sometimes so badly done, that it's genuinely horrible." Anton praised Hexuma's "especially intuitive" controls, and stated that "for a text adventure it's essentially very good", but noted that he was "irritated" by certain aspects of Hexuma's gameplay. Anton furthermore remarks that Hexuma 'feels dated', stating that "the adventure game genre has developed considerably since Die Kathedrale – Hexuma unfortunately arrives too late to be revolutionary."