A New Beginning: Final Cut

Poor execution of a good game. The English localization is largely to blame; the dialogue is awkward and unnatural. At best, it's worth a giggle; at worst, it interferes with the story and puzzle-solving (eg, I consulted a walkthrough because I didn't understand that "filter" actually meant "lens"). Typos are common, and the onscreen text often differs from what the voice actors are saying—sometimes because they're correcting egregious grammatical errors, and sometimes because the text is in German or Russian. The voice acting is extremely flat. A handful of characters are dynamic and convincing, but the rest sound like they've been given no direction. Consequently, several dramatic moments come across as dull or silly—though that's also because many of these moments are inherently absurd. For instance, one character suddenly conducts a perfectly normal conversation after being interrupted in the middle of a mad dash to the restroom. The last 10 minutes of the game are truly inane, with some decisions and revelations that destroy all narrative credibility. The characters are fine enough. There's a good mix of personalities and (despite the localization and voice acting) some decent chemistry; however, the villains are over the top, and the abusive relationship between one of the male characters and the lead female character is utterly appalling. What saves the game is the gameplay. Yes, the interface is a little clunky; no, the tutorial doesn't bother to tell you to hold SPACEBAR to view all the hotspots. But the puzzles are generally solid, varied, and interesting—just don't think too hard about whether the solutions would be plausible in real life. You can skip the most complicated ones, and there's almost always sufficient guidance. Graphics are clean and professional. Too much of the game is silent, but when there is music or ambient noise, it fits well. There's no fear of dying or dead-ending the game, but a glitch kept me from viewing the full credits.

A New Beginning is a point and click adventure, set in a time travel story with a heavy environmental theme. The plot is unexpectedly interesting, well written and planned out. The difficulty is reasonable, with no ridiculous spikes, whilst offering the usual P&C style puzzles and inventory management. The Dialogue and voice acting is entertaining and not badly delivered, giving appropriate emotion to the matters in scene. A surprising game, that's nicely made and entertains throughout.

I was at first attracted by the hand-drawn art, but when I started playing, the game turned out to be overly preachy, stiff, full of mundane inventory puzzles, improbable, hard to care for NPCs and a very naive view on the world's energy crisis. Years later, I finally finished playing, and... ehhh... I respect the effort, but I did not really like the game. It was like listening to a two hours sermon of a religion you don't care about. For the record - I think climate change is real and critical problem for humans to solve, but the game does not offer any real insights on the topic, just naive activism and virtue signaling.

First things first, the game artistic direction nailed it. Panel, art, characters are really nice, every thing have a personnality, you believe the world you play in. The story is good with some interesting characters development. The little cinematics that take places like animated page of comics are well done. This is the strong side of this game. Some weak point : the labial synchronization is off. The game have a lot of details and that's great, but in the other hand, you barely see objects you must use to solve the riddles. So i was reduce to sweep my screen with my mouse to catch what i missed. There is no logic in the solving sometimes : one moment in the game a character told you that he can't support spicy food, and what do you do ? you spice the food in front of him and then give it to him... I admit i had to go see the playthrouth several time to see the end of the game, but maybe that's on me. I haven't done many point and click/riddles type of game in my life. Overall a good story with a unique design. If you're not use to this type of game you will struggle for sure.

This game isn't that bad at all. It has a very good story about the current state of the world climate, the good and BAD power invested in this but also dilemmas surrounding the matter. Plus this is not a typical Daedalic game with obnoxious characters or Moon logic.