A New Beginning: Final Cut

This game has two things going for it - the nicely stylized visuals and the soundtrack. That's it unfortunately. The voice acting is decent about half of the time, but the other half almost sounds like a voice synthesizer. The premise gave me hope for a dramatic and mature story, but the writing would be fitting for a cartoon made for young teenagers. Maybe that's the target audience?

The best thing one can say about this game is that it has its moments. All in all though, it's a preachy mess of a game that suffers from an illogical, convoluted and completely unbelievable story, horrendous localisation, fairly bad voice acting, an annoying and tedious control scheme and a bunch of not terribly likable but extremely stereotypical characters. Also, pretty much everyone dies. You have this idealistic Scandinavian scientist that was trying to solve the world's energy problem by using algae to create electric energy, alienating his son in the process. There's the completely evil, money-grubbing corporate bigwig that sees murder as a business strategy and a cackling old shyster of a lawyer that actually holds the gun. There's even a psychiatrist that is more interested in pushing her standard of happiness and health than in her patient or his circumstances. It's like one big collection of animated caricatures. At times, the game can have its funny moments, and some of the puzzles are pretty engaging, but as the whole concept of the game appears to be "let's really push the climate change agenda with every over-dramatic piece of narration", I can't even recommend it for someone who primarily plays adventure games for the puzzles. I'm not even one of those people who like to pretend that there isn't a problem with the way we are producing and consuming energy, but especially the ending scenes just take the cake.

Look you ignorant gits: nuclear power, for all of its faults, does not contribute in any meaningful way to to global warming. There are good reasons to fear nuclear power, but global warming isn't one of them. And a nuclear meltdown, terrible as it is, is actually good for nature because it drives the humans out. Just look at the Chernobyl exclusion zone, which is has turned into a paradise for wildlife and is now largely a nature reserve. In other words, this game gets the science completely backwards, which is completely unforgivable in a game where the science is such a core part of the plot.

A really wanted to play it through, but voice acting, uninteresting story, unlikable characters and the bugs made me to uninstall it. A gave it up after Chapter 5.

The graphics are fine, most of the puzzles were OK from a gaming perspective. But the protagonist... is awful. There are few games I've played where I've completely failed to empathise with the character you are playing, and actively wanted them to die. But this is one of them. She's shallow, preachy and I often found the decisions I was forced to make to continue the story were completely at odds with what I would have wanted to do, like unnecessary betrayal of your friends. That completely spoiled the experience for me, and I couldn't recommend it for that alone.