A New Beginning: Final Cut

There was an awful lot of detailed gameplay throughout the game, promising a well developed conclusive ending... except it completely lost steam in the last fifteen minutes of gameplay. A game this promising deserves a better ending, I think.

Took me back to those braincracker point-and-click, classic adventures. Good game, worth the time.

I must say that so far this was the weakest of the Daedalic's games (have played the Deponia and Harvey series). There is not much of gameplay, rather you are stuck watching the dialogue and actions of the characters you can't control. The topic is indeed important but it could have been turned into a real game and not a preaching cartoon. So in short, looks pretty but as a game it is a bit poor.

Started it up, watched the intro cinematic, enjoyed the comic book style story telling, liked the apocalyptic sci fi setting, thought this may be an interesting game. Then I got control of the player character. Everything went downhill with the writing then, as I couldn't stand him. I figured though if other character made up for it, it wouldn't be so bad, But he just got worse from there. The nail in the coiffin for me was the point where a woman is literally kealing over in pain, possibly dying, and he takes the time to pick up the phone to talk to his therepist, who proceeds to tell him that he needs to stop trying to save people WHILE THE WOMAN IS DYING IN THE SAME ROOM AS HIM! At that point, I figured that if this was the representation of the human race in this world, then it deserved to die out. I didn't get more than maybe 20 minutes in, but dang the characterization was so poor, I couldn't muster the will to continue. So to put simply, I hated the characters too much to continue playing.

An old cliché goes like this: "the only down-side to it is that it ends." When it comes to this game, those words ring true. In fact, not only does it manage to maintain a finely-paced, balanced mixture of situational problem-solving and an ever-present sense of menacing urgency and inevitable tragedy, but one gets the sense - 'hey, this stuff is important, why is this conversation not taking place in real life?' The underlying message might at times be obscured by the strong story, only to resurface again and again in different renditions. After having finished the adventure, a sense of urgency lingers on...