Love the game. Always loved games with a good time loop mechanic (Vision: Soft Reset, Elsinore, The Sexy Brutale, etc.) and I had played the original Skyrim mod. It's been awhile since I played the mod so I don't remember right off all the parallels verses new direction (although I of course remember the main plot beats.) Great music. Lovely design. Intuitive gameplay. The NPCs still do that weird thing where they're just staring intently at you. Good voice acting. And I loved the canonical ending, esp the final bit where ....... we'll just say there's lots of applause. Taking off a star for the hidden task related achievements. Why. Are. These. Still. A. Thing. Over. Fifteen. Years. Of. Having. Them. The ONE AND ONLY TIME you should EVER have hidden achievements are for STORY CRITICAL ACHIEVEMENTS. THAT'S IT! Because the point of getting an achievement is to get the player to see more of the game, parts of the game they might not otherwise see - if you force them to unlock the achievement BEFORE TELLING THEM HOW TO DO IT, well that's just absurd. So major immersion breaker there. But get this game. Seriously. And if it's on sale, then definitely get i.
So here's my impression so far. I load it up. Title screen appears. Says "Press any key." I hit the A button on my controller. What I assume is the intro cinematic plays but I have no clue because while I hear a lot of clicking/typing sounds, it's just a black screen. Then I hit a button to continue. Character gets up off the bed. I push the Start button. Nothing happens. I hit the A button. I get the Steam keyboard even though I'm running it on GOG. I hit Esc > Settings > Controls > Configure Gamepad with the mouse. Nothing happens. I hit the A button. Nothing happens. I double click the "Configure Gamepad" button with my mouse. Nothing happens. I close out of the menu. I go back into the menu and try again. Still, NOTHING HAPPENS. So. Not exactly off to a flying start here. And now I've tried putting the resolution up to 1920x1080. It says it's there, all settings are on Ultra, but the game still is displaying the default resolution of 1024x768. And the right thumbstick is STUPIDLY sensitive while the mouse isn't anywhere near sensitive enough. I turn subtitles on. The game CLEARLY SAYS that subtitles are on. One guess as to what the problem is. So. I close the game out. I start again. This time I click my mouse when prompted to "Press any key." Still have the black screen on the cinematics. Still have the 1024x768 resolution. I go back to change it to 1920x1080. Doesn't change. Subtitles still don't display. My system EASILY beats the recommended specs, let alone the minimum and I've NEVER had these kinds of problems with ANY other game before, so - obviously - the issue is with this game. I really, really, REALLY want this game to succeed. This demo does not inspire any faith in me that it will. The developer already got into hot water by messing up BIG TIME during development once already; they can't afford to screw up again. Night Dive Studios, if you're reading this, please fix these problems.
As someone who loves adventure games, I thought this would be a slam dunk. Well acclaimed, 2 sequels, surely this would be a game I'd fall in love with. But the game stumbles right out the gate with clunky, bad dialogue (starts with that guy you share the hall with, then continues with Fiona and rarely stops with only a few of the characters having well spoken dialogue) then has the pacing of a snail race. Plus one of the puzzles involves you putting candy in a pool of toxic sludge, in front of the person you're supposed to give it to and he still eats it. Then, the very next puzzle involves you making a shadow puppet with a light source that IS NOT, I repeat, IS NOT facing towards the wall the puppet appears on, and you have to convince a person in your way that he's being held up by a police officer using a windup toy monkey. That's assuming you even have the endurance to reach this point because, again, the game has SERIOUS pacing issues. Then you get to Arcadia and the first person you meet, both right away and in a future chapter, gives so much exposition that even George RR Martin would probably say "You guys need to reign this in a little." And don't get me started on Crow's whiny dialogue. Or that damn "Why yes, what a silly question!" librarian who takes about 25 years to find a book you request, and there are many, many books he will look up for you. "Oh but you can speed up the -" so what? That just means that, in playtesting even THE DEVELOPERS realized how awful the pacing issues of the game were, and didn't bother to tighten it up. It's like if a surgeon accidentally breaks a tooth while doing surgery on you and then says, "Well just go to the dentist." Shouldn't have been an issue in the first place. The sequels, while they both have their own issues, are much better. If you feel like you must endure this game before playing the sequels, I recommend a "Let's Play" of it. Okay ending. Some heartfelt moments. But lots of muck to dig through.
Spec Ops: The Line is developer YAGER's attempt to critique the modern war shooter video game that was and still is rather prominent throughout the 00's and '10's. As is probably no surprise if you were to look it up, much of what you do in war video games is not only frowned upon, but are straight up war crimes, including taking hostages and using them as bullet sponges or burning enemies with flamethrowers. SO:TL is never so heavy handed as to call out such behavior but does throw in a few things I think we can all agree are, at best, morally grey and that's probably a bit of a stretch. For instance, first major spoiler, you unwittingly bomb innocent people with white phosphorous and they all burn slow and agonizing deaths. You only discover your very direct involvement with such "collateral damage" after speaking with one of the soldiers you'd been mowing down with reckless abandon, so of course your character decides that things need to chang- yeah, no, he's just gonna keep on killing more and more of the soldiers with reckless abandon. While it's not 100% clear why some of the soldiers act the way they do and - maybe? - are also killing innocents, it IS clear when it's all said and done that you've slaughtered far more innocent people than you could've ever hoped to save. What is also perfectly clear around this time is that your character is very much an unreliable narrator as he slowly descends into an ever deeper and faster spinning cycle of madness. You get a few ending choices, but even the least pessimistic one leaves you feeling hollow. Gameplay is pretty bog standard 3rd person shooter stuff. Get behind cover, shoot baddies, repeat. Occasionally move because they threw a grenade at you, shoot the idiot who charges you with a knife - yes, that's right, A KNIFE when you have a gun, do it all again. Come for the game, stay for the story, just don't expect a happy ending.
