Dear sirs,

This game is the perfect adventure game for a purist like myself.

Victor/Wormwood clearly understood that the perfect form for a graphic adventure was/is/will be 320x200. I despised SVGA adventures even back in the nineties: clear graphics only serve to kill the very thing the game really takes place at: the human imagination. What was your motivation for this, in case it was something else?

The music is incredibly well done. I've never wanted to listen to a soundtrack before (and that was not an exaggeration), but oh boy it's happening now.

Voice acting: spot on. At one point I had momentarily thought Horatio might have been voiced by Steven Russel (Garrett/Thief). I do not need to elaborate further.

Logical puzzles are also perfect (yeah I keep using this word). As a matter of fact, I dumped Deponia mostly because of the crazy illogical shit (it was pretty boring/casual otherwise too). The info terminal was brilliant, although I did employ Primer's capabilities for the combination (then reloaded of course), because I got tired of the mindless parsing of number variations.

I could go on with the setting+plot+script, but you can make an educated guess on what I could say. This was the second game in the last 10 years which has managed to caught my rusty old self completely off guard - the first being Miasmata, by the way.

Let's see some negativity then, before I'm accused of being a Wormwood affiliate:

- the only way this game could be even more completely aligned to my ultra-radical taste would be being text-input based like Sierra's AGI or early-SCI adventures. Okay-okay I know that would be an instant turn-off for today's casual crowd, but what can I say - I was born into 8-bit text adventures. I crave the personal touch. Simple point and click is "Baby's First Adventure Game". (using a variety of verbs with a SCUMM-style interface might be an unneeded step back though)

- oh also it should run on DOS on a 386.

- still, I wish there was a hardcopy distribution, because screw digital-friggin-downloads. I'd prefer this visibly on my shelf, next to Space Quest 4 and the rest.

- okay I'll stop with the unreasonable stuff: I want these to be the largest problems of your games! (you are going to create more, right? I don't even care when.)

Why is this gem so dirt cheap?

I didn't like the pixelhuntung apects (please add a "hotspot view"). I also found it pretty lame that the game required you to speak to a random guy (Oswald) about some other random guy (Laurence) so that in a completely different location, one of five heads, which before were labelled just as "heads" and were not takeable, is now interactable and takeable. Also if you use crispin on the keypad behind the bridge, a "big view" is displayed and you can't use the "decrypter" (by using the inventory key), but you must instead use the "decrypter" with crispin so it works. Many objects on the screen e.g. "rails" or the "sad robot" which had no progress purpose, and many stuff in the inventory (like "record") which served no purpose also didn't exactly help to find out the puzzles.
All other aspects like the humor were really nice, I with the game had a higher resolution (e.g. 640).

@ Gabucino -- Glad you enjoyed the game so much! I passed your nice words along to the rest of the team, as I'm sure they'll enjoy reading them too. Our next game is in the works, and I fear it may offend your tastes a bit (it's higher resolution, for example) but I think you'll still find plenty of work for your imagination! As for the price, if anything I'd like it to be lower -- the more people who can play the game the better!

@ AlienMind -- I'm sorry there were so many things you found frustrating about the game. Any time someone (1) buys and (2) finishes a game I worked on (heck, even if they just play the game for more than five minutes), their criticism are valid; obviously, parts of the game didn't click with you, and as a designer, I'd like to make a game that everyone enjoys. That said, the things that bothered you are things that generally I think are important: that the character should have a motivation for acting (i.e., to recover the head for Oswald) before he can act on (i.e., by taking the head), that there should be a large number of non-necessary interactive elements to avoid the game boiling down to "use everything on everything" and encourage the player to instead stop and think about things. Still, I'm sure there ways we could've bridge the gap a bit better. Hopefully we'll do a better job with the next game!

Thanks both of you for the comments!

