ENCODYA

This game starts well with a nice story and good characters but quickly becomes a crap shoot. By chapter 3 your stuck trying totally random things and hoping for the best. The gameplay then turns from joy to chore. The robot clue system is total junk as clues tell you nothing. You ask how do you find X and the answer is the same as the question. Looking for highlight items doesn't work either as they get hid in the background and are often covered by the character. Shame could have been good.

Well this was such a great experience to play through as you control S.A.M 53 (the big nanny robot) and Tina(the little girl) in a cyberpunk setting in the city of Noe Berlin. I really enjoyed the story and it became better as you progressed further into it. The characters you meet are good and remember when interacting with them use both your characters as they can get different interactions from them. At times you may have to interact with characters more then once to get new options. Graphically it is great. Music is superb in the game. Voice-acting is good. Had to lower the music and sfx a bit to hear some of the characters well. The only complaint I had about the game was that S.A.M 53 is so big so could cover things you wanted to find/interact with. At times I mostly moved around with Tina so that wouldn't be an issue. A great point-and-click game that I can easily recommend.

Although it would be great to have game in more languages, English used in this game is not too difficult and you can get most of jokes even on very basic level of knowledge. I planned to work my progress slowly through the game in several days but as soon as I started to play, the game dragged me and did not release until the end. Awesome story, awesome world full of Easter eggs and great play experience. From technical side: - It would be awesome to have frame limiter other than V-Sync as my GPU kicked in and held working at max to keep around 300fps which I would gladly lower to like 80fps even on 60Hz monitor. - I noticed few minor glitches in textures (old "oracle" woman had hole in her cheek) but nothing what would ruin your experience. Overall I really enjoyed stay in Neo Berlin and am looking forward to visit again.

As of my playthrough of the game, I would say that the game is really enjoyable, but the in game hint system can be entirely unhelpful (2 out of 3 times I checked the hint system, I got a hint which told me stuff I already knew), and my searching for help online was "dangerous" as I really found only 2 "worth checking out" guides, and one was "too helpful" and the other was well written, but only covered a portion of the game. There are parts I found I needed help, and what I had wasn't a good fit. I got through the game, enjoyed it, but the guide I used ended up taking me too easily into just following along with it. I *expect* this to improve. The game is ~3 days old. So, I think there will fairly soon be guides which when you go, "how do I get this part dealt with" will give you that information without spoiling other parts of it. Well worth checking out...

A young orphan girl with a big robot companion in a large dystopian half-cyberspace city, trying to survive. That's quite a premise to work with and the devlopers did well. The world created by this game is interesting, humorous and sometimes quite dark and shows a lot of meta-gaming (which I like), without it being disturbing. If you know Bladerunner you will see many hints of it, but they are subtle. The same goes for Ghost in the Shell and other classical movies. The designers made no effort to hide that, and it fits. The puzzles are standard adventure-like, even though a bit on the easy side. I think in the later versions the size of the mouse-over spots was increased, abandoning the pixel-hunting you had to do before. Travelling between locations is a big aspect of the game, and you do more travelling than item-hunting, which serves to emphasize the point of a little girl lost in a big world. Some hardcore adventure players may dislike the lack of complex item-puzzles and some places only having one item instead of being loaded with dozens of them, but I like this deviation from tradition. It's the story the games focusses on and not so much the puzzles. One obvious negative spect, already mentioned before, is the lack of spoken languages other than English. As the game takes place in Berlin a German version would be obvious, of course. Still, the voice actors are good, some are very good, and the German translation is ok most of the time. There are secrets hidden in the game, which you can find or not, but have no influence on the story. That's fine with me. Sam (your robot) serves as your hint guide, but I found no need for that, as verything he can tell you get told anyway. Ok, the political aspects of the game can't get unmentioned but they are done in such a satirical and sometimes cynical way that they're not disturbing and fit with the story and the setting.