Breja: Really? I agree it's not nearly as good as Deponia or Chains of Satinav, simply not in the same league, but I still liked it. I liked the main character, and actually thought his voice actor did a pretty good job [...]
For me that's part of the charm of classic adventure games, picking up everything that isn't nailed down and coming up with all the crazy plans. And the Daedalic games are well designed, once I got a feeling for them I was able to finish them without looking at any walkthroughs.
It was the worst game I can remember playing in years - I actually hated it. It was released broken, and even in its current "fixed" state it's full of inattentive nonsense - dialogue options slip into French and Russian in the later game for no reason, and the dreadful translation that frequently left me completely unable to fathom what was supposed to happen and what many objects were. And some puzzles - not the mini-games, which were also dreadful - can't be solved if you make a wrong choice early on.
Example: in the (lame) puzzle about monkeying around with the - no spoilers - various options available to get someone out of his office, if you open the patio door while you are trying to figure out what the hell the game wants to happen, you can't close the door again. It gives you the option, but stops you from doing it ("You're too close," or somesuch). It actually TELLS you to close the door. But you can't. Only choice is a reload. Elsewhere, the savegame problem that stopped players from playing the end at all still affects some even now; Daedalic's "fix" is a downloadable savegame that jumps a player past the trouble point.
I'm not going to get into this in detail, but look at the user reviews here and on Steam. My experience is very common among people playing in English (apparently the game is very different in its original German). The voicing on Bent and Faye is so bad that I was half convinced by the end of the game that they were speech synthesizers; every few hours one of them would come up with an inflection, though, so they can't be. The idea is great, the format is cool, the story is often decent. The art is often splendid. The execution I found to be incompetent and poorly managed. It looked to me very much like the game was taken away from its original dev team to be finished by people who didn't know what was going on and didn't care.
If you liked it, that's great. It was my first Daedalic game, and it was very nearly my last. I love adventure games; sometimes I check walkthroughs, because I don't have the kind of time I used to have back in the day, and if the game is really good and I'm involved in it, I'll go a long way trying to solve my situations clean. In
New Beginning I quickly disliked both Bent and Faye, and the supporting characters were for the most part even worse - getting to the end was a slogging chore.