BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION

great: soundtrack good: lore and visuals okayish: dialogs, writing in general. exception is exposition of your followers which is laughable and occurs at a wrong time bad: voice acting mostly does not match situation, intonationis are often off. gameplay is miserable. i do respect absence of quest log, but to make it work you need minimally sensible quests. for me actions required to advance a quest were not obvious, but it could be just me. overall the game feels more like work because of constant pixelhunting and backtracking

I don't wish to critique too heavily on this game - I realise there's only so much that such a small team can do. The good: nice scenery, nice score, nice story The not-so-good: finding items - you have to run all over one area to get them, there's no indication until you're very close; pathing - on some areas it's not easy to tell how you go from A to B; transportation - the warden gates are not a bad idea, but the ammount of backtracking just makes them annoying; lack of a proper quest log - sometimes it's just hard to know what to no/where to go next, the todo list is very spartan. All in all, a decent effort, could've been much more given more resources.

10+ hours played, left unfinished I feel bad taking from the absolutely stunning work that has gone into making this game look and sound as good as it does. The settings are stunning, the colours rich, the sound pitch-perfect. The voice acting, too, is very strong. There are more than a few nods to the original Fallout games, both in aesthetic and in some of the settings, but that's no bad thing. The voice acting is mostly good, too, and it's nice to hear the South African and other accents from the African continent, rather than the typical American-dubbed English-language games. However, the game itself doesn't live up to its beauty. The setting is intriguing (time travel + technology-driven post-apocalyptic ruin) but the characters are just rehashes from other games or movies, with very predictable story-arcs: a male protagonist harbouring vengeance against the technological world for a lost love, his brother a veteran who suffered from a harsh father growing up; the robo-dog companion POOCH actually offers the most interesting back-story. The other characters you interact with throughout the game are also one dimensional, with a few exceptions. The puzzles and travel are also slow and fairly repetitive; I completed many of the tasks by accident, just by wandering around and interacting with things, before I had learned why I was doing so. If the story and characters had been a little more interesting, this could have been forgivable, but they don't hold up, and in the end for all the beauty, the gameplay is a little desolate.

I am super confused about the great reviews this game has received. The atmosphere, art design, characters, all good stuff. It's well written. Should have been a movie or something instead. There's almost zero "game play" here. You can't even figure out what to do based on clues, because there aren't any. You quite literally just have to click around on every corner of every painted scene to move your character into every nook and cranny waiting for an icon to pop up on the screen letting you know that you need to click on it. It's not even clear where you can and cannot traverse, so you have no choice but to randomly click on every inch real estate to see if your character will auto-path there and whether or not an interactive bubble will pop up when you get there. New conversation options with NPCs or interactive bubbles on objects will appear based on whether you have "unlocked" them by finding the previous clickable bubble in the chain. Click on every inch of every screen to hunt for the interactive bubbles, then revisit all the previous screens to see if that bubble unlocked a new bubble elsewhere. That's it. That's the game. It's so tedious I can't bring myself to finish even though it's relatively short. Just watch a Youtube video of it or something if you respect your own time.

A game title has never described it so well. It's beautiful: really lots of areas, beautifully designed. It's a desolation: these areas have very little to do in them. 1 or 2 interaction points at most. And since a lot of the areas are quite large, you spend your time walking around to locate the points to interact with. In addition there's a lot of back and forth resulting in time spent navigating between areas. On top of that, on the puzzles' side, it's unfortunately a bit lacking: it mostly consists of the previously mentioned back and forth. As for the story and the characters, they are really weird and sometimes feel off. Finally, the mini-games are seriously tedious, if not horrible.