A murder mystery set in the 30s isn't something I could ignore, but this game is so clunkily put together, I doubt you'll want to complete it even with a walkthrough in hand. Me, I wished there was a sequel to be found. Looking at it objectively, Jack Orlando is a game with a handful of almost every problem imaginable. This feels like a game rushed into release, that also suffers from having an amateurish studio translating it into English. Playing this game, the first thing you'll come across is the horrendous dubbing, which seems to be done by one kid on a crappy PC microphone, as if someone corrupted the originals and decided to do a Mr. Bean - fix it alone and not tell anybody. Luckily the dubbing becomes better and more fitting for the characters later on, and makes you actually enjoy the dialog. But to get there you'll need to traverse hearing a high pitched kid's voice coming out of an elderly woman, and you'll have to suffer a handful of freezes, which thankfully eventually went away. Sadly, the audio itself has some glitching later on, and can be barely audible at times, or seem to not be played at all. The animation is also clunky, with every movement feeling like it could use a few extra frames of animation, but surprisingly the walking animation fits the background - there's no walking on air. The world is also filled with areas to visit, which you can walk on foot to, but most areas only offer one pointless interaction, and one place you can enter. Gameplay comprises of pixel hunting items on the ground, and trying to figure out which 10% aren't useless. Plot is fairly boring, with a pretty forgettable villain. We're constantly told that Jack is an amazing sleuth, but he comes off as an aging, bumbling detective, who stumbles into the solution. The only major highlight is the dialog system, which manages to recycle lines, yet make conversations sound natural. But most conversations being pointless doesn't make you want to experience them.
Playing Dog Mendonca, it's hard criticizing it as a game, since it doesn't seem to want to be a game. It seems more like a short introduction into the world of the