BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION

Very beautiful environments Very optimized (runs smoothly at 4k, no crash, no visible bug) Good Sci Fi story Very good interaction with the NPCs and between main characters Coherent world building But... Like all Bischoff games, the logic behind the "point and click" aspect of the gameplay is sometimes (actually almost all the time) very obscure and unintuitive. Lots of traveling and collecting items that are sometimes hard to spot, in a very "point and click - ish" logic. The veteran gamers will know what I mean. All in all, with a good walkthrough, I had a pretty good time playing Beautiful Desolation. But it is sad that I had to - in a way - cheat my way through the game, because, as I said above, the game is gorgeous and the characters are very well written. ... Which can be said of all their other games as well : very good story, characters and environments, but tricky game logic.

The world is so full and vibrant. The groups and people you meet in this game all feel thought out and unique. I backed this on KS and was very glad I did and felt like the game play was a continuation of what the Brotherhood has been working on. A few of the item combinations weren't obvious to me, but once I got them they were. Throughout the game (even up till the end) there are little "extras" that make the world feel alive!

Firstly, don't be fooled- this is not an RPG and not a Fallout-like. This is a point-and-click adventure game. You have no stats and no combat, the gameplay is entirely composed of walking around to grab items and talking to NPCs. This doesn't mean that the game is bad: the art is nice, the story well exposed and the setting quite intriguing. But it's really less of a game and more of a visual novel and I think it's easy to get angry if you accidentally end up buying something that's not your cup of tea. The store description also doesn't really help It may be worth your time- it takes only about 10 hours to complete after all. I liked it, but with just a stat and action resolution system it could have been another fantastic game like Disco Elysium rather than a slow-paced find-the-item.

I liked the atmosphere and graphics of Stasis and Cayne and the point-and-click adventure mechanics worked pretty well for these games, so I didn't hesitate to back the campaign for Beautiful Desolation. Unfortunately, it seems the budget was mostly spent on artwork and music (which are beautiful). With the rest, only a thin layer of game play could be implemented on top, making it more a very slow moving graphical novel than a game. The sceneries lack interesting content, you can't interact with most objects. The game play consist mostly of running around and poking into every corner to eventually find that one object you need to progress the story. To quote Gordon Ramsay - 'It's bland beyond bland'. I don't mind that the dialogues are pretty clunky and feel a bit cheap, it's an Indy game after all. However, the storytelling is inconsistent and confusing at times which is a big no for a point-and-click adventure. Summary: play the demo first - game play: 2 stars - story: 2 stars - music and artwork: 4 stars

The lore, dialogue, and really everything about the foundation of this game and world are great. But it's NOT an RPG, it's NOT strategy, it's barely adventure. Really it's an interactive story. No real puzzle solving, no actual choices that matter, no action, it's just point and click. Which means all the motion graphics and moving around are entirely pointless. If this was the foundation for an open world rpg boy would it be amazing stuff. As is, it's quickly boring, and just silly that you leave your injured brother to trapse around the world through jump gates trying to find the story you should be following in a roughly linear way while fumbling around dead end or not supposed to go there yet locations. I just can't find enough interest in it to play through the rest, especially since it's also kinda predictable, but mostly because your dialogue choice mean absolutely nothing. But for those who like this kind of point and click story walk through, it's quite nice.