This is my first foray into the Dark Eye 'universe' although I am certainly not new to the fantasy genre or point and click games. Memoria is pretty standard point and click: A story based game on rails that you can't really fall off (just become paused now and then over a puzzle) in which you control a protagonist (in this game two) by clicking on 'hot-spots' on the screen to traverse screens or interact with objects. You have an inventory and can pick up some objects and combine them before using with/on hot-spots on the screen. A couple of nice touches are (1) holding down the space-bar shows you where the hot-spots are (no more scanning your mouse pointer over every pixel looking for things to ineract with), and (2) an option that means the object you have 'in hand' will glow when your hover it over a hot-spot in can interact with - much less trial and error. Some might say these detract from the story or make the puzzles too easy but I found I only used the space-bar a couple of times on a screen and then remembered what could be interacted with. And the glowing item feature only came into real use when I was stuck and just trying all sorts of different combinations. Both great features. The hand-drawn backgrounds/scenes are beautiful, really nice to see this kind of art in our age of 3D-everything gaming. Despite the art the atmosphere just wasn't there for me - the voice acting was a bit wooden, not awful, but quite bland, nothing powerful or exciting although using (I assume) British voice actors helped to keep the fantasy feel - I think American accents are great for most things but not fantasy. ( **Very Minor Spoiler** The staff had the best voice acting I thought.) The lack of music was also a shame. There was some music but not much and what there was, again, not awful but bland. I generally play games wearing headphones and this game had me nodding off to sleep a couple of times; I'm not joking! So then, wonderful hand-drawn art and a couple of great features tied into a slightly boring fantasy story with a somewhat lacklustre atmosphere. I can see the effort the makers have put into Memoria and why it has its fans but the end product doesn't sit at the top of the tree. I'm rating this 3/5 stars - good/solid, not great.
As per the headline this is a good but not great Point n Click adventure game. If you are not sure what that means then this is essentially a relaxed type of game with no pressure which is essentially a story on rails which progresses as you solve puzzles. The bread and butter is move your mouse pointer around the screen and click whenever you see a text pop-up - some things are items you can pick up and use to solve puzzles, others are non-collectable items you can use items on (or with) and then some others serve no real purpose. These type of games rely on atmosphere and storytelling mixed with logical puzzles. Primordia has atmosphere, certainly. The visuals look dated/retro by modern standards but are nevertheless well drawn and have a definite 'dark graphic novel' style. Animations are functional rather than fluid but that doesn't spoil the mood. The voice acting is of a good standard but overall lacking a bit of sparkle. Your role as the brooding protagonist Horatio Nullbuilt is contrasted by your constant sidekick, Crispin Horatiobuilt (you made him), who cracks jokes which unfortunately I thought were cliched rather than actually funny but you may love him - a bit of a 'Marmite' character like Jar Jar Binks character. The music is pretty good and fits well with the game's slightly dark ambience and it's good enough to leave playing all through the game though you could of course mute it if it's not quite your taste and play something more to your taste. The story is a pretty solid tale of robots on a post-war world (I won't say more than that) that kicks off well but doesn't reveal all that smoothly and is thin in places. It's a bit disjointed at times - not hard to understand, not at all, but lacking in steadily building. Quite early on Horatio learns something significant about himself, seems to accept it but struggles with it towards the end of the story - 2 steps forward and 1 back. The puzzles are pretty standard fare - collect objects, use objects on a part of the screen (or NPC) or combine objects first then use them on the screen. The ability to also 'use' Crispin at times (he can fly/hover) is a neat touch but underused - it would have been great to have puzzles where both Horatio and Crispin have to do things in tandem to solve a puzzle. About half of the puzzles I found to be reasonably obvious and straightforward with the other half being a pain in the neck due to having little or no logic involved and ultimately led to trail and error with items and researching rooms in cased I'd missed an object while mouse-scanning the screen. To be fair plenty of point n click games have at least some puzzles which leave you thinking "there's no way I could logically come to that conclusion" so Primordia is perhaps not the worst but not the best where puzzles are concerned. The interface is OK. The game uses an 'engine' called AGS which is not great when it comes to screen resolutions. Run the setup program from within the game folder odr GOG Galaxy before you run the game. I ended up having to run in a window because whenever I tried full screen I just got a blank screen (Windows 10, Geforce 770, latest Nvidia drivers as of 30/07/17) so I made my desktop black and hid the taskbar. I opted for anti-aliasing rather than nearest pixel as I preferred the smoother look to the 'jaggies' although that smoothing does mean less edge sharpness of course. The in-game interface hides at the top of the screen and drops down when you move your pointer up there - not a great one as regularly I did bring up the interface when not intended, but not awful, I've played with worse interfaces. There did not seem to be an option for just voice acting without onscreen text which is a shame as this can lead to skipping quickly through conversations because it's hard to to ignore the text on the screen and once you've read it you don't always want to wait for the characters to finish their voice sentences. Again, not the only game to do this. You can have just onscreen text and no voices if you wish. In conclusion I enjoyed the game enough to play it through to the end which took about half of a lazy rainy day and I did refer to a walkthrough when I got completely stuck - maybe 10 times. If you like Point n Click games in general and the genre (robots) works for you then yes, consider this, or if it's on offer with a good discount then definitely recommended. It does not have the quality of the best in this genre (such as the Monkey Island games for example) but then Primordia is not from a big name studio with huge budgets. It's 3/5 from me but that's not bad on a 5-star scale where 0 = awful, 1 = poor, 2 = mediocre, 3 = good, 4 = great, 5 = superb.
