Resonance

This game's main strength lies in its interface and puzzle design. The inferface is highly innovative and really pushes the boundaries of what types of actions you can perform compared to most other titles in the same genre. This leads to a great sense of freedom in what kind of approaches you can try to approach the puzzles the game throws at you. Unfortunately it often leads to situations where you come up with a solution that would seem to make perfect sense, but the game won't respond to it because the developers apparently didn't anticipate anyone trying that particular combination of actions. On the other hand, it is really impressive how many possible actions they DID anticipate, and the sheer wealth of possible things you can try or do in the game is positively staggering. Where the game really falls short of being a true classic, though, is in its somewhat harebrained plot. Without going into detail, the entire plot is logically hinged upon the philosophical position of materialistic determinism - that, given enough data about the material state of things and sufficient computing power, you can actually predict everything that wil ever happen. Unfortunately, this notion - all but taken for granted as truth in the game - was discredited as extremely problematic long ago, with the discovery of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. This makes suspension of disbelief and full immersion in the story much harder for any player reasonably well-versed in the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics. Apart from that, the story, although interesting, is convoluted and really quite dark, but these are all intentional choices by the writers, lending an atmosphere of brooding paranoia to the whole experience. Finally, the aesthetic production qualities. There is certainly nothing to complain about here. The pixel-art graphics and animations are about as good as you can possible expect from a low-res adventure. Voice acting and sound design are actually quite solid.

One of the clunkiest point-and-click adventures I ever played. Tacked on a normal dialogue system is a drag-and-drop proof of concept which allows you to ask about any interactive element of the scenary to any person, as well as reference info from the past... Every now and then. In practice, it's like multiplying by 10 the already abundant number of items, creating some very frustrating moments. The UI is also pretty unresponsive, as the items/concepts you are dragging can open a drop-down menu on hover (and when I say hover, I mean "move the mouse in its general direction). As if this wasn't enough, you'll have to juggle 4 characters with 4 inventories, which are a hassle to herd from room to room (god forbid you find a ladder, as then they climb it SLOWLY one by one). If you miss-click, you are forced on the action immediately, so you'll exit when you don't want to, interact with items you weren't actually trying to touch, etc. Most of the puzzles are fairly easy, with a few enjoyable ones, and a few increddibly annoying and hard ones that will make you want to murder someone for example: 1) Trial and error dialogue trees; 2) having to remember an acronym showed to you nearly at the beginning of the game; 3) long sequence of having character A, distract NPC X, but only after you first went with character B and C upstairs, so you can distract NPC Y with B, and have C access a console, but you can't actually do everything if you didn't solve a puzzle elsewhere and got the right items and intel to pull off the heist, and then you still need to fiddle some more with the entire thing; These are some of the worst offenders, but let me tell you, there is plenty to get mad about (including an optional maze). The story starts strong, but sadly peters out, and you'll find contrivances aplenty by the end of it (and other disappointments I won't mention to keep this spoiler free). Game looks good, music is just okay, and is overall not worth it.

If you're a fan of point-and-click adventures, Resonance is definitely a game to try. It's nice has a decent story, it's not too much "pixelhunty" and generally plays quite well. The only thing that I didn't like much as I remember were two or three "action" sequences. But worry not, they are not hard or complicated. It's just that they were a bit unexpected.

I had a lot of fun playing it. Works great with wine on Linux. That being said here are a few recommendations: - This is a difficult game. Don't be shy to look at a walkthrough. - Tbe retro graphics become much better with FSR supersampling. In Linux this is very easy with gamescope.

Really good game. I kinda liked 3 games, lately: Resonance, Technobabylon and Unavowed. All of them really good. All of them Dave Gillbert (funny but i only noticed this after playing the 3 games). Specially the storytelling part. Really enjoyable. Dave Gillbert, love you man. Keep up the good work. So, all in all if you like adventure games, you really need to check these ones out.