Resonance

Positive: Interesting premise; innovative features, such as like four separate characters, the "memory" feature. Negative: Becomes tedious very quickly. With so many items of inventory, four characters, two groups of memories per character, it can be very difficult to guess what the designers had in mind as the solution to each puzzle. Plus, some of the puzzles have very little logic behind them - why does one door in the hospital have cell phone reception? How was I meant to guess that? Many of the other Wadjet Eye games are excellent; go for Blackwell or Gemini Rue instead.

I liked the story and the visuals, the puzzles are also engaging and difficult enough to make you think, but not as difficult as to be frustrating. The downsides come from the hold-down-mouse-button-hover interface that is really tiring, and the difficulties connected with it. Also, some scary parts are really a bit too scary.

"Resonance" plays, in many ways, like a classic adventure title, but without the frustrating pixel-hunting and dead ends typical of so many older titles. This game was extremely engaging--from the beginning, the innovative mechanics (e.g., short/long-term memory system), great dialogue, and fitting atmosphere made the game easy to step into. As other reviewers have mentioned, it's difficult to address the game's good and bad points well without spoiling the plot. Without going too much into depth, what makes this game stand apart are the characters (they do have depth, more than one would expect for the length of the game), the fluent and well-executed narrative style, and the ambiance. The graphics were nostalgic but clear, the music was excellent for the settings (the hospital muzak cracks me up), and the backgrounds were beautiful. The not-so-good parts... well, honestly, there isn't that much to complain about with this game. I would agree with other reviews that the game is short, and it feels like some plot elements could have been better explored. The mechanics were generally great, but some of the more plot-heavy sections of the game could be tedious when you want to replay a section for an alternate pathway. My recommendation: play this game! You feel invested in it quickly, and it's one where there are rare moments where you're at a loss for what should come next. For a new title, it pleasantly surprised me and definitely makes me excited for other possible future titles from this maker.

I cannot give more than two stars to a point-and-click game that has these kinds of bugs in it. It requires you to input text but neither shift key nor the numpad work, which breaks the game for everyone who doesn't use the exact keyboard layout as the developer. Amateurish. I thought we were past the stage of games that are unaware of abstraction layers. Also, where did my save games go? I save *a lot* and always in an empty slot, because storage is cheap and my time is precious, but at the end of the game the majority of my saves are nowhere to be found?! That's unacceptable. The GUI is not very good, despite trying to be. It gets in the way of gameplay by expanding and obscuring the very part of the world you want to interact with, just because the cursor is approaching a menu. All character switching has to be done through a slowly animated menu, interrupting your flow and making the game much more time-consuming than it needs to be. You also cannot simply press a button to make your three companions follow you, but instead have to talk to each person in turn through an equally slow menu. And I cannot even make sense of the save/load game screen. What order are the savegames listed in? Why a grid layout? Why are there empty slots everywhere? Why the U.S. date format? The puzzles are a bit too easy, at least if you've got some adventures under your belt. Some of them are just lame excuses to use the new memory mechanics in the game, but none take any significant time to solve. There are different kinds of puzzles in adventure games though: the logical kind, and "figure out what the developer wants me to do"-kind. This game has a lot of the latter, which I don't mind except when they go toward the extreme. E.g. if your character gets punched in the face and just takes it and the developer expects me to step in and speak up, then yes, I'd get stuck; no sane character does that, which means I won't waste my time trying to solve that "puzzle" any time soon. Some are guesswork.

It's too bad! I really enjoyed most of the game to be honest. The story is kind of refreshing, I liked the characters and environments. Most puzzles are good. There's also some interesting and very unusual mechanics, messing around with long term and short term memories which you can bring up during conversations. Bad parts though. What happened? Puzzles flipped out a bit I think. At some point you're even told by the character you solved the puzzle with that the solution was stupid. He says something like "I thought that only worked in movies" when you unlock a locked door with your credit card. I didn't really mind the timed puzzles or the more difficult logic puzzles. There at least you know there's a puzzle and you know that you have to solve it. Here, you don't know what is a puzzle, where it is or anything at all. It's just a mess. Combine everything with everything. Talk to everyone about everything. Doesn't make it better that you have 4 characters to control. The number of stupid things to do is almost infinite. It gets even worse when you actually try the right thing but it doesn't work, because sometimes you have to right click on the thing you want to interact with. If you left click, you're just told "Nah, I don't want to do that". It's just stupid and frustrating. I would recommend using a guide if you get stuck. I'd also really recommend playing the game. It's a bit flawed. It could have been made much better with just a handful of small changes. Still, I want to give it a 4/5. The 3 is very strong. Some parts are 5/5.