Sorry I concentrated on my nitpicks, I'm a pessimist, overall the game was well worth playing. I nearly fell from my chair at a few lines from Crispin, like the one at the bar where he described his sidekick after he would have had the arm. Not many games can do that.
I just kinda fell in love with how "Book Of Unwritten Tales" was made. There, the space bar showed the hotspots on the screen, and after you looked at a thing which served no purpose, that hotspot actually disappeared. I understand that the "hardcore crowd" doesn't want that, but I'm not hardcore.. maybe that could be an option?

Actually, I have to admit that the business with finding Laurence's head stumped me at first too--it was one of the few things in the game for which I had to consult a walkthrough. But it was also partly my own silly fault for not listening better to Oswald's background information on Laurence and what happened to him. In general I'm fine with some hotspots being "playable" and some not, though, because otherwise things do become too "use everything on everything."

Sigh, I wrote an epic response to this and GOG.com ate it because it was too long. Trying to recover/recreate now.

***

God, this is annoying. I was only able to recover the second half of a long post that took an unreasonably long time to write. The gist of the first half was:

(1) I appreciate negative feedback, which is very useful, especially for a team of fairly inexperienced developers.

(2) I'm really glad you liked Crispin, especially given that he was so divisive.

(3) A long explanation of how, absent hotspot highlighting, each room is a "place" which the player can explore with his [neutral pronoun here] eyes, perhaps tracing a path with the cursor as he would use his finger in a book or a map, and when he finds something interesting, he's pleasantly surprised to find his interest vindicated by the game having a hotspot there. Thus, done well, the player's interest precedes his knowledge that something is a hotspot; it is interest for its own sake, not for instrumental reasons.

***

By contrast, if the game allows hotspot highlighting, the player will -- whether he initially wants to or not -- use hotspot highlighting because who wouldn't? It's convenient, and refusing a convenience is nearly impossible, whatever the consequences may be. Once the player uses the highlighting -- and I mean "once" in both the temporal "as soon as" and in the "one time" sense -- the relationship to the scene and to *every* scene changes. It is not a place, composed of interesting elements, which, if you are lucky, will prove interactive. It is a device, with differently shaped buttons, which react when pressed, painted over with a pretty picture. At best, the "picture" is secondary and the interaction is alienated from it; at worst, the picture disappears entirely.

I don't mean "disappears" in the sense that we could take the pictures out of the game and no one would notice. I mean disappears in the sense of how the player perceives the game. And I'm horribly generalizing from my own experience here, I admit. But when, for example, I played Mask of the Betrayer -- a game with excellent art design and a passably good graphics engine -- I would simply hold down the "highlight containers" button as I played, and fuck if I could tell you whether I was looting a corpse, an ornate box, a grave, a treasure chest, a pouch, an idol, or whatever. The game was just a vast thing covered in pouches to open, like some kind of hypertrophied environmental Rob Liefeld character.

I think there are ways to achieve some of the benefits of highlighting (i.e., less of a pain to find hotspots) without these downsides, and we're hoping to explore them in designing our next game. Maybe Vic and I will be persuaded to surrender to a highlight button! But at least for now, I think there are better ways.

For similar reasons, I'm averse to the idea of removing hotspots. The persistence of hotspots, the inclusion of useless hotspots (i.e., ones that do not assist the player in advancing through the game), the inclusion of useless items (e.g., the record), the inclusion of obscure responses (e.g., using the plasma torch on the Gospel, using Scraper's arm or Cornelius's hat on Crispin), all help conjure the illusion that the game world is not a series of interactive elements strung together for the player's amusement (and frustration), but rather something that exists of and for itself while also happening to host the player's adventure. The kind of design that has become more pervasive -- where the ratio of "usable" interactive elements to "useful" interactive elements approaches 1 -- again conveys to the player that he should not think of the record as a record, but instead as a key to a lock that has not yet been discovered. As the number of keys and locks becomes smaller, you also start to convey to the player that he should not even bother to try to match them up logically ("Perhaps this old fashioned key will open the Victorian manor!"), since it's perfectly straightforward to just try each key in every lock.

