Cognition: Game of the Year Edition

Cognition, for me, is a game that fails on two fronts. As a story, it tries to emotionally invest the player through bombardments of killer thriller drama, complete with swelling music, loud sound effects and twitchy shots of color-saturated gore and close-ups of anguished faces. The cast tends towards stereotypes and is not very likeable, while dialogue quality is mostly okay, a bit uneven here and there. About three hours in, I can't say the story grabbed me. As an adventure game, Cognition is bogged down by an unresponsive UI that frequently makes the player wait, takes the cursor away for no reason or requires an unnecessary number of clicks for basic actions like picking a destination on the overland map. Combine this with some unobvious solutions that require a search everywhere and try everything approach and the experience is not enjoyable. Worse, the adventure game elements end up making the protagonist look incompetent in-story, always grabbing evidence barehanded and carrying it around for days on end, having to steal items that she could trivially obtain in the big city setting, and generally not being allowed by the game to anticipate the need for actions in the near future. Recommendation: Avoid.

Currently I’m still playing the game, but wanted to write my review anyway. The reason for this is that I can already see that I probably will play this game to the end, although I am playing other adventure games as well and have good titles waiting. I started with playing the demo version of the title and I was not so enthusiastic. The graphics seemed somewhat strange and the quality was not so fantastic, however it got a lot better when I set the graphics settings higher this was a lot better. The scenes are quite nice modelled, the characters up close not so beautiful but not annoying for me. The extraordinary cognition gift of the main character (Erica Reed) was somewhat annoying at first, but when I’d started playing the full game it became more interesting because there is more to the evidence that meets the eye. When you find more clues you can search more information on your computer later on and use the right parameters, which I find interesting in adventure games. So I guess the game may be interesting for players who liked games like Still Life and Gabriel Knight titles. It could be better with more detailed graphics of characters faces and some better music.

Just finished it, and I'm hungry for more. I'm not a big fan of serial killer stuff, but the story was amazing and the characters, espeacially the main character was perfectly presented. This guy below me in the reviews says they were not professionals but still managed to do a good job yeah, nah these guys were highly professional. The accent of Rose the American African Antique shop owner was perfectly either casted or performed. Agent Erica Reed probably deserved an Oscar, she was so believable, and the her little quirks like rolling her eyes to the top of her head all the time reminded me of a fiery love I used to have. Puzzles were not that hard once you get into the swing of things. But the only bad thing is the bugs and glitches, Sometimes you don't know if its a really hard puzzle or a glitch.

I loved this title. The graphic style, the dialogue didn't bug me much, but I don't look for perfection, the only thing that really bugged me is the obscenely bad walking animation. Apart from that, a truly excellent adventure game.

A well told story, good acting, good voiceover and good hand painted scenes, logical puzzles.