bad at everything: plot, dialogs, puzzles, humour... even accessibility! (Really, its main menu is bat crazy bad; an accessibility nightmare). It manages to keep its sexism at high levels too.
Mediocre point & click game, sexist, bad dialogs, mediocre plot, mediocre puzzles, bad jokes, not funny enough, not witty enough.
Not a great game, entertaining. Quite sexist, without anything that compensates for it. Bad dialogs, mediocre plot, mediocre puzzles, not funny enough, not witty enough... and yet, still the best one of its trilogy.
I won't dwell too much into the details. I'm too lazy for that. Similarly to its previous Dreamfall title... I would call it as stretch to say that this is a game. It is an interactive movie with very brief and scarce moments when it can feel a bit like a game. Gameplay is close to horrible. Clearly optimized for console gamepads, using gamepad instead of mouse+keyboard will improve the experience, but it doesn't completely fix it. The "game" parts feel slow, I spend most of my time walking and/or searching for things. Almost no puzzles, and the few ones we find are extremely bland and boring. And... that's when we get to play, because most of the relevant parts of the story are just unplayable cut scenes, where one has to sit and watch, but not participate. The story is nice... but it's not properly polished. I understand that there are many uncovered aspects of the plot to make space for new titles, "just in case" (although it is clear that they didn't want to keep working on this series after this one). However... this does not justify AT ALL how the story is presented and developed. As an example, what they did with the Saga character is close to insulting. It could have been a very interesting plot line... and they disgraced it completely. I'm not asking them to reveal all the mysteries, but she was just used as a plot device to fix the unfixable plot holes that were being created along the way during that story.
I am quite disappointed with this game. I won't be mentioning all the good stuff (which it as) because others already talked extensively about it. Although the premise is good, and the artwork is decent (not great, though)... it ends up being a subpar & frustrating game: - Gameplay becomes truly annoying. I understand having to go through the loop, but not being able to skip almost anything makes it utterly boring & annoying at the same time, which has some "merit". - The amount of available scenarios is incredibly small: 11, with many of them being small rooms with almost nothing in them). - Although I'm a big fan of multiple endings... I truly hate what they did here. Each one of them is completely inconsistent with the others, changing the meaning of everything we have experienced through the gameplay in previous rounds. It's not like we explore different consequences for different actions, NOPE. - Some people are using the word "clever" as an adjective for this game. I dissent. When you remove all rules & constraints, all it's left is hand waving improvisation. Everything can happen, everything is possible, so you can have as many crazy plot holes... it doesn't matter. Your story can be truly bad and it doesn't matter because you can magically "fix" it.
I'll be brief with my critique. - The story is pretty good, although too short for my taste. - The ambient music is OK, but far from memorable (I'd already forgot how it sounds, and it's been just 30 minutes since I finished it). - I'd say that its most disapointing aspect is its graphic art. I'm not talking about the low resolution, but to other aspects that indicate clear lack of polish: - plenty of noise artifacts in surfaces that should be "plain" - the excessive posterisation applied to the game characters to reduce the color palette looks like a quick job made without much care. - bad "animations". It can be seen when the train arrives to the station, or when characters are walking (they seem to slide instead of walk; same applies to the changes in size due to perspective, they are not performed nicely). Other than that, I really don't like not being able to save my game at a specific point so I can continue from there later. Having to play the whole game again to explore other branches is quite unappealing.
