Pinstripe has so much going for it. That makes it even sadder that I didn’t enjoy it. You play as a father who is trying to get his abducted daughter back from an evil man known simply as “Pinstripe” who took her before crashing the train you were on. You have to solve various puzzles in order to get to where she is held. The flow of the game very much reminded me of Super Metroid minus the combat as you have a lot of backtracking to previous areas where you can access places you couldn’t previously. There is light combat but you’ll use the weapons more for interacting with the environment. The voice acting is top notch by all involved. The story was interesting and kept me moving forward wanting more. The graphics had a great art style to them making them pop. This is all sounding good but sadly I found the puzzles to be just too tedious and frustrating to keep going. Most of them I could figure out without too much help but when they were frustrating they boiled my blood like few games have done.
I played Pinstripe on Linux. It never crashed once on me. There was no manual save as the game opted for save points that are scattered at different locations that you choose to save at. There is just one save slot so you can’t have multiple saves going. There is just one graphics option. The game uses the Unity engine. I played version 2.1 of the game from GOG. The game worked with both mouse/keyboard as well as my Logitech F310 gamepad. I found the gamepad preferable.
I really want to recommend Pinstripe but can’t. Everything but the puzzles is top notch and deserves praise. If you can get past that issue you’ll find a gem of a game. I made it as far as the Sack Chute area before giving up. I paid $3.99 CAD for the game and had I enjoyed the puzzles would have said it was worth $30 but as it is I still can say I got fair value.
My Score: 6/10
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 19.1.4 | Samsung 850 Evo 250GB | Manjaro 18.0.4 | Mate 1.22.1 | Kernel 5.2.8-1-MANJARO