BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION

Overall I must say its a nice titel, good job to the Bischoff Brothers. They seem to improve their games on every step and same time stand proud of their roots. + wonderful illustrated worldmap, great maps at all I wished modern cRPGs would have more. just to say its charming oldschoolness but also "living", similar to PoE2 for example. + great retrodesign of the UI like Fallout 1/2...pure love + damn freakish, bizarre and absolutely unique NPCs! (should be an homage to Planetscape Torment/Torment ToN) and first Fallouts obviously) + fantastic atmospheric world design of post-apocalyptic/but more far future of africa + very short loading screens, 2-5s + no bugs found or experienced + pretty in-between-story(s) of your mates But like all games there are some not so good sites on it: - even the story is somewhat cool, futuristic yet tribe-esque, very mysteriously (what actually is good) but very hard to understand though - there are some more endings and you can fulfill more different decisions to theses, but usually you have always to choose between 2 sides...save A to kill B... even you can always ask for friendly actions, but theses tribes/identitys are too stubborn. - gameplay is somewhat annoying because of single maps you can visit are too small. so you can usually talk to around 1-2 NPCs, investigate a terminal or find one item on nearly all maps. this let you fly around very often with your aircraft, searching for quest-items or quest-relevant hints (and at the half game I started to look for walkthroughs, as the world gets too complex) - i'm heavily missing a real quest-log for overview what you should/can do next - some riddles are ridiclious that dev's had to help questioning players... - at some point I knew that 2 items had to be combined, but the merging mechanism seemed bit clumsy here and stopped. after seeing this has to work on other players, retried it and worked then. I wish they would do a cRPG with this designs, world and atmosphere...

First thing: this game is point-and-click. 6 hours in so here's what I've experience so far: PROS - nice artwork, visuals, atmosphere - main story is interesting CONS - every dialogue choice seems to lead to the same outcome - got blocked for an hour because I didn't walk close enough into the corner of a room to pick up the piece of gold lying on the floor; had to look up a walk-through to backtrack my way to that one piece of gold - every mission is go here, talk to this person, go there, talk to this other person, receive item, wtf is this item for, go back to first person, no seriously wtf is this item for, repeat It's a well made game for its genre but it also helped me realize I seriously detest this genre.

Took around 12 hours to finish in about two years. I love these brother's games. I supported this project very happily and will always do. This one was pretty impressive and it was a huge task for them. Congrats! Mick Gordon participated (music from Doom, etc), and it is mesmerizing. Imaginative and creative, based on south african culture, something that is fresh and different. 4 stars because: - Many scenes / huge empty scenes to explore. Thank god you added the blinking sign to find hidden objects. This also happend in Siberia. More work for you, not really needed for a game to show its potential. Hard to find stuff and remember what you left behind. - 3d lacks elements to distinguish depth / heights / perspective. It is quite confusing to find your way around the scenes and understand them. They always lack ambient occlusion and harder shadows and a little parallax between near objects and far objects. This is one of the most annoying aspects, it all has a lack of contrast. - The to-do list is not enough. I ended up with 5 papers full of scribbles, writing down stuff about each place to remember there was nothing left to do there, (which later on was not true, by the way), and writing down stuff that was still left or characters that I didn't know if would be interesting later on. The tree of options and the amount of data given in the game is so huge that if you're not a frequent player due to work or family, you end up absolutely forgetting what you were doing the last time. Next time, please, let us have our own notes in-game. Would be awesome to add a dictionary of discovered information. That would helped A LOT to understand what I was doing. - Some puzzles just made no sense and you needed to remember stuff from the beginning of the game. - Annoying to click stuff while moving, you have to wait till the character stops next to it to click it. - 3D would benefit greatly if you hired a profesional animator just for key animations and cut-scenes.

Beautiful Desolation is an adventure game not a cRPG. I'm starting with this simple statement because some people expected ultra-high interactivity and talking to everything that is moving. As an adventure game the puzzles are easy and logical and there are 0 nonsensical combinations of the items. The game’s challenge is achieved mostly from the various places you need to visit and NPCs. The trick here is to remember very well the places and NPCs you visit. I saw many people complaining about the difficulty of the game and demanding a hint system. In my opinion don’t play this game using a hint system or walkthrough, you'll kill the purpose of the game and transform it to a pointless walking simulator. It's not that difficult as they claim to be, trust me. As a last resort just keep some notes on a piece of paper and you will be fine. The setting is beautiful and bizarre, admittedly this is the main selling point here and the characters are very colorful and vibrant. I enjoyed most of the voice acting, especially the weird NPCs but the main characters voice acting could have been better. Music and sound are very well done and atmospheric as expected to be. Visually the game is gorgeous, the 2D isometric rendered environments are beautiful. They are like a slap in the face for those who claim that 2D isometric art is outdated. Basically, this is how Baldur's Gate 3 should look like in my opinion. My biggest issue is that there is not enough weird animal wildlife as was presented in the early Kickstarter footage and many truly beautiful levels left out from the game. It's a pity that they left them out, I wanted to explore Babel more... It took me around 20 hours to finish without hints or walkthrough and doing all the combat. As a final line, let’s hope that the Brotherhood will hear our voices and make an RPG for their next project in a similar beautiful environment.

There are a lot of good things with the game. Soundtrack, graphics, characters and voice-overs. Sadly the main story gets drowned out with all these side stories(side quests) that you forget what are we doing all this for. It becomes more about the place where we are at. You got some more in-depth knowledge about your brother and dog-robot which is nice. I agree with what others have said that there is a lot of backtracking to previous areas which can gets tedious with flying back and forth through the portal and then to where you need to go. I do explore as much as possible most of the time but to find things to make money in the game are hidden until you walk just by it. There is nothing showing graphically that there should be something there to find. Specific items for quests are shown. Was hoping for more after having enjoyed Stasis and Cayne.