This is why I was resistant (obstinately, incredulously so) when players insisted that if using Item A on Item B produced Reaction Z, then using Item B on Item A must also produce Reaction Z. But it is not the case, for example, that using scissors on tape should produce the same reaction as using tape on scissors. (I should know: my daughters delight in both activities, which produce either very small pieces of tape all over the room or mummified scissors.) It seemed to me that players who expect the same reaction are not thinking of the items as scissors and tape but simply as numbers and of interactions not as verbs but simply as additions.

But in the case of using items on each other, I think my resistance -- although grounded in my own kind of adamant logic -- was wrong. Having watched a number of Let's Plays of Primordia, it's clear that a large number of players *already* think of items in those terms, and the game did nothing to disabuse them of that notion. In other words, players approached Primordia like a parent who gives his children scissors and tape and expects them to cut the tape; Primordia responded like a crazy child who taped up the scissors, only without being whimsical or endearing. So people got frustrated, and some of them quit.

Lesson learned!

Which is all to say, after this absurdly long post, as much as I've thought about these issues, the main thing is that if you are going to deny players their conveniences, you've got to bend over backwards to make sure that you aren't being a jerk to them, whether by having an unpredictable reaction (I've seen several negative reviews where the player was upset about the fact that you had to examine the burnt sensor to get the crystal), by having a particularly hard-to-find hotspot, or failing to provide some decent guideposts as to which hotspots and items are wheat and which are chaff. I'm hopeful that with our next game we will do a better job with all of that, and I know I'll approach it more humbly than I did with Primordia ("If they can't figure out that you have to use the plasma torch on an item and not vice versa, to hell with them!").

> Our next game is in the works, and I fear it may offend your tastes a bit (it's higher resolution, for example)

:(

> but I think you'll still find plenty of work for your imagination!

Ha! I'm doubtful. One either caters to the casual crowd, or to me. But fret not, I'll check your stuff out. You got credit.

> As for the price, if anything I'd like it to be lower -- the more people who can play the game the better!

The majority of the populace is a vegetable, so if you wake up one day and see the masses amused, you either created something legendary, or something utterly average. On the other hand, commercial success awaits in both cases.

> I appreciate negative feedback, which is very useful, especially for a team of fairly inexperienced developers.

Never listen to the common player. Don't even listen to me either. Keep creating whatever way you want to.

> (i.e., less of a pain to find hotspots)

I think we both know that whoever had big issues with "hotspots" in Primordia shouldn't be handling a computer. One day they might download Sanitarium, and proceed to have a seizure. (I admit, that game made me peek into a walkthrough. I still wouldn't complain about it, since it's not the - otherwise very memorable - game's fault that I'm not a puzzle guy.)

> Maybe Vic and I will be persuaded to surrender to a highlight button!

"Streamlining". The well-known way to perdition.

> all help conjure the illusion that the game world is not a series of interactive elements

Yep. And flawlessly executed.

> This is why I was resistant (obstinately, incredulously so)

Rightly so.

> But in the case of using items on each other, I think my resistance -- although grounded in my own kind of adamant logic -- was wrong.

It most certainly was not. Reason:

> Having watched a number of Let's Plays

This was a huge mistake.

> it's clear that a large number of players *already* think of items in those terms

This syndrome is widely known as autism. Let them enjoy Elijah Wood. (all: spare me the shitstorm, that would only entertain me)

> So people got frustrated, and some of them quit.

Yes, and I call this a perfectly working feature.

> Lesson learned!

Wait, what?

> you've got to bend over backwards to make sure that you aren't being a jerk to them

Well why the hell not? Don't follow trends - create them.

