A New Beginning: Final Cut

The New Beginning is a cinematic epic. It never feels drawn out (it is long, but never padded), and the story moves at an exciting pace as we encounter revelations and story bits that expand on what we believed had been happening before. The puzzles are logical, and never impede the flow of the story, which is important for that cinematic feel I mentioned before. The characters are full-bloodied people, and not just there to help the story along. That helps both humour and darker themes to co-exist and not feel forced upon the player, which gives and amazingly organic feel to the game. In essence, The New Beginning is a classic point-and-click adventure done right. It does not deviate from the genre in the slightest, and does not experiment with the gameplay style (and why should it?). Daedalic understands that this allows the developer to focus on things that really matter - story, characters, pacing and the overall feel of the game. All of which are masterfully done in the New Beginning.

This is a game with some great characters, environments and clever puzzles. Unfortunately, as is common with Daedalic Entertainment, a good game is smothered under too much dialogue - often delivered quite slowly. Subtitles and a twitchy trigger finger is a cure for all but the cut-scenes, which are both unskippable and bound to a slow 'comic book' animation style. Despite the slow, overly wordy pace, the game is still imaginative and well worth a look.

Maybe I'm just getting old, but even though I like the general storyline and the graphics, I find the characters (including the protagonista) are more often than not stereotypes and the writing (dialoge and storyline) is mediocre at times, I'm in the middle of chapter three (of eight), and I already encountered several puzzles which I found really far fetched or which exhibit a lack of knowledge about how things work (and I'm not talking about things that are not invented yet). I might give the game another shot, but I will probably just abandon it, something I have rarely done in the past 25 years I have been playing adventures.

As you may have observed from reading the description blurb, this game has a pretty strong environmentalist slant. Whatever your position on climate change and appropriate responses to it might be, consider yourself warned that this game will thoroughly hammer its green morals into you. With that said, it's not a bad game in and of itself. The story is okay (merely okay), voice acting and music is so-so, and the puzzles can be tricky but never infuriatingly so. The one thing that might throw off some experienced gamers is that there are many occasions where attempting the same dialogue choice twice will get you different results - threw me for a loop every time. I also experienced a number of bugs: sometimes the left-click interaction menu will freeze on the screen, necessitating that I hit ESC to enter and leave the menu. Once I made the mistake of moving to talk to someone and then opening the interaction menu elsewhere on the screen - I was unable to move my mouse pointer anywhere or click on anything, and the ESC key did nothing. Also, I lost the ability to save midway through the game, and no amount of clicking on save menu icons actually did anything. Overall, I'd say that among the various games Daedalus has on offer, A New Beginning is probably their weakest. I'd recommend The Whispered World, Chains of Satinav, or Deponia over this.