Cayne has a strong start, a clean main menu leads into a promising first couple of scenes of pretty isometric room renders and clear audio. A slow start as the main character, the pregnant Hadley, lays on a series of beds listening to and delivering dialogue and exposition. The problems begin as it dawns on me that neither Hadley or the other characters will ever stop pausing the interactivity for dialogue. The problems continue as the dialogue rapidly switches back and forth in tone, rarely proving relevant, much of it being a thoughtless collection of random cliche, entirely out of place. Little else in the game seems to have recieved as much attention as the mindless jaw wagging aside from the pre-rendered scenery. Cayne's major selling point seems to be the visual display, the entire game is presented with high resolution 3D renders peppered with a fair amount of fluid animation. The shine of detailed grey corridors and the liberal amount of gore sadly ends up as wasted window dressing around senseless puzzles, doing little to communicate anything but the results of successful brute force clicking attempts. Aside from the two instances of literal floating holographic 'put this item here' indicators I spotted. Poor dialogue and badly utilised visuals are forgiveable errors, but the claim that the game's puzzles are 'intuitive' are borderline deception. Often physically impossible item and object combinations are the solution to puzzles with much more straightforward common-knowledge answers. The levels of thought required are shadowed by the levels of patience needed to navigate to-and-fro between the limited number of rooms, while being constantly interrupted by unskippable narration, while you scavenge for items and attempt solutions. The whole slipshod assembly ends with a shocker ending that's born flat on its face. The team has ideas with potential, but seemed to expect a collage of nice ideas to stand on their own with a dramatic delivery. Didn't work.
