Playing this is like playing a standard Sierra game while Al Lowe lays on top of you, making jokes about farts and Nixon. This game is for a slightly smaller crowd than, say, Monkey Island. You have to be able to stomach Hop-Sing Along's pretty rough "Chinese" accent as well as Al Lowe's narrator constantly shooting jokes at you about genitals, the the intelligence level of the Bush administration, and, boy howdy, look how much we are breaking the fourth wall in this Sierra game! It's great looking, it's got the exact humor you might expect, and it has the right amount of ambition (and clunkiness) for a great Sierra game. That said, one of the game's ambitions is to have a LOT of unique reactions to many, many different objects in the world. There are sooooo many things to click on and look at. Which is to say, you spend a looooot of time listening to Al Lowe making Al Lowe jokes. So it's really Al Lowe's humor that will determine how much you like this game. It has some fantastic touches, like a continuous musical number that introduces each act of the game -- which is delightful! But it also has many of the usual frustrating Sierra gameplay choices. It's a solid game with some memorable sequences, but you probably won't care about that if you reached your poop-joke limit 4 pixel hunts ago and quit playing. So you might love it, you might hate it, but it's a fun example of a great good game. It's not a GREAT game, it's definitely a good game, and maybe a great goood game if you think you can dig it's specific humor. The game has a lot of talent and experience behind it and they make a good product, but it still feels kinda stale, and the jokes are a little dusty, and it moves a little slow. Very much the Airplane II of video games.
The creators took the gameplay seriously, took the acting and filming seriously, and took the story and dialogue seriously, and created something better than competent in all three areas. I can't name another FMV game that feels this professional. These Australians go hard in making a noir game, and their effort shows. The characters are clear noir tropes very competently acted (the little bits of Oz accent that leak in are more fun than distracting), the plot is basic but with some excellent turns (which really helps for a video game), and the gameplay is clear and logical, with few adventure game moon logic issues. The creators turned Melbourne into an extremely believable 1940's era SF/LA, and the sets, costumes, and dialogue all drip with real research and love for the noir genre. Yes, you can die (or fail to pay rent) and lose the game, forcing you to start over. But that's a GOOD thing, because 1) there are multiple paths and multiple solutions to puzzles, meaning you can take different paths and make other choices to explore the game more, and 2) it lets you find the same evidence from different sources, meaning you will be constantly thinking about and re-examining your hypotheses. Basically: The well-executed setting and the redundancy of gameplay make you FEEL like a noir detective pondering a tough case. Honestly, the tightness of scope and quality of presentation probably makes this the best retro FMV game. Certainly, it's cleaner and punchier than the Tex Murphy's, it's more concise and better paced than the Phantasmagorias, it's not just a rambling story attached to super hard (and fun!) puzzles like The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour, and the gameplay actually exists unlike the wonderful Dracula Unleashed (and the acting is less camp). It's not perfect (see the niggling issues others speak about here), but it's a smart game made well. I don't have any nostalgia for it because I never played it till the 2020's, but I know I'll remember it forever.
Out of this World has exciting new things happening all the time. It has puzzles and platforming that are driven by a story. Achieving those puzzles moves you through the story. The Way has many challenging puzzles that were consistently difficult for me, and many frustrating platforming puzzles. You solve these puzzles to make lights light up and platforms move, and, maybe, if you've lit up enough lights and moved enough platforms in enough puzzle rooms, and finally to maybe trigger some plot event. There's not a lot of dialogue, thankfully, but there's little enough that I find it disappointing that it wasn't ditched altogether. Out of this World is a Cinematic Experience, in that its goals are to have many flashy, unique events and bespoke puzzles to suit them. The Way is a Mature Game. in that it comes from many years of the gaming industry figuring out how many puzzles dungeons in a row can be satisfying before adding a new mechanic. Also there's a story. The Way is definitely INSPIRED by Out of this World, but comparing them feels off. Because The Way has much more content in between story events, and the story events have dialogue, The Way feels much slower and less impactful than Out of this World. WIth all the things they have in common, it makes playing The Way feel like you are reading a novelization of Out of this World. Less immediate, less of an experience. No rawness. Not that The Way is bad! I enjoy playing it, except for the SUPER GARBAGE platforming stuff. Which is accurate to its inspiration and all the incredibly BS repetitive parts in that old game. Dying and repeating constantly the same stupid monster battle was boring then and it's boring now. But the puzzles are difficult in a good way, and the art is a melancholy mood rendered in crunchy-slick pixels. So it's a cool game. Just a weird experience. Don't expect an Out of this World descendant. Expect a solid puzzle platformer made in the shape of an Out of this World member berry tree.