> the player was upset

Yeah I was "upset" about being unable to use the geo-coords in any way. I did not post a "negative review" though, I went to do something else, then revisited the game some days later, and discovered the helpful aspect of asking Crispin. It was a discovery and it felt very gratifying (this is how an adventure game should make the player feel, and definitely not through hand-holding, btw).

(The moral of the story is NOT that next time you should create a pop-up: "Whenever you feel stuck, you can ask your sidekick for hints! Yay! Have fun!")

(!SPOILER!)

Another example. I was stuck at the bridge combination. (Still not posting a negative review or any of those fashionable letsplays.) Then I looked at the ever-so-helpful datapad, saw the numbers and the name "Primer". Well what do you know, I looked up all the prime numbers (on the net) between 100 and 200, and tried them. (at that time I haven't realized that one can actually walk eastwards at the car wrecks, therefore haven't met Primer)

(SPOILER ENDS) It was a completely acceptable solution, and it only made partial sense, so I immediately knew I was right when I thought I missed something. This is good design. (I did wonder whether this is gonna break some script later but turns out, the game was actually well made.)

> ("If they can't figure out that you have to use the plasma torch on an item and not vice versa, to hell with them!").

To hell with them.

I can understand the appeal of that mindset, but I'm not persuaded it's the right approach.

First, it's not possible to be part of a collaborative project and maintain an uncompromising mindset. Creating an adventure game, and creating it as part of a team, is a constant process of compromise.

Because of the ultimate form (i.e., adventure game), the art and story and even sound can't just be dumped in exactly as it emerges from the imagination. Fitting these elements to the form requires pruning and expansion -- some kinds of stories, some ways of telling them, work better within the medium. The same is true for the art. To take a trivial example, with a 2D adventure game, your camera angle has to stay within a fairly narrow range in order for the sprites to be usable.

Because you're working in a team, there is a second order of compromising. Even assuming all of us stayed strictly in our own domain (which we didn't -- we tended to advise each other, such that Vic and James might share story thoughts with me, and I might share art thoughts with Vic and coding thoughts with James, Vic might do some parts of the AGS implementation that otherwise James was doing, Vic would compose soundscapes for Nathaniel to work off of, etc.), we'd still need to compromise our domain to fit with someone else's. Vic might draw something that I need to integrate into my story, I might have some puzzle that requires something of Vic's art, and many times this is iterative: I describe an area, Vic paints it in a different way, I adjust to accommodate, etc.

At the point you've already made these compromises, there's no reason from the standpoint of "purity" to draw the line at compromising with team members. What about beta testers? And if them, why not players?

That doesn't mean that you should compromise any time someone asks you to -- sometimes what people think they want isn't what they really want (or need), and sometimes it's the responsibility of a creator to make the audience compromise, and in compromising become better. Games are teaching tools, and one thing they can teach is how to be a better player -- less dependent on directions from the game, more thoughtful, less obsessed with error-avoidance, etc.

But in order to teach people you have to start by meeting them where they are. For most of my life, I dreamed of being an English teacher, and in fact I did teach English a few summers, to the point that the school where I worked gave me authority to craft my own curriculum, which I did. I had this very demanding, high-concept approach where I had these like eighth graders reading All Quiet on the Western Front along with selections from Faces of Battle and the Iliad and so one and so on, and for all my best intentions -- and they were great intentions! -- the whole thing was a fiasco. Nothing had prepared these particular students for such a course, whatever its merits might have been, and in the end they would've learned more if I had just used the stupid vocab memorization lists and worksheets that the school normally employed. That doesn't mean that I should've used lists and worksheets, but it means that I needed to start by accepting that people aren't actors designed to help you play out your fantasies, but sets of specific needs, experiences, etc., etc.

The same is true as players. As much as I might think that beating them over the head with the notion that A on B = C does not mean B on A = C is a good idea, and it might be a good idea, beating them over the head ain't gonna work. And, ultimately, what I want to do with game-making is (1) share my imagination; (2) teach certain skills, knowledge, values; (3) entertain people; and (4) have enough success to keep game-making. The first two things require that a degree of non-compromising, because it is *my* imagination I want to share and those are *my* things I want to teach, but even those things require a degree of compromise because sharing and teaching require that the other person want to be shared with and want to learn. And the last two items absolutely require compromise.

