PC Pick-and-Mix: An Upsetting Abscission, A Trapped Archive, and a Sweet Family Tree

Time for another entry in my occasional series unpacking what PC games I’ve been playing lately. This time around, it’s a puzzles-and-narrative special, with one point-and-click adventure and two more purely puzzle-oriented games, all three of which combine an interesting story with puzzle-based game progression. Abscission Will Stanhope is a police detective in the rain-soaked Massachusetts town of Ashfield. He used to be a rising star of the force, but in 1986 an investigation centring on a disused medical prosthetics factory just outside of town went very, very badly wrong. The aftermath left him shattered, and saw him transferred to the comparatively low-stakes world of the Vice Squad. Now it’s five years later, and his colleague Luna, who was by his side on the prosthetic factory incident, has called him in to help on a case. The outré and avant-garde artist Serina Challinor has been gruesomely murdered in her top floor apartment. The crime scene is like nothing anyone has seen…