Cognition: Game of the Year Edition

...but not this one! I actually uninstalled it near the end of episode 1. I didn't like the puzzles at all - they really weren't interresting! Not at all like Call of the Sea for example, or Lost Horizon. They had puzzles that was exciting - this game though has the kind of puzzles where you feel they are there just to bother you, and prolong the game. At one place, at an interrogation, you instantly need to go get something (which takes loads of time walking and travelling between locations), and when you finally are back, thinking "now I'm getting somewhere", then you need to go to another location to get something else (again taking loads of boring time), back again, but it's still not enough, you need to go to yet another place to fix something else....urgh... There is so much idle time between all those actions and it takes so long time! Everytime you've talked to someone and exit the dialogue, you'll get a 5 second break where you can't do anything, so each time you start a dialogue with anyone, just to see if some new options has appeared to make you progress when you are stuck, you'll have to endure those 5 seconds of idle animation when nothing happens. It gets very annoying... The greetings and good byes with each character, which are cool maybe the first time, are also very annoying to hear again and again and again, always the same ones...it all feels very stiff, not alive/realistic at all. Animations and pretty much everything feels cheap and low budget. No idéa if the story is good in the end, I've heard it's not the best and they mess it up towards the end, and then I'm glad I stopped already at episode 1, cause there's not much I like in this game so far...

The storyline was gripping. I couldn't stop playing till the very end. I found myself quite invested in the protagonist and her storyline. I have cried over movies but never over a game. It was quite an experience and I would definitely recommend it.

The storytelling is great. If you liked games like memento mori, this is just for you. Sadly the engine used for this game is the predecessor to the engine used in GK1-20th. In short terms: It's crappy. Feets move faster than the torso, that has som graphical glitches as side effect. Quite sad actually, I really enjoyed the game, but bugs like this broke the immersion. The gameplay mechanics "evolve" throught the episodes, not always with the desired effect. This could have been a good launch platform for a new graphical adventure franchise, I see a lot of lost potential in the game.

Two things fooled me into buying this: Jane Jensen, tagged as a "Story Consultant" (whatever that means), and the meaningless designation "Game of the Year Edition". Any year in which this was considered GOTY by anyone would have been a catastrophically grim year. And Ms. Jensen would have been better served by suing to keep her name off of this. Horrible voice acting. Ridiculous plot. Hideous animations (particularly the CSI tech whose mouth "opens" into jagged points). Ludicrous writing (as you hand the aforementioned CSI tech a piece of evidence, while neither you nor him are wearing gloves, he idly asks "any fingerprints? Eh, I'll check it later."). I got four episodes for one low price and still feel cheated. I made it about half an hour, maybe 45 whole minutes into the first one, and have no urge to see any more.

This Point-and-Click Adventure is a detective story in which you have a unique power. This power lets you do several different things, but they're all based around seeing past events. It gives a pretty unique angle to puzzle-solving, and as it develops, you gain more tools, so it isn't just a long string of inventory puzzles. Unfortunately, not all of the puzzles make sense, and while that's not uncommon for the genre, a lot of it has to do with the fact that the rules keep changing on how these powers work and when they can be used, unless they just weren't explained all that well. Either way, certain episodes might keep you glued to a walkthrough after a certain point, and once they start including timed elements, even that gets tricky. I played the demo, and it was EXCELLENT; I was completely sold. Unfortunately, from there, it had a lot of ups and downs, mostly downs. The first episode has some incredibly tedious moments that included leaving an interrogation THREE TIMES; none of it flowed well. The second episode was probably the best of the bunch, but then the third episode introduced a new mechanic that was interesting from a gameplay perspective, but really stupid from a story perspective. The final episode decided that all of a sudden, this is a choices matter game and any screwup gets you or someone else killed; that's not what I signed up for. Still, the story was compelling enough that I did finish it.