Is Song of Farca a good game? Yes. But only on your first playthrough. It's a a beefed-up visual novel with a nice, trivial hacking minigame, a conversation system in which you have to present evidence created by your deductions and a simple but effective pixel art depiction of your home. It will give you about 8-9 hours of intrigue and good gameplay...and then 30 more hours of boredom if you try to get all the achievements: you can't skip any dialogue. The first playthrough is “the good one” and that the game is not as replayable as the developers think. Why am I giving it a bad rating? Because it's Russian copaganda in disguise. It's set in Farca, a fictional nation that looks like your generic cyberpunk dystopia. Your character, a blue-haired, tattooed and pierced lesbian (or bi?) girl with a video game t-shirt, is in house arrest, but it’s not because she’s oppressed: she's a loose cannon who punched someone. She's aided by a leftwing journalist and from time to time you receive a revolutionary newsletter you can reply to, and those replies will shape the world, leading to different world events and achievements. Be revolutionary enough and you’ll get everyone killed. Sounds absurd? Yeah, because it is. You eventually realize antifa characters are psychopaths (one of them a literal serial killer) and the most honorable people are an oligarch/mob boss and a cop. Choices don't matter. No plot twists will ever change. You get the illusion that choices matter because you must play well or your mistakes will get people killed, so there's a "proper" way to play and other options are not choices, but failures, except when you guide a character through a life-threatening situation, but no matter what you do, she won't die, because she will die later to force a plot point on you. It’s all smoke and mirrors. But the game is very playable. The music is subtle, with a touch of Deus Ex. The graphics are nice, with cool character design. It could have been great :(
It's a good game. I completed it and got all the achievements and no, it's not badly made and it's not an awful game, so I can guarantee that it's NOT a one-star game (that's why I'm giving it five stars). The problem is that it was released in a state that gave a very bad first impression (for example, the opening movie is just the one from the original game shown as if it was projected to some random FBI agent, but the rest of the cutscenes in the game were actually remade with the new engine) and there are many small bugs that make the game look bad, but they don't keep you from finishing the game and have a good time. Even the stealth sections work! Sometimes, gamers are right to complain and to drop their review bombs, but in this case, they all joined forces against a game that didn't deserve their wrath. I think it's a good remake that shows a lot of respect to the original and is very enjoyable to play.
Only the English version is included in this release, so this is my rating for the quality of this launch. The Spanish version had cinema quality voiceover from the guy who dubs Harrison Ford in the Star Wars movies, and that's missing here. And suspect players from other territories are not happy either. Localized versions exist. But GOG, as usual, doesn't care that much about non-English releases.
When this was sold in Spain, it had Spanish audio. Where is it? (Do you like this Amazon-style review? I'm sure you didn't expect it around here :D)
GK2: The Beast Within is one of the few FMV games (along with the Tex Murphy series) that stands firmly as a "true" hardcore adventure game that doesn't become an interactive movie in the bad sense (="click to see the next video"). Tim Curry is missed as the voice of Gabriel Knight but the cast is adequate and the puzzles are as good as you can expect from any other classic adventure game. Getting this 6 CD-ROM adventure for $5.99 is a great deal. Thanks, GOG!
Only ten years after The Secret of Monkey Island, the once-beloved adventure genre was dying. This was one of the last great point'n'click adventures, and after it... Only darkness. Very long conversations (is that a bad thing?), mature themes, a beautiful soundtrack (which is available in mp3 format), 3D characters in prerendered backgrounds, oldschool puzzles with good adventure gameplay... and above all, a great story that pulls the player into the game. If you like adventure games, you'll probably enjoy The Longest Journey. There's also a full 3D sequel, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey (confusing title! Why didn't they just call it "TLJ2: Dreamfall"?), but this is the beginning of the journey. They don't make games like this anymore!
Access Software intended to continue the Tex Murphy series, but there was no time for a new story, so "Tex Murphy: Overseer" was conceived as an ambitious retelling of the first game, "Mean Streets", with state-of-the-art FMV videos and 3D environments. The timing was not right, though: adventure as a genre was dying, Access Software was sold to an uninterested Microsoft, and it was still too early for DVD tecnology, so the superior DVD version or the game was (and still is) unplayable on most computers. If you have played the previous Tex Murphy FMV games, you know the drill: a sci-fi noir story performed by familiar TV actors in virtual backgrounds, with lots of puzzles and the best hint system ever. And like the previous games, "Overseer" is once more a great adventure game, still miles above other FMV titles. You can play the CD version currently available here. Still, if you are new to the series it would be a good idea to start with "Under a Killing Moon" or the previous installment, "The Pandora Directive" (one of the finest adventures ever made), and continue here if you like what you see.
