Posted on: April 2, 2022
nachbarnebenan
Verified ownerGames: 648 Reviews: 21
Almost but not quite
When I first saw the graphics style and a short gameplay video of this game, it reminded me of the Deponia series - and I was right, somewhat. Still, this game stands well on its own and is not a mere copy of another. The story of the little communist country visited by a communism-loving well-meaning western journalist (which you play as) is quite well laid out and given the topic and time (mid 50's) there's no shortage of irony (ok, it's in the title) and cynical sarcasm and in some instances quite dark humor. The story is not overly long but convoluted and with some twists and the puzzles are mostly of the typical adventure style, with some mini action-games thrown in. However, these positive aspects are completely overshadowed by the issues the game has: First, the german translation (text only) is horribly bad, to the point of being useless when it comes to hints about puzzles. Quite a lot of times you have to think about what the original English term could have been and deduce from that the solution. Also, a lot of jokes and word-play is lost, even though there were some obvious possible translations. And due to the bad translation, some puzzles basically have to be brute-forced if you don't speak English as the information you need is in the spoken (English) text but not the written (German) one. Secondly, the action-minigames are too fiddly. My advice would be to either remove them or at least make them optional after you fail once or twice. The mouse spot detection seems broken. Third, the game audio is filtered to sound like old-style 50's era radio transmissions, but after a short while this becomes unbearable to the point that I played mostly without sound, unless I got stuck at a puzzle (see above). But most importantly: The game crashes about 50% of the time it auto-saves or you save manually. That's a big no-go and I'm shocked noone caught that in playtesting — it even crashed at the credits, because it saves there!
Is this helpful to you?
