Edna & Harvey: The Breakout

Right from the get-go Edna & Harvey The Breakout puts you in atmosphere. Whimsical and hilarious, this game scores high on quirky répartie and self-deprecating humour. I quickly found myself trying to extract every single comment out of Edna or Harvey. Even Edna eating cereal is fun! Graphically the game doesn't stand out as a masterpiece but it is done well and consistently so. It keeps it's naive tone throughout. And this style works out perfectly. Voice acting is spot on. Here again the style fits the story. And the music. Some parts are quite good, some are sooooo close to elevator music. This being said, some of the scenes *are* in an asylum so I'm assuming this is by design. The music does, however add to the story so it's all good. Now a word about the puzzles. You'd expect a game about a woman escaping an asylum to be full of wacky puzzles à la Space Quest (i.e.: "Put ladder in pocket"). Here Edna & Harvey The Breakout really shines. You do have the occasional brain teaser here and there but all in all, the story and the puzzles are well laid out. The part about the game programmers had me stumped for a while but I did figure it out. You will too. So in conclusion Edna & Harvey The Breakout is the most fun I had with an adventure in quite a while. I got it on special but even at a regular price it's a winner. It's the type of proper adventure game you want to support.

Having never played the game (And played all the Deponia games) I thought I'd try out this classic and was immediately surprised how good it was; a treat from start to end. It reminds me of the old flash/newgrounds days of games and the humor is on point, never beyond poking fun at itself or breaking the occasional 4th wall and the unexpected twist near the end with a welcome surprise. The only problem with it is it's age, as it's aspect ratio uses the old format that doesn't support widescreen (Which the remaster also on this site probably fixed), but despite that I still enjoyed everything it had to offer, from the great voice acting, unique characters to the soundtrack that I'll definitely come back to play many times again!

This game as many do not seem to know was a Project from "Poki" the same guy making the dev commentary. It was actually made before the company got founded. That is why the game is very limited in a technical way and just got a bit polish later. The characters are very likeable and the story is one of its kind. Basically the dev commentary explains all the decision making and process behind the game and this continues in Harvey's New Eyes. Now you either like or hate the game and Poki totally acknowledges that by modern standards some things are just a no go. At the time the original was made this was a "technical" wonder. the special thing about Edna which we will also see a bit in Deponia is that almost every object is intractable with the world for unique sentences sometimes giving you some side information. Small tip. use the telephone in Edna's cell on the door. The goal of this intractability was clearly reached in the game. Very sad that it is bound by technical limitations. We speak original screens of 800x600 pixel.

Story: 4/5 Worldbuilding: 4/5 Art Design: 5/5 Graphics: 4/5 Sound: 4/5 Gameplay: 3/5

I discovered this game in like January 2018 and was intrigued by the art style and setting. Four years later, this is probably among my top three games of all time - and that is saying a lot, since I only ever played it once and in a way, it's a bad game. Before the update coinciding with the 10th Aniv. edition, "Edna bricht aus" as its known in its native language (which I played and you should play too if you speak German; the performances are amazing!) was a technical nightmare. A Java game that warned you about performance problems if you run it in window mode. It also ran in 16-Bit, meaning if you somehow switched colour depth through running another programm, the game window turned white. Yes! Frequent crashes too. Now, that is all fixed, but what remains is the fact that EBA is really not a point-and-click-adventure for newcomers, with a lot of solutions being seemingly impossible to figure out even with hours of trial-and-error. I don't want to spoil anything, but the game itself eludes to this fact mockingly in a few of the well-placed 4th wall breaks. All that being said, I love this game! "trying everything with everything" was fun and rewarding for the amazing dialogue and humor from Edna and Harvey, with the voice-acting in native German being surprisingly memorable. (All voice-actors are professionals except for "the Yuppie", which shows.) This game oozes with something games nowadays rarely have: personality, dedication and passion. The art style might be childish, but I really liked it, with it reminding me of some of the educational games we used to play at Grundschule. It's unique. The only criticism of the game that I even would have is that the themes of Mental Health are somewhat lackluster. The game was released in 2009, but still, I would have appreciated characters in the asylum being more than sterotypes.