Which is all to say: I do admire your dogmatism, but it's not for me! Still, I hope you can find it in your heart to keep playing our games, even if they are adulterated. :)

> First, it's not possible to be part of a collaborative project and maintain an uncompromising mindset.

On one part (50%) this is true, but the only truly successful "collaborative project" I was part of (http://mplayerhq.hu) did kinda require that everyone would accept the main developer's mindset. After he lowered this requirement, it all went sideways. Of course there is compromise, but there has to be a strong push in the right direction.

> Creating an adventure game, and creating it as part of a team, is a constant process of compromise.

And this is how Dragon Age 2 was created :)

> At the point you've already made these compromises, there's no reason from the standpoint of "purity" to draw the line at compromising with team members. What about beta testers? And if them, why not players?

Because if the average player is the common denominator, then the game will be average too. There are numerous examples for this. Another reason is that this is not how it was done back in dem' ole' glory days ("internet? is that a BBS?"), and it worked wonders.

> That doesn't mean that you should compromise any time someone asks you to -- sometimes what people think they want isn't what they really want (or need), and sometimes it's the responsibility of a creator to make the audience compromise, and in compromising become better.

That is well.

> But in order to teach people you have to start by meeting them where they are.

Yes. But before that: one can choose the target audience at his own leisure. Let's be honest: the one thing the young student wants is freedom from the chores, and not the well-intended guidance of the teachers. It is what it is. Later, some of them would embrace those thoughts.

> A on B = C does not mean B on A = C is a good idea, and it might be a good idea, beating them over the head ain't gonna work.

Not allowing illogical events is part of "teaching certain skills, knowledge". But if that's the next game's biggest flaw, then I'm still on board ;) After all (I gave it a bit of thought), it was adventure games with text-input which required proper word order, but "point-n-click" Lucasfilm games elected to work the way you propose. (and they went bankrupt, ha!)

> Which is all to say: I do admire your dogmatism, but it's not for me! Still, I hope you can find it in your heart to keep playing our games, even if they are adulterated. :)

Oh I wouldn't want to convince anyone with my overwhelming radicalism (especially not on the Internet), in fact I did advise not to listen to me; I just shared my thoughts, and - by the way - thanks for kindly reflecting on them.

I actually think in pre-Internet days there was still quite a lot of compromising (with publishers, developer management, critics, testers, fans of prior games by the same developer, friends and family). I do understand your point that, simply as a matter of probability, those categories of people are somewhat likelier to give useful feedback than random players of your game. But I don't share your negative view of "the average player" or "the majority of the populace." By virtue of leisure time, education, experience, and so forth some people may be better able than others to engage thoughtfully with a game (or with any given thing), but generally my view is that the average human being has quite a lot of insight to offer, and that people who are willing to take the time to talk about what they liked or didn't like about the game almost always have something worth sharing. In my experience, negative commentary is almost always correct in the sense that it identifies a failing: if not a failing in terms of the idea (A on B != B on A), then a failing in terms of the expression of the idea.

I might feel more confident in the quality of my work (and thus less likely to defer to others' reactions to it for guidance) at some future date, but there's really no reasonable ground on which I could say, "I'm sure that I'm right, and they're wrong." Even with respect to storytelling, which is at least something I've done for my whole life, it's not like I've ever told an adventure game story before, which is its own kind of artform as I said earlier. And even if we were dealing with a short story (the form that I've worked in most often), it's not like I'm some super accomplished short-story writer: I've probably only written, perhaps, four dozen complete stories in my life, of which perhaps ten were any good. But most of the feedback we get doesn't address the story as such. Usually it's about gameplay. And there, I'm even less likely to have some great insight: aside from some short text adventures, I'd never designed an adventure game prior to Primordia, and I've only probably even played a couple dozen of them. It's true that I've spent a lot of time thinking about them, but probalby the average player of Primordia has played more adventure games than I have; some of the players have made more adventure games than I have; and if you include their participation in message boards, they've probably thought about adventure games more than I have. So I think they're worth listening to.

