I enjoyed what I played but found several unpleasant aspects. The story is a twisting murder mystery that takes Blacksad through the seedy underbelly of New York. Despite the goofy premise, the characters are engaging and some are even memorable. If you played The Wolf Among Us, Blacksad is very comparable to Bigby in how he can be tailored to a player's experience. An issue I had is that the pacing is very drawn out, and at times I was getting impatient (though I was save scumming my playthrough so keep that in mind). The game also has no skippable dialogue. Gameplay is a mixed bag. Deductions and Blacksad's personal notes give the game some extra flavor to help us learn how characters will act and how we can proceed. The game is sadly not K+M friendly at all, and practically begs you to play with a controller. It is very clunky either way, with Blacksad not moving smoothly, and often getting stuck on environmental details. There's also no quick walk button, which I missed from Telltale games. There are also QTEs which are not difficult but can catch you off guard. The game has some major bugs that I found to really hinder my enjoyment. As I was backing out of the menu constantly, I noticed the game does not load subtitles once you load back in. You will need to quit the game for them to return. Sometimes Blacksad will even load into the map, but not into his walking path, which leads to scenes where I have no choice but to exit to the menu. Blacksad can often slide out of place for animations, there's many models with poor clipping and bad lip sync, and often times my computer crashed while the game was open. The music is great, but the models are not always as good as Blacksad. Female characters can often have muddy looking textures, and there's some strange transparency issues on some objects like Blacksad's coat. I can recommend this game but only after some major patches are delivered. It's a good detective mystery!
Obra Dinn is a murder mystery on an empty shipping vessel, where you have to determine what happened to the crew and passangers before the ship reappared empty. The premise is adequtely spooky, but the set-up of how you actually view the events used to solve the mystery is a little contrived, though easily ignored. The game's graphical style was offputting to me for the longest time, and I still find them a bit hard on the eyes for long sessions, but they work for the game's mood, tone, and mechanics. The music is great, even when it doesn't tonally fit a scene, just because it's so well written and produced. When it does fit, it gives the game great horror feeling. The voice acting and modeling was distinct and diverse, which helps add realism to the somewhat abstract world. There's also some neat twists on the chain of events the player will find that really helped make the game structurally very memorable. I unfortunately found myself being a little less attentive and found myself in a pretty aggressive loop of going through memories many times to catch little details to identify people. Doing this requires you to travel the ship to find a specific memory, and some are locked behind other memories. Locking memories to others led to a lot of speeding through segments just to reach one specific point, which was less enjoyable and more like a chore. I also felt the ending sequence didn't quite have the impact maybe Lucas Pope was going for. I loved playing through this and I'd love for Lucas Pope to consider doing another game expanding on these ideas.
I had a good time with KCD. I started playing at release but decided to wait a bit longer to see if bugs can be ironed out, which they seem to be at review time. I didn't have any major issues at launch, nothing game breaking anyway, but the size of the game outpaced the QA team. I don't hold it against Warhorse Studios, being their first release and quite ambitious, but I hope that they streamline the development pipeline so they can catch more bugs faster and earlier for the sequel. There was one quest that became bugged due to me sequence breaking a related quest by accident, so be wary. The story is predictable but well told. I didn't have many issues with how it played out, except for the conclusion ending on a cliffhanger. I think the final few scenes would've been served better as the start to the next game. The music is corny in parts but very well written. The graphics are good but I think the engine is demanding a little more than it gives out, if that makes sense. Cryengine for this game is very unoptimized, and I experienced some frame drops and stuttering in larger towns. There's also distracting clipping on some pieces of clothing and hair that I hope mods can fix. The combat is frustrating at first, but as you go on you will get used to the combat rose. The combo system was not well implemented, as I almost never found a use for one beyond one or two I could remember. I got good use out of most of the skills but I found the game can go on so long that the build I picked at the start for Henry felt irrelevant by the end. The game can get pretty unbalanced without trying too hard. Overall, I think this game is worth your time if you're into historical fiction. Warhorse has delivered a high-quality product, but I obviously have set my expectations higher, so I hope issues I have this go around can be ironed out in the sequel.
