As usual with Wadjet Eye Games, this was enjoyable to play. I bought nearly all of their games on release. However, this one was unexpectedly different, and I have mixed feelings about it. Gameplay was solid, writing was interesting, there was a wide cast of characters and locations, and there was no lack of things to do. The puzzles were logic, the kind that requires writing things down. If we get stuck, we can always ask Nozzo for help, which was a nice touch. All point and click games should have that. Fia's bedroom has a Ghost in the Shell vibe. Cutscene's art quality was all over the place, though. Having that said, DEI + LGBT was heavy handed in this game. They usually put that in the game tags list to inform customers, but not here (or at Steam), and I somehow felt misled, like they omitted that info on purpose. It caught me totally by surprise. They made this game a love letter to the DEI + LGBT movement but decided to keep that a secret. Considering how deep that is embedded into the characters, the story and how it ends, the least they could do would be to add the appropriate tags to the game description. When I realized what was happening, it was like I went to a party I wasn't invited. What if I am not into that? I thought maybe I can choose a different path, but no, all choices led to DEI + LGBT on your face. I don't regret playing the game, and I definitely had fun. Time traveling is a fascinating theme and challenging to write. But the relationship between Fia and Em was forced, hollow and shallow. Zero chemistry. Even Nozzo said it didn't make sense. When it comes to character development, they hinted like Nozzo was written and designed to be Fia's love interest but then changed their minds midway. I recommend this game, as I would for all others from Wadjet Eye, but be aware of DEI + LGBT contents that define how the story develops and ends. They should have added that to the game tags. That's what the tags are for.
Hands down, BEST point and click adventure game I have played in this decade. Fun characters, engaging story, beautiful art, pleasant music, nicely animated, and a nice collection of puzzles. Finished all 3 endings in 11h, and at no point I was bored. Sometimes dialogs were a bit too long, but they had a purpose (not filler). Dialogs were well written, and characters were fun to talk to. There was some drama, a lot of humor, and we could play multiple characters. Navigation was easy - as soon as we visit a location, it becomes available in a quick travel map. Each location can have a few sub-locations, but it's still easy to navigate, which helps with backtracking. Many quests are chained together, so solving one goal may require solving a few others first. However, there is no quest tracking, so it is possible to get confused about who asked for what and where. It's easy to forget if we save the game and return to it the next day. Talking to people can help refreshing my memory, but quest tracking would be welcome. The game is fully voiced, and everybody sounded great, which helps with immersion. Perhaps my only complaint would be the long unskippable cutscenes, especially at the end, when I wanted to try all 3 endings, but having to rewatch several long and unskippable scenes and dialogs was rather annoying. All in all, it was a quite enjoyable experience. There are lots of places to go, people to talk to, puzzles to solve, and things to do. The people who made this game know what they are doing. Recommended!
This game has a lot of heart and appears to take inspiration from Benoit Sokal's "Syberia", where a female protagonist travels to exotic locations with a witty robotic companion. There are only about 3 times when our choices matter, but they all appear to lead to the same ending. I am not complaining, though. It has a story to tell, and it does it well. Completed the game in 4h without rushing it. I felt immersed in the story, characters and locations - though I was a bit annoyed by the feminist undertone, reducing male characters to either fools or villains. Not sure why, but a couple of male characters had female voices in the English version. Except for the villains, basically all major characters are female. Voice acting was welcome and well done. Game art was beautiful with a retro sci-fi vibe. Character animation was a bit stiff, but it did the job, so it's fine. Puzzles were fun and straight forward, where some will require more thinking, making them satisfying when we finally solve them. I am rather neutral about the (repetitive) music, and I had some issues with voice volume being too low at times. Voice volume control is shared with ambient and SFX, and that was a problem to me. We can use the robot companion to solve puzzles or to provide hints. It can also reveal hot spots in the current scene, but that's behind a series of commands and dialogs before and after, which can be a bit annoying. We have to go through this every time we ask it for hot spots or hints. In most point and click games, that is usually just one key. The game itself is pretty linear, and I don't think we can die, but it manages to convey a sense of suspense and danger that compensates for it. All in all, it was well written, immersive and fun to play, though a bit on the short side. If you like point and click games, you should like this one. Recommended!