Finally, one thing to bear in mind regarding compromise is that even a single creator will have multiple aims in a project. Say, for example, I wanted to make an adventure game that would (1) encourage certain philosophical/political/moral values; (2) encourage certain ludological (? i.e., game-related) values (e.g., don't reload just because you've suffered a small setback); (3) create a particular world that fascinates me; (4) include certain verbal formulations that I think are clever and I want to share with the world; (5) reference various cultural legacies that I think are valuable. We can leave off crasser things that I might also want (say, fans, fame, fortune). Among those five aims, even though they are not per se contradictory, they may all the same obstruct each other. For example, if not having an artificial tutorial (i.e., popups on the screen saying "do this to do that") means that we lose half our player base, then #2 is running contrary to #1: I am shrinking the auidence for my non-game ideology in order to promote my game ideology. If a game that included no compromises on any of the five aims would only be enjoyable / palatable for 1,000 players, whereas one that compromised on three of the aims would be enjoyable / palatable for 1,000,000 players, then I'm not sure which of the two approaches actually entails the greater compromise. A "pure" game would be a compromise of the premises of #1 and #2 (that I am trying to change people) and #3, #4, and #5 (that I am trying to share with people). Increasing the audience advances those goals so long as there hasn't been complete compromise in terms of content.

I guess the truth, though, is just that I'm not a true artist insofar as I don't believe in creating art for its own sake, any more than I would write long message board posts if I believed that no one at all would read them. For me, art is just another vector of communication. And the content of my art isn't something I feel super-duper passionate about: I do get worked up about random things (e.g., comma placement) and there are certain bright lines I draw and generally don't cross, but it's not like changing things bothers me that much. I've more or less always been that way: I share my work with people and alter it in response to their suggestions. And I'm not some amazing wellspring of creativity. Most of what I do is assemble parts I've found elsewhere. With any given character in Primordia, it's pretty easy to find existing characters who inspired them, for example.

> generally my view is that the average human being has quite a lot of insight to offer

To offer, yes. The problems begin when they receive something, and one expects them to do something worthwhile with it. Everything has its proper place it must fall into.

I'll try to elaborate. I've never seen the concept of "developing for the average user" actually work and yield something good and useful. What I took from this is that the "average user" is simply non-existent. For example, MS Windows can be semi-officially considered "for the average user", but on close inspection those users would be (and has been) just as happy (or even more so) with a typewriter - they already use this vile computer thingy as such and have no inclination to advance.

If someone doesn't have a natural affinity to something, they most probably will never develop one - regardless of the amount of artificial "prodding". The best thing one can manage is _find_ their proper target audience or even determine whether it exists or not - and this is already a mighty undertaking - not to _create_ it. They way I've seen it, vying for the "average user" (even for his betterment) always yields something too watered-down to be usable. "Think different" :)

> and that people who are willing to take the time to talk about what they liked or didn't like about the game almost always have something worth sharing

Oh, people have well-enough time nowadays to upload lame letsplays, but that hardly constitutes as something worthwhile. That's just riding a trend in the hope of ad revenue. Precious few are actually able _and_ willing to sum up their experience in a medium that is unlikely to earn copious numbers of those yummy "likes", "+1s" and developer-supplied "swag".

> it's not like I've ever told an adventure game story before, which is its own kind of artform as I said earlier.

Only to a lesser, mostly invisible degree. Adventure games are first and foremost for captivating the imagination. Forcing l'art pour l'art would only yield another unexpected slap in the face like Gone Home was...

