Yesterday Origins

Pros: The look and atmosphere from the first game are back. The puzzles are mostly logical and vary from simple to tricky. Good story. Cons: The designers discovered the 3d object viewer and thought it'd make for a better puzzle interface - they were wrong. It sounds good on paper - look at an object, rotate it in the 3d viewer to find one of a few hotspots and then interact with it using items from the inventory. Unfortunately, the system is so laggy (I had no problems running the first game 'Yesterday', which was great) that it makes solving the puzzles a chore. You can slide the mouse while it rotates painfully slowly, then suddenly it speeds up and whizzes past the part you needed so you have to scroll back...painfully slowly). The cut-scene videos also lag behind the audio, with the result that the scene ends before the video has caught up and you're left wondering what all that shouting was about. Then it autosaves so you can't go back and try again. If they'd stuck with the system from the first game, this would be 5 stars. I'm slowly making my way through the game - do so if you have a lot of patience for frustrating mechanics.

I liked the game. The 3d object viewer needs some time to get used to it, but after a while I kinda enjoyed looking at the characters again in each new scene and listening to the sometimes different descriptions. And, as some other reviewers noted, the game crashed twice for me. Fortunately the autosave function guarantees that you don't miss more than a few minutes at most if that happenes. What else? There are MANY descriptions of objects, which for me makes or breaks the atmosphere of an adventure, making the world more real. The puzzle quality was good in my opinion - some easy, some most moderate to hard, and for some I needed a walkthrough, as it is often the case with me. I liked most of the NPCs, only one had me rolling my eyes. The story is as engaging and dark as the first game, and it sucked me in from the first second and kept me engaged until the very end - if you liked the first one, I don't think you'll be disappointed with this one. I wished there was a third game of this series - I'd buy it in a heartbeat -, but as this isn't the case I'll probably play both games again in one or two years.

The first game was a little bit more interesting for me to play, but this one is very good too. I agree with the other review that 3d object viewer was a bad decision. Some people complain about the bugs. I had only two minor ones: - in the hotel (after the airplane) John was sliding on the floor without moving his body - pretty cool :) - I lost 6 minutes of progress after speaking with the boy I was supposed to rescue - had to talk to him again. The rest of the game, including the cut scenes, was a smooth experience. All in all solid story and engaging gameplay. On the day one of release (on Steam) I think the price was at least twice as high as it is now. I am glad this game made it here, DRM-free. Thank you, GOG!

As other users have already reported, this game is completely unplayable due to UI issues. Controls do not work (keyboard, mouse and joystick), menus are not visible (if any), there is no way to change settings. I couldn't go beyond the initial cutscene, which is a shame, as the game seems to have an interesting story and good graphics.