Moebius: Empire Rising

This is a game with a strange take on reincarnation and secret societies. This isn't Jensen's worst game, but it's close. That said, it's better than most of the stories that adventure games are built upon. There's a lot of guesswork involved with the core minigame, as the in game cues for it are a bit vague. A lot has been made about the graphics, but it's not really all that bad. It's more the art style, the models are relatively detailed but the texturing has an animated look to it, that may turn some people off. The animation is bizarre. The walking animations make everyone walk with a bow legged limp, and the heads crane at weird angles all the time they move giving everyone a creepy broken neck appearance. I'd liken the movements to shambling zombies. The music's well played, but it recycles some of the Gabriel Knight piano music and doesn't always fit. Not as much as Grey Matter, but there's definitely some recycling in the soundtrack. The game design is your typical point and click affair, but suffers from a quirk that punishes the player. I know this isn't the only game to have it but it's annoying. It puts out objects that are quire obviously meant to be inventory items, but won't let you pick them up until the game wants you to, requiring a bit of doubling back. Even more annoying is that the character taunts you with "maybe later," "I don't need that right now," "I don't want to carry that around. I'll come back if I need it later." Finally, and this is very important. SAVE OFTEN. The game has a pause bug that happens on occasion, where you'd perform an action or transition and take a minute or two pause. Rarely but unpredictably, it won't come back. The last 3rd of the game is less forgiving than the first parts. There are some death traps and one dialog sequence where the wrong choices lead to a dead end making it impossible to continue. There's no autosave, so you have to save often or lose your progress.

While Moebius is nowhere near as great as Gabriel Knight, it is a decent adventure lite game. The story is good (with some reservations): bear in mind that Moebius is intended for a prelude to the Grand Story, but works all right nevertheless. The protagonist is fine (with some reservations): he is not your dime-by-the-dozen likable hero. In fact, he is quite the opposite. Personally I liked the "tainted" hero approach, it made him much more interesting to me. The gameplay is all right (with some reservations): the game focuses on storytelling, and I really appreciated the easy puzzles which kept the story flow at a decent pace... ... up until the dreaded Final Chapter, which was a huge letdown. Fortunately, the remaining 80% of the game is good though. All in all, this is more like an interactive visual novel, and I'm quite fine with that. If you are looking for a hardcore adventure game, look elsewhere.

I really wanted to love this game, but it was just too easy. I expected more of a challenge out of Jensen. In each chapter of the game there were only a few locations available , with only a few items available so putting things together was far too easy. Since it was so clear that objects would be needed later, it was infuriating to me that Malachi wouldn't things up until he knew what he needed them for. As I think most adventure gamers would agree, adventure game kleptomania is standard practice in most adventures for a reason. We all know and accept that we're going to need that random object at some point, so even if it makes no sense at the moment we might as well pick it up now. It is frustrating when you know you'll need an object later, but Malachi won't take it because he doesn't know why he'll need it yet. Sure it's more logical, but in an adventure game, what's the point? Now I have to waste my time revisiting a location just to pick up some object that I spotted earlier but couldn't take with me the first time I was there, just for the sake of the game being more logical? If you care more about story this game is worth your time and money. If you're looking for a mental challenge and a sense of accomplishment for finishing the game, this may not be for you.

I fell in love with Jane Jansen's work via the infamous Gabriel Knight series, but the love affair ended quickly after Gray Matter, which was a flop for me and didn't itch my adventure spirit itch; in fact, I never even finished it and the hard-copy of it is currently sitting in a box in a dusty corner of the attic. Fortunately, though I haven't finished the game as yet by any stretch of the imagination, I am rekindling my opinion of JJ based on the game thus far. Contrary to poopular, (intentional misspell) opinion, I find Mobeus to be immersive and a pleasure to play in all regards from storyline to gameplay/controls. Keep in mind that this is NOT a modern game by comparison with, say, the bells and whistles, layers of gimmicks and apocolipse aftrer the world ends theme monotone that so many games have and are spewing in recent times. No, this is a solid old-fashioned well written and told adventure game that interestingly and uniquely represents a current flavor that speaks to those who have an interest in less trendy, more controversial aspects of the underworld that runs through what is invisible to most. Hope it's not the last from Jane, and not the best, either.

As the title of my review says, the game succeeds in its basic duty as a graphical adventure to tell an interesting story (upon close examination, there are certain details that make little sense, but it does not require more suspension of disbelief than your average movie), so my overall rating would be a "pass", however there are many peculiar design choices and outright shortcomings that need to be mentioned: - The graphics are based on 3d models (characters and manipulable objects) on 2d backgrounds. While the backgrounds are nice, they do not always blend well with the characters and the animations in general leave a lot to be desired. Somehow, this gets even worse during cut-scenes, which have a "late 90s flavour", and I don't mean it as a compliment. - The game lets you pick up an object only when the character has a reason to do so, so it is not possible to resort to the standard technique of "taking everything that is not nailed to the floor" to solve the game. This design choice necessarily implies some backtracking and could have been a huge annoyance, but in the game works quite well, partly because most puzzles have a logical solution, and because at any given time there is only a limited amount of objects and locations accessible. - There are puzzles in the game where you have to "analyse" people or objects, which means in practice matching a number of possible explanations for different clues. The idea is nice, but the execution is a bit "hit or miss", with some solutions being seemingly arbitrary. None of these puzzles is too difficult, in any case. - Some of the chapters of the game take place outside of the US. Especially the dialogue of the early chapters (set in Italy and France) is particularly grating, with both the main character and the "locals" speaking English -with or without fake accent- and substituting certain words with corresponding ones in local language ("Monsieur", "Signore", etc.): it'd been better just to stick to plain English.