This game has everything I want from a a great adventure - a large open world, cool characters, gorgeous locations, plenty to discover, and a fun way to traverse short and long distances. And what's most - the protagonist is likeable. I have played only 4 hours, and I had a lot of fun. Can't wait to go back to it! ^___^
This is one of these games you think you will play just a bit, and when you look at the time, hours have passed. ^___^
The premise is that you are abducted by aliens, but the gameplay seems unrelated. The best way I could describe it is “abstract”. It claims to be “story rich”, but I wouldn’t go that far. Like with most walking sims, there is a narration, but it tells you nothing. They say there are puzzles, but not really. You pick all floating objects in the room and pile them in the centerstage pedestal. Once all pieces are piled up, it self-assembles, so I wouldn’t call that “solving” a puzzle. This opens the door to the next room where you do exactly the same, as a condescending voice calls you a “little boy” (ugh!). The narration voice claims it will “tell you a story”, but not really. There is supposed to be a mystery, but that comes to be the game itself. It starts vague, then becomes judgmental, but without ever getting to tell you a story as promised. Perhaps one of the most interesting “puzzle” is one where gravity becomes dynamic, but it’s still the same “puzzle”. I kept doing that for 27 minutes, and we get to the final room, which is back to where we started. There you can pick between 2 paths that lead to the different endings. I picked the one that could be more exciting, but at least to me, it was rather “meh”. The game is tagged as “psychological” and “horror”. Not sure if it was either. But it was definitely atmospheric. Some parts were rather confusing because nothing appears to be happening, so you try to move, but you can’t. It was just a timed event, but there is no indication of it. My personal impression is that the game builds up an expectation that is not fulfilled, and a story that is not told. Considering the title, I at least expected something to be “unveiled”. What you see in the screenshots and demo video is pretty much what you get - vague and subjective. If you don’t mind that, buy the game.
This is a standard point and click adventure game. It doesn’t exactly have a “story”, though. We go through a series of fetch quests and stop for too long every time there is a dialog. And I mean TOO LONG. I finished the game in 13h because I fell asleep many times during the LOOONG dialogs. It’s nothing particularly interesting, so it gets boring pretty quick. It’s not a bad game, but not a good one either for lack of an actual story. Finishing the game actually means completing the many fetch quests, while suffering through the endless dialogs. The other reviewer said he completed in 6h because he skipped the dialogs, so there you have it. I started skipping the dialogs more to the end because I couldn’t stand it anymore - and I NEVER did that in an adventure game before. Some games use filler mechanisms to make it longer, and in this one, it’s not only the endless dialogs, but some characters spoke really slow, and that’s when I started losing patience. In addition, the protagonist is constantly being emasculated, humiliated, and he acts like that’s normal. Disrespecting him is supposed to be funny. You play a harmless feminist vegetarian activist respected by no one. There is an effort to attack capitalism, and I would rather they kept politics out of video games. That’s who you play - a low life doormat wuss despised by everyone. After completing fetch quests, most people still despised him, so I didn’t feel like something was accomplished. The art and dialogs are amateurish, but I get it - it’s a low budget game, and I respect the effort put into it. That’s why I avoided skipping dialogs for as long as I did, but even I have my limits. It’s not a bad game, but I missed an engaging story, and the dialogs were pointless fillers to double the game time. It was still kind of entertaining, but I had zero rapport with the protagonist and there was no character development. If you don’t mind that, buy the game.
