Huh... I had this high on my list of "Getting into Adventure Games" in the "Detective" category... thought it looked beautiful and loved the idea that some of the screenshots portrayed - pouring over case files, checking out suspects and crime scenes, piecing together clues etc.

But after reading a lot of the comments in this thread, plus hearing about some of the critical ratings (51 on metacritic was it?) I think I might wait for an insomnia drop, if at all.

*edit* LOL just took a look at the screenshots up for the game since the site redesign... looks more like a club simulator than the screenies I remember seeing before! ;)

Sorry for the off-topic post, but could some of you guys please check the last screenshot on the game page (the one that shows a sort of "personality puzzle")? I get a really weird flickering effect when that screenshot is displayed in the preview window.

edit: Actually, strike that: I get a weird flickering effect on ALL the screenshot previews once I click on the next batch of screenshots.

I finished the game recently and found it to be a pretty good adventure game.

It's true that the game is not difficult, but I don't agree that it's on the same level as Broken Age. In fact, as opposed to Broken Age where I had the sensation of just clicking myself through the game and the game just sort of advances without even having to stop and think, I'd say Moebius has a lot of puzzles which, granted, are easy, and the game probably offers too many clues to solve them, but at least they made me stop and think what I was doing.

Another point&click... Not being my genre i'll pass this up.

Yeah, I've seen flickering in a lot of places now. Sometimes in the thumbnails, sometimes in the larger images. For me, it seems to be related to the position of the thumbnail scroller.
http://www.gog.com/forum/general/gog_known_issues_wiki_page/post36

Meh, $12 is too steep for my wallet...waiting for a true Gem promo price on this one...

~the pink is just to celebrate the Schnuff return and in no way reflects my acceptance of the GREY GOG ;-p~

The only time I had to stop somewhat were a couple of the historical comparisons things, since some of them were nonsensical (as in, more than one solution was correct when taking the game's clues in account) and required pure guesswork/trial&error.
The rest was clicking through, and backtracking when I couldn't click through anymore, because that meant something just became usable elsewhere.

[rant]
An adventure game using the "I don't need to pick that up yet" tactic (for the sake of what ? "Story progression" ? Realism ? Pissing me off ?) just calls for fire&brimstone.
That's what we got for abandoning pixelated 2D where everything was clickable & invoked a written description : backgrounds with barely three mutating clickable spots and backtracking for the hell of it instead of glorious inventories the size of landfills and head-scratching while prowling through increasingly insane objects combinations the longer one got stuck, with interaction possibilites that mitigated any brute-force approach. When you have three objects in your inventory and the currently accessible world is two screens with three hotspots each, there can be no thinking involved for more than thirty seconds.
But I guess that as long "story-oriented gamers" get their money's worth, all's fine in the world.
[/rant]

Luckily there are still a number of quality point&clicks being made. I'm just sad that it's one of the ancient ones that was responsible for this abortion. Maybe the Space Quest guys on the other hand will deliver another Space Quest 5 ?

He kinda has that "haters gonna hate" type of walk, lol.

Blame it on the dumbfuck backers. This "feature" wasn't in the earlier builds of the game and some people on the backers-only-forum explicitly asked for this to be implemented

Wouldn't count on it. They released an early prototype a year and a half ago, and that was fucking horrid. Shitty, non-responsive swipe controls (Yes, apparently this game is being designed primarily with tablets in mind), the majority of the puzzles is designed around said shitty, non-responsive swipe controls, underwhelming art, terribad writing, buggy as all hell,... The music was great and the animations were better than the ones in Moebius, so at least it had that going for it.

Keep in mind that this was a very early, pre-alpha prototype build, so they may as well have made something worthwhile out of it. But if the writing/art/puzzles from the prototype are any indication of the level of quality you can expect from SpaceVenture, it will be an awful, boring mess when it is released - that is, IF it is ever released.

I backed this, but I never check all this in-progress stuff, and I wish the designers didn't either. Either they know what game they want to make, or they shouldn't make a game in the first place.
So the blame is to be put equally on dumbfuck backers as you put it, and on Jane Jensen for caving in to idiotic demands from outsiders.

How I hate this mentality that because you backed/preordered/are interested in the game, you somehow have a right to influence the development of the thing. Feedback should be taken in account, if at all, after the thing is done and infused in the next thing...
Do writers get plot change suggestions from their readers as well, or are only gamers this stupid ?

Ouch.
Well, I never was a fan of Space Quest anyway, but lame comebacks - which is quite the norm now that I think of it - are always sad.

I just read the part about the hotspots : he doesn't so much complain about their number than about the fact that not only are most of them "useless" and that the descriptions are badly written.
The second complain I agree with - mediocre writing is even worse than bad, bad can be hilarious - the first is inane : if you only keep "useful" hotspots, you end precisely with Broken Age, a click-through barely-interactive "experience". Might as well do a movie right away.

And his part about second-guessing is precisely why we need everything in a scene to be interactive, because only then can you be free of second-guessing : if everything is interactive, then everything can be useful, and you can start thinking on the game's internal logic's term. You should be able to look at everything on the screen, pick up everything your character can reasonably carry, fiddle with everything that's fiddle-able, and solve obstacles in an organic way. That's an ideal view of it, but I think the older games were closer to this than the new cinematic interactive experience bullshit.
But then this guy would probably scream for an overabundance of red herrings.
He effectively calls for only the useful stuff to be interactive, but the result of this is just easier second-guessing.

Clearly, in these enlightened times "Press X to win" is the way to go!

Thanks for that info! I was kind of on the fence about that pre-order.

Pro-tip : when a game is advertised as "story-driven" nowadays, there's a good chance it's code for "I want to be a movie,
be a movie soon, I want to be a movie, be a movie too !"

George Martin, for quite a while, having been convinced by the pedo nutcase Marion Zimmer Bradley that if a fan guesses your plot, they can claim copyright on your work. That's why A Game of Thrones was taking so much time to write - he was constantly changing stuff to be one step ahead of the fans. Seriously, it's on his blog.

edit:
Thank you for the info. I'm continuously broke, but preorder exclusives made me buy it (it's arm-twisting, but it works), and now I feel way better. I just hope the guy follows up in his design work on what he says as a critic.

The SpaceVenture alpha proto demo didn't really have any writing at all, so I wouldn't call the writing terrible, more like not there. And the guys did admit, that they didn't really have that much of writing back then and that their progress to date hasn't been as fast as they'd hope.

I still do hope that they'll manage to deliver something, as what they've shown does look better than what Moebius was. But even they've admitted, that they don't yet know when the game will be ready. Only thing they've said about it is, that it MIGHT come out some time next year.


And they appatently have redesigned the UI after the feedback they got from the alpha demo, so that's something at least.