A New Beginning: Final Cut

Buggy, to the point of giving up at the end of chapter 2 due to a progress-breaking bug. During chapters 1-2 I found a decent if not too original premise, large exposition dumps, mediocre voice acting and dialogue, decent but not spectacular locations/art.

A sci-fi adventure focused around climate change. It was dramatic, exciting and generally involving. I throughly enjoyed it, apart from a few bizarre language mistakes and typos. All these negative reviews seem harsh in my opinion. I got it on sale and got way more than my money's worth.

I was somewhat disappointed that despite of the SciFi story most of the game takes place in the late 80s. Still, I kinda liked the story and the two main characters - unfortunately most side characters are stereotypes or annoying or both. Graphic style is OK, but it's quite obvious that animations were reduced to a minimum. And the existing ones aren't great either. Besides, the partly sketched backgrounds make it hard to make out smaller objects. Which brings us to game design: as to be expected, there are a lot of "distract person to get item" puzzles. And a lot of "I am a game designer, what do I care about physics or common sense" ones (like antenna cables setting things on fire). As there is no way to highlight usable objects and it's impossible to detect them visually, there's a lot of searching for usable stuff. Furthermore, several objects have multiple examination options like "look at" and "read" where in 99.9% of the cases, using them will repeat exactly what you heard when you took the object, yet there are a few cases where only reading/looking makes it possible to continue. The inconsistency is the problem here. Worst of all are the mini-games which are puzzles of varying stupidity. Admittedly you can skip them, but this somewhat shows that the designers messed them up so badly that they added a skip button instead of fixing them. E.g. the bomb defusing and turbine activation show strange detail behavior which hints to either bugs or stupid design. Worst of all is the binocular puzzle which is simply utter crap. Last but not least, for a "final cut" version which was released in 2010, there's a ridiculous amount of bugs and glitches. There are audio hiccups, spelling mistakes, nonsense text either spoken or as subtitle and dozens of cases where suddenly the wrong language is used. I had everything from German, Spanish, French to Russian. Where Cyrillic script is especially great to read. Still liked it but it's not really a great game and needs fixes.

A bad game with ridiculous characters and massive technical issues. I'm glad it crashed before i wasted more time on it. Would have asked for a refund if it weren't for it being too late. Not because I want to money back but because I wan't the developer not to have them. Awful game. If you like games and environmentalism then get yourself a book by E. O. Wilson and a game and enjoy them separately.

Very good adventure with a mature and well written Story. I have played so many adventure games and I have to say that A New Beginning stands out for its mature and thrilling story. I really got to like the main characters which is rare. The dialogue was well written and witty. The story is not as simplistic as it might look like like in the beginning - no spoilers. Why not 5 stars? The Mac - version crashed sometimes (which was not so bad because once you figured out the puzzles it does not take a long time to catch up again - but saving regularly is advised). Also: The puzzles were mostly good, sometimes very clever. But I could have lived with less "use pipe on this" and "use knife to cut" - if you know what I mean. Difficulty was quite low (for me as a veteran) - but not too easy. some of the mechanical (and skippable) puzzles were quite tricky and fun. I had a great time and ANB is certainly one of the more memorable adventure games out there.