A New Beginning: Final Cut

This game was a GOG Summer Sale impulse purchase for me. The screenshots looked charming, the plot peculiar and that it’s made by Daedalic Entertainment only added to my curiosity. However, within the first half hour of the game, I just couldn’t bear playing it anymore. The male protagonist came off as bland and not remotely interesting to immerse myself into his background (and not only because of the lacking voice acting). The controls are mildly irritating, requiring long-presses and subsequent mouse gestures to interact with hotspots. When the female protagonist came along and the story line started, it only went downhill. Melodrama and very cheesy phrases amounted to what I could only describe as cringeworthy. This game is probably just not my cup of tea, although I did enjoy other Daedalic Entertainment games.

Let's start with the good: the background art is stunningly beautiful in this game. That takes care of all the good points. Bad: - Voice acting: incredibly bad. I ended up turning off the speakers so I wouldn't have to listen to it. I don't think human voice actors were used for the English version - I think they simply bought some voice packs for a speech engine and generated the voices. It's really that bad. - Animation: the cutscenes use a comic-book style animation with static images being shifted around. It looks like amateur Flash animation. - Story: terribly preacy and pushy. While the ecological message of the story could be important and useful, the way it's done would be over-simplified even for a newborn. It's just primitive. The time-travel element of the story has no relevance to the game - there are a few forced puzzles related to it but that's it. - Characters: I cannot recall any other adventure (or other) game with characters so completely one-dimensional, annoying and antipathetic as the ones in this game. You can read this review for more details: www.destructoid.com/review-a-new-beginning-final-cut-241798.phtml This is a waste of money and time in my opinion - there are much better games to play.

The biggest failing of ‘A New Beginning’ is the story. As someone who cares about the impact of climate change on our environment, I feel the game’s story fails to articulate the intricacies of climate science, and the strengths and weaknesses of various energy sources. By presenting complex environmental issues as black-and-white, it actually deters civil discussion and education about these topics. In ‘ANB’, the shortcomings of traditional energy sources and of nuclear energy are personified by a single evil character, while the wonders of unproven eco-friendly energy by our earnest heroes. By branding the non-eco-friendly energy sources as evil, the developers weren’t presenting these complicated issues fairly. The way the developers depicted the villain was so over the top that it’s hard to take their views and their game seriously. It wasn’t enough for them to criticize nuclear power, but they had to put the power plant in the rainforest so show how evil he is! But if you sabotage the plant to get people to care about the environment, then you’re a martyr for a noble cause. It almost seems like ‘ANB’ implicitly condones eco-terrorism. To them, you're either for or against a clean environment. It’s ironic then that our heroes built their cyanobacteria farm on an oil rig (likely powered by a traditional energy source), and travelled using fossil fuel vehicles. They’re judgmental hypocrites who are no better than the villain. The preachy story and unlikeable main characters make ‘ANB’ hard to like. Some puzzles in ‘ANB’ have farfetched solutions. For a game to be the “final cut”, it’s certainly not polished. It crashed during the prologue cutscene, English text in the action menu occasionally appeared as French or Russian, and there're plenty of spelling mistakes. While I think games can be a great way to inform the masses of environmental concerns, it needs to be done with fairness and diplomacy. ‘ANB’ is simply too extreme to be the one to do it.

The only positive of this game was the graphics. Otherwise, it has - a fair amount of bugs, - beside two or three puzzles the rest were very easy - Horrible voice acting - The synchronisation of the voice and the length of the written dialogue was probably done in German and therefore in English there were some big gaps which made the whole dialogues sound ridiculous - And most importantly the story was nonsense and inconsistent. For example, one moment she does not know what coffee is and the other moment she is offering coffee to someone else. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

As my review gonna be harsh I should mention the only redeeming aspect of this game and that is the graphics, I love the whole cartoon style that this was drawn in (but without looking childish) and I think that the idea to have the cutscenes in the form of motion comic book panels was brilliant and well executed. That being said the rest of the game had much to be desired, the plot was good at the beginning and had potential but it didn't really went anywhere beside eco propaganda and preaching. Also the game is full of terrible bugs, there is part where you need to watch again a cutscene of your team mate die because the game "forgot" it already shown it you, parts that the inventory didn't work properly (thought there is a way around it) and from chapter 6 you simply can't save your games (only with the quick save). All those are pretty major bugs which shouldn't happened , certainly as this is a supposedly patched addition (hence the term "final cut") which were suppose to be bugs free.