I am a big fan of the 90's, puzzle games, point and click adventure games, and story driven games in general. So, it is with a heavy heart I give this game a thumbs down. Repetitive lines from the villian - "I hope you don't take all....KNIGHT" as you do a chess puzzle is funny the first time. But not the 500th. And he will say it 500 times; he'll say it a million times if you take long enough to do said puzzle. And the labyrinth basement. Oh dear God. Exercise in tediousness and frustration if there ever was one. To top it all off there's even a "competitive" puzzle which is as near as I can tell impossible to win late game, so I wound up Youtubing the ending of the game. I do not recommend this.
Speaking as someone who normall enjoys point and click adventure titles, and as someone who normally likes puzzle games, I had high hopes. This game did not deliver. Taking place some many decades after the original's setting, your character is trying to save a woman he only days before basically accused of screwing to the top, because of course he did. This game is definitively 90's, from the dialogue to the technology to the art style of the FMV sequences, this is definitely a 90's drama. Where does it fail? So many ways.....short of it is that finding the clues is an extremely tedious process, the FMVs are easy to gain out of order thus making the narrative difficult to follow, the villian is annoying to listen to (and loves the sound of his voice) and the puzzles are lackluster, uninspired and many times nonsensical. I finally gave up when I got to the train puzzle, as I was already not having a lot of fun playing this trainwreck (coincidence?) which, for those of you at home, having fun is kind of important when playing a video game. I finally just looked up the endings on Wikipedia. I do not recommend this game. Buy and play it at your own risk.
Syberia, or as it would be called in any sane world "Tedious Backtracking: The Game", is definitely amongst the poorer of the point and click adventure games I've played. Normally I enjoy said games. Normally I enjoy story driven games regardless of genre, but normally the games I enjoy don't have loads of backtracking or NPCs with some of the most absurd motivations you've ever heard of. For instance, one character you meet will overcome your mechanical buddy Oscar (himself extremely annoying) take his hands by cutting them off with shears (and how exactly did he do this without having hands before this? We'll never know!) all to finish making a concert room for his favorite opera singer, when he has no idea where she is and might be dead for all he actually knows (not that he'd tell you that) and it's quite likely she would not know who he was either. I'm not joking. This actually happens in the game. It's also INCREDIBLY easy to miss an item you need because it hides so well in the background. I don't like the shiny "YOU CAN TOTALLY CLICK ON ME" mechanic but surely there's some middle ground? Then the phone calls. Oh gosh the freaking phone calls. During the second act in particular the main character's fiance calls and tries to guilt trip the protagonist about how lonely he is and why doesn't she think of his feelings more often - AND THEN has the nerve to tell her she needs to calm down. Yeah. Then later the "best friend" calls to say that she's spending some time with the fiance, just propping him up while you're gone - GEE I WONDER WHAT DIRECTION THIS MYSTERY IS GOING TO TAKE? The mother is absurdly annoying. So yeah, if you're not backtracking you're on the phone with exasperating, feckless idiots. Or speaking to other exasperating, feckless idiots in person, like the university heads. They want you to fix their bandstand, which was broken for years. All you need is an egg, open the door, pull a lever, fixed. Music's ok. That's about it.
My first Myst game was the 1993 original, and I've since gone on to play Riven and Uru. Those are my 3 favorites in the series, and Obduction easily stands shoulder to shoulder with them. It stumbles a little towards the end, but makes up for it with the best ending, giving a rather satisfying feeling. You start off in a hiking trail in the middle of nowhere before stumbling across the first "seed," which transports you to Hunrath, a small community also in the middle of nowhere but the world around you is clearly alien. Like the original Myst, you will get the same sense of wondering just where you are and what you've landed in, as the game's story is very much "in medias res" (in the middle of things) and you need to piece together what happened and how you fit into things. The XBox 360 controller has some issues - even though I refuse to have the Y axis inverted, during times where I needed to hold A (the "interact" button) I'd have to hold down on the control stick to make the cursor/thing I was using go up and up to go down. (tried inverting the Y axis to test and see if this would fix the problem. No.) The game also defaults to walk every time you load it up. The music is enchanting, albeit short lived in most cases. I've always loved the ambient sound and music in Cyan Games' games and Obduction doesn't fall short here. The puzzles are typically straight forward and you probably won't need a walkthrough for most of them. There is one section towards the end where the path to your objective is suddenly opened. You have the barricade there the entire game, then suddenly gone. I understand why the path is closed so you don't go there early, but give us some context, guys! Finally, unless I'm missing something, the ending you get is determined by one thing that shouldn't matter one way or the other. There was one point where I needed to restart my game completely because of a glitch that blocked me. Hopefully this gets patched. Buy this game. Period.
