Blacksad: Under the Skin

I got this game for free and I still feel robbed. I played for 2 hours and beyond the slog pacing of this game. it is filled with bugs! -Clues can disappear after you obtain them, forcing you to slog again through unskippable cutscenes and dialogue. -Movement in this game is worse than tank controls of RE1 -Dialogue, music, and cut scenes are SLOOOW. Gamers didn't make this game. There is no way people who play video games tested this and liked this project. You can't even fast walk, you can't highlight interactions, and you can't skip pointless interactions. YOU HAVE TO SLOG THROUGH IT. WHy????! Even if you got this for free don't play it. Watch it on YouTube because my god is this game badly designed and counter-intuitive for pacing. I have zero clue how this game even received a 3.8 less than half of the people on GOG got past the gym.

And story-wise wise I do. However, the controls are utter garbage. You can't use the mouse, in a made-for-mouse genre of game, what? Many menus are unuseable, not everything is clear what you are doing, it's just a mess. In a game where consequences are supposed to happen depending on what you do, it would be nice to know what you are doing when you do it. There is quite a bit of do something then roll back the save because you had no idea what the selectable did. The animations on the more animal characters are sometimes worse than puppets. Some of the dialogue options that look like they are supposed to be humorous are actually quite literal, I picked an option I thought was to joke with a lady by saying I don't like myself either, no, it's quite literal. In conclusion, This had a lot of potential, the story is interesting and I want to see where things go, but it's going to be a slog though poor gameplay to see it though. This would have been better implemented as a straight-up non-interactive animation in my opinion rather than some cobbled-together mish-mash of a 3D exploration game and a Telltale story game.

I played it just recently and the performance was excellent. Overall very enjoyable and immersive experience! The music was so great, I even ended up listening to the soundtrack over and over on Amazon Music. The puzzles are very intuitive. I played it in Spanish to help me improve my Spanish a little bit. The voice-over actors did a great job. After finishing the game I watched the replay on Youtube in French and the French voice-over is very decent too! Pendulo Studios is remaining one of my favorite adventure game developers. Thank you guys! And an additional thanks for releasing the MacOS version :)

Let's start with the good stuff: Blacksad's story is great. I loved the characters, the case, and how everything comes together, piece by piece. If you like good crime/detective stories, I think you'll enjoy this. However, the gameplay and the pacing of the game has some issues that have been stated in many other reviews. For example, the character moves too slow with no running or fast-walking option, and his movements are clunky. Another issue is the camera; it's too limiting, as if the game is forcing the camera to make it difficult for you to see stuff. One gameplay mechanic I want to praise, though, is the deduction system. Although there were times that the deductions were confusing or not following 100% the same train thought of its parts, it's a cool feature. It helped me to get into a detectivesque mood. Lastly, you can't skip scenes and dialogues. To add to that, there are many transitions in a scene or between two that take long to finish. Too long, in fact, as if the developers wanted to artificially stretch out the "hours of gameplay". The reason I'm pointing this out is that Blacksad is probably the narrative-driven game I wanted to replay the least. Overall, Blacksad is a good story that needed more polish gameplay and pacing-wise to shine.

The art and storytelling in this game are amazing - a vibrant noir world. Beautiful lighting, excellent animations and great voice acting. The camera moves all the time, giving the game a cinematic look - at the same time it makes the player wobble through the game as if drunk because you always have to adjust the direction. The gameplay part of the game could be better - the controls are janky, there are a lot of timed QTE's (not my favorite thing), spots you can interact with sometimes don't show up the way they should - you need to stand on a certain spot and face them, which sometimes is difficult to do. Loading scenes takes forever and you can't skip anything, so patience is necessary to be able to enjoy the game. But this us the rare case of a game where subpar gameplay mechanics didn't ruin the experience, at least for me. The story is so captivating, the artwork and environments so gorgeous that I enjoyed it A LOT.