The Samaritan Paradox

This is a pretty cool point&click game made with AGS. PROS: *its about 10 hours long and feels pretty solid. *its a clever game, with above average challenge. *the story is told from two perspectives, one of which is a book the protagonist is reading, it feels a little like playing the movie "never-ending story", and i liked that. *the music is quite nice, and uses different tracks for the two perspectives. CONS: *some of the voice-acting feels wooden and dialogues are sometimes mediocre. *some puzzles are time based, and are a minor annoyance. *story concludes a little strangely and abrupt.. but i still liked it.

Let me just start off by saying that I'm really very grateful people try to tell stories about these themes - my dear old Sweden's role as weapons exporter, for one. That sort of thing is too rarely spoken about. However, I obviously didn't enjoy the game all that much. The backstory is where the game really shines, but the story itself - the dialogues, narration - just isn't good enough. I mean, I can't claim to be able to write better myself, but parts of it just felt sloppy. Another thing I really wish they would have spent more effort is in the sound department. The voice acting wasn't the most stellar performance I've heard, but I won't make an issue of it. (Hell, X3 was MUCH worse than this.) My beef is with the phone calls, and volume levels. The voice lines are very faint, while the music is relatively loud - I have NEVER, I kid you not, encountered such imbalance before, from any independent or established studio. Also, it would've been a nice touch if they'd made the lines spoken through a telephone actually sound like they came out of a telephone - filters, encoding artefacts, that stuff. I also noticed that some interactions, mostly involving inventory items, didn't result in either prompt or animation, further making the game feel incomplete. It is an enjoyable game, clever puzzles, but just a little more effort could've gone a really long way.

Being home from work due to a flu I logged on to GOG to buy the latest Blackwell game which to my dismay is not released until tomorrow. On the first page I found information about The Samaritan Paradox and gave it a shot since a AGS point & click adventure developed in Sweden and taking place in my home town is a must, of course. Now, some 10 or 11 hours later I am finished, and blown away! A fantastic game in pretty much all aspects! Interesting, tricky and actually HARD puzzles, beautiful graphics, good voice acting but most important an amazing story that dragged me in and would not let me stop playing untill all twists and turns hand unfolded! For me this is the best game of the year this far, including Broken Age, Broken Sword 5 (part 2) and whatnot.

This is a point-and-click adventure game embracing an old style and interface, such as the King's Quest games have. The premise of the story is that the main character, a cryptologist, helps a famous author's daughter find the parts of his final last novel he wrote to her before his death. The author has left a series of clues and puzzles to guide them along the way. One interesting dynamic is that each time you get a new chapter of the novel you play out a story within the story, in a medieval fairy-tale kingdom. It felt fun to enter a classic fantasy context for the story as a relief from the darker, more modern main story. I found the puzzles pretty challenging at first. I looked at a walkthrough a few times for Chapter 1. But after that I found my patience or got used to the author's logic and had a rewarding experience. There are classic puzzles of picking up inventory items, combining them, and using that at the right location. There are a few puzzles that have to be timed precisely. This confused me at first, but there are usually good clues about when to time them. There are also a few situations where you can fail and die, but the game reloads again to give you another try with the situation. Overall, I felt like I was reading a good mystery, thriller novel, like something from Dan Brown. I had a hard time putting the game down until it was finished.