> But most of the feedback we get doesn't address the story as such. Usually it's about gameplay.

Make sense. The adventure happens (or it doesn't) in the mind. By the way, looks like some people expected an american-style happy ending in Primordia? Well, tough, grow up! That would have been anything BUT satisfying, worthwhile, or even "in character".

> means that we lose half our player base, then ... I am shrinking the auidence for my non-game ideology in order to promote my game ideology.

In my experience, there is no other way to make something with a strong identity - but this is a good and natural thing. The workaround is to make two separate games, and that's definitely a win for everybody, you can safely reach for two different audiences (probably overlapping to a large degree). It does require more work though, but that's also normal... said the complete outsider.

> A "pure" game would be a compromise of the premises of #1 and #2 (that I am trying to change people) and #3, #4, and #5 (that I am trying to share with people). Increasing the audience advances those goals so long as there hasn't been complete compromise in terms of content.

I agree. It's a matter of striking the balance. As I said, _I_ think Primordia managed this perfectly. Keep going, please.

> With any given character in Primordia, it's pretty easy to find existing characters who inspired them, for example.

That's actually not an issue, but people nowadays misguidedly think that having roots is somehow despicable. The real challenge lies in taking ordinary things and making something fresh and new from them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF_INzomp5U#t=33m25s
This is what an adventure is. And yes, System Shock and Gothic are both adventures for me.
Don't worry, showing on what points I can click on when I hold down the spacebar will NOT break the immersion of the game for me. Not everything which was invented in the last 10 years is bad. The only thing I'm interested in IS the story, and, sorry to say, had me not really completely gripped in this game, because I did not really care about anybody outside of Crispin, even though (and maybe because of) the game pretty much demanded you care for them to advance the story. But the truth is, I cared about Crispin (character) and getting back that power core. Crispin never appeared in any kind of danger, so it was down to the core for the rest of the game. I took the one ending in which you deactivated the threat, took the core, and GTFO, and never looked at the other endings.
System Shock with it's audio logs managed to get quite a personal closure to the characters and their pain with it's audio logs. Gothic also did make a strong closure right at the start when one of them slaps you in the face.. you want to get revenge for that. Primordia only made me feel for a little bit about that junk dealer, but also only because he's so funny and not because I actually feel anything for him. Watch Neon Genesis Evangelion or Death Node or any good anime to see how you do IMHO good character development. e.g. show someone as a real badass and then make him loose his facade by confronting him with an overwhelming enemy which induces his self doubt. In Primordia you get shot and he's reacting like "just a fleshwound". I would have also very much liked to see the foundations of his beliefs shattered by meeting an old senile man. I know, that "humans make errors too" WAS displayed, but only as text-log and kinda detached... The great components of a whole world WERE there, but I kinda never felt really personally attached to it. And the not existing hotspot view wasn't the case, I swear.
Maybe also your games are just too sophisticated for me, as I found this one too hard... sooo.. nevermind :-)

Crispin and Leopold are definitely the most "human" of the robots you meet, so it's not surprising that they'd evoke the most empathy. Obviously having robots as the characters creates a certain obstacle to such connections, but so it goes!

I've watched NG:E -- all the way through, including the movie sequel -- though it was about a decade ago that I watched the show. (How time flies!) I remember thinking it was pretty good in the way it depicted the stresses on the child-protagonists but full of all sorts of things that seemed rather lousy to me, most significantly the very superficial appropriation of Christian imagery without (it seemed to me) any thoughtfulness about it. The anime equivalent of an American dude getting a Chinese character tattooed on his arm because it looks cool. But you're certainly right that it does a good job of depicting the stress of facing overwhelming odds, though I never took it as "a real badass" breaking down before overwhelming odds so much as a child being asked to do things beyond what a child (or even an adult) could bear. In that sense, I thought it owed a lot to Ender's Game, which has a similar premise.

In any event, like I said, I appreciate the feedback!