Based on the trailer videos and screenshots, it was a sure buy. Great art, great story, fully voiced, and exploring an exotic alien planet with a robot companion, leading to a giant mysterious monolith? What could go wrong? At first, nothing. For a while, you get what was promised - until you get to the monolith. Now that I finished the game, I realize what we see in the trailers is just misleading bait to make you buy it. Up to that point, they had a perfectly good story and game experience. Such a waste. The featured review here admits not having finished the game, and perhaps that explains why it was so positive. No spoilers here, so I will just say this game is definitely worth 5 stars up to the point where we reach the monolith, which I think it’s 70% of the game. The really disappointing part is this last 30%, where the game departs from what you see in the trailer videos. Hence the feeling of being misled, since this is how the story continues to the end. I don’t regret playing because it was good for a while, but I feel misled. Some may argue that this is a mature adult story, but even that part went over my head. Her intentions are good, but she does nothing to mitigate the actions that led to it. Instead, she just “thinks about it”, and regrets her decisions when it’s already too late. That’s why some other reviews said it becomes a slog to play it because it’s pointless. That’s all this game becomes from this point on - tons of pointless reflections over how much she regrets her life decisions, all the way to the end of the game. In a nutshell, it’s a collection of sorrow and regrets about what she did with her life. This is what the devs wanted this game to convey, but that’s not what the marketing sells to us. Forget the “monolith”. This game should be titled “Sorrows and Regrets”. If you don’t mind that, buy the game.
I love point and click adventure games, and the trailer on this one shows everything I like and want from it. The art is good and the characters are whimsical. It starts with a slideshow setting the plot, and even though it's vague and confusing, I kind of get it. However, the dialogs throughout the game are unrelated to the plot, and soon enough I realized there is no actual story. The game mechanics are basically: go to location, optionally talk to character, and solve puzzle. There is nothing in between, so it feels like an empty shell. All characters have nothing much to say, with 1 or 2 predictable lines about the puzzle. The graphics are pretty, but there is nothing to click, except for the path to the next character and respective puzzle. The text narration and dialogs are timed, so if you couldn't finish reading, too bad. The character walks slowly, and if you double-click, he now "runs" as slowly as before. Even with minimal dialogs, we still get misspellings, and plenty of gibberish just to tell you where the next puzzle is. The protagonist always asks the same (weird) thing, which seems related to that plot that never happens. There is no story, and some of the puzzles made no sense to me. You start a puzzle, but they don't tell you what you are supposed to do. At some point we realize it doesn't matter if we talk or not to the characters - this game is all about solving puzzles, and then the next, until... game over, roll the credits - and it happens in less than 2 hours. You could choose to click a character, just to be told to go solve a puzzle. What is a point'n'click adventure game without a story or meaningful dialogs? Considering no story, empty dialogs and game over in under 2h, even $9 is overpriced. The bottom line is that what you see in the demo video is 90% of all the game has to offer. If you are Ok with that, buy the game.
I didn't understand the gameplay when I started, and I made some mistakes I later regretted. Perhaps the game could inform me that when a customer problem could be solved with more than one plant, the one we choose would change the ending. Only later in the game I realized that this is how this game forks story paths. I could just play it again, but it was a lot of work to catalog so many plants that I don't want to do it again. Which leads me to the next issue. The plants encyclopedia can be frustrating. It tells us about the plant's properties, but rarely helps to identify them. Instead, it gives vague clues that can often lead to incorrect identification, which I guess is part of the game puzzles. Makes me wonder why the plant drawings in that book look nothing like the actual ones. Considering 90% of the game is identifying plants, that book was supposed to help. If I had a suggestion, it would be to update the plant drawings on the book to match the actual one when we finally identify them. I cannot keep track of all the plants in my head when we have almost 80 of them. We can tag the plants, but in the beginning, I didn't know what to include on the labels that would help with the gameplay. Each plant has the English and the Latin names, and some have multiple names. The game asks you to identify by one of them, so placing labels can get crazy. Besides that, the game feels original, had a nice mood, and was pleasant to play. The story is interesting but offers little to no replayability because I already know how to solve all the puzzles, and God forbid I had to re-catalog all the plants with such a vague encyclopedia. What I can say is that it was entertaining to play, and that's what matters. I still recommend it.
