Let me preface: this is a SOUNDTRACK review - it has little to do with the game. Go check out the game - it's worth 4.5/5 stars (for me at least) and is a classic Cyan production all the way through. ---------------------- Now as for this: if you absolutely adore Robyn Miller's work - you will be... a bit disappointed. This is no Riven. There are glimpses of it here, but the quality is a mixed bag. As a companion piece it does its job tremendously well - you can't feel the rough, cringy moments when immersed in the game and you'll be forgiven to actually think it is of equal quality to Robyn's previous works. But no, the soundtracks to Riven (and Myst to a lesser extent) did stand on their own without the game, this does not. The main culprit is surprisingly its ambition. The parts that are ensemble-oriented fail. And they don't fail on a compositional level - the Cyan team simply didn't have the budget to hire and ensemble with a full string and horn section, that the composition required. So they settled. And they made a horrible compromise. The compromise they could have gone to would be to restrain the ambitious scoring. What they did instead was to retain the scoring (cause much ambition, yes?) and produce it on a HORRIBLY SOUNDING SYNTH BOX. The whiplash from those moments is jarring and praise should be given to the overlords of sound that did the in-game mix so well, that you don't snap at the juxtaposition. ---------------- TL;DR: If you liked Myst/Riven soudntracks - the craft is still there but buried deep in under-budgeted production. Buy it if you love Cyan and want to support it to up the production budget better next time. Otherwise - just go buy the game itself and skip the deluxe soundtrack package.
This game was funded by nostalgia for The Neverhood. It tried to tap into the heart and soul of that 20 year old gem, but only managed to puppeteer its corpse. Sure, the art style is still as brilliant as it was 20 years prior and the set pieces are just as fun, but that's about it. The soundtrack lacks the abstract humor of the predecessor and so does the story. In fact the story is the weakest point and it just stumbles around without coherency - ironically because it tries to be grounded and level-headed instead of an abstract mess that The Neverhood was. Puzzles are severely lacking and an average shmuck like me can blaze through them without even trying too hard. The hint ghost is nearly insulting and the only difficult thing is a "find all the broken levers" quest, which is literally as substantial as "spot the hotspot" in a flash game - and the difficulty in it is not the challenging kind, but the obtuse kind. And the last puzzle is a backtrack quest - which almost made me quit. Most bugs have been patched out, but there are some occurrences, where they pop out. If you're reading the old reviews - the mouse pointer now changes for interactable objects, so it's a step-up in terms of interface. A warning though: save games don't get overwritten when you save the same name - so it's best to create a new one each time. ---- TL;DR: ---- So overall what do we have? The story falls flat, TenNapel's abstract humor got dialed back too much, soundtrack is lackluster and puzzles are dumbed down. Why 3 stars then? The positive side is P. - the heart of the story - who is simply a joy to watch whenever she's on screen. The art holds up. Some set pieces still harken back to the full-on insanity of Neverhood. And it's short, so it doesn't overstay its welcome. To sum up: this game will disappoint you, but don't let that stop you from enjoying the parts of it that are truly enjoyable.
