The narrative is trite, the scares are the same format throughout, and the combat is straightforward. Occasional animation glitches with overcorrective physics and railgun ragdolls punctuate what atmosphere there might have been with bouts of comedy, and I'm just left wondering why on earth anyone in this situation would put up with this much backtracking.
It's pretty clear that Mage's Initiation draws its inspiration from the Quest for Glory series and no insignificant amount from King's Quest V. But this title really lacks the depth of character and coherent message that made those series stand out. The result is a one-dimensional delivery of an adventure that doesn't bring much to the table and seems to get lost in the telling. But what really holds this back from being a well-delivered, if bland, work is the inconsistency that the game manages to provide in its several components. The voice acting throughout the game is excellent -- with the glaring exception of the plodding, halting delivery of the bloody main character himself. The art style is well-done, particularly personal portraits and backgrounds, but the mid-chapter 2D animated cutscenes are laughably bad. They are so far out of the artistic character of everything you've seen to that point and such low quality that I'm honestly stunned they were not cut altogether from the final product. Combat magic is interestingly thought out in terms of spell variety and exploration of your element, but spells available for puzzle-solving are so limited as to make the solution trivial. You may encounter interesting choices, but these will either be without consequence or simply be morally incorrect and used to punish you. This badly needed more aggressive editing. It's a routine problem in adventure games that you'll need to pick up weird, trivial objects in order to solve problems through lateral thinking later on. But it's a terrible problem if your main character is fine with this in some cases and actively laughs off the idea of doing so in others. When the same voice can say "Anything not nailed down..." and "I have no idea why I'm holding onto this" while also saying it's not worth his time to check under a rug during a desperate search, this reeks of inconsistency and simply insults the player. This was simply limited and uninventive.
Lamplight City spends most of its time wishing that it was Sins of the Fathers and gently nudging the player to wish so, too. Billing itself as a detective game feels in LC's case like grasping for definition in an adventure game that eschews the genre's defining difficulties. With no action set, no inventory, and a surprisingly shallow set of bad consequences for trying, there's essentially no reason not to simply click on everything possible until the case is solved. It's interesting to see something attempt to streamline what I can imagine some consider the drawbacks of adventure games, but the result simply feels clunky without having replaced that content with something more suited to the final product. Objectives don't track well with what you've done, clues are simply too easy to acquire, and the kind of critical thinking a detective game might demand simply doesn't come up. By and large, I found the experience disappointing and, above all, incomplete. The game feels more rushed as it progresses with later elements feeling either tacked on or abruptly cut off. Theoretically a "steampunk Victorian" world, the atmosphere doesn't feel like it gets the chance to establish itself. The game falls over itself to capture the zeitgeist of automation anxiety but rarely bothers to actually demonstrate it. What are stated driving motivations for characters simply aren't witnessed. Instead, we follow around another messy-haired, black-coated, detective type who can't sleep properly surrounded by New Orleanian architecture and Creole culture, but without the upsides of origin, development, and Tim Curry.
Frictional comes through again splendidly with SOMA. I came into this after playing through Amnesia, and Frictional really managed to outdo itself by taking an entirely different path to get to the unsettling parts of mind with this title. I've never encountered a title that managed to deliver such dread just by presenting me with questions. The atmosphere is superb and your progression really builds over time, but the worst moments are planted like seeds within you, hidden away and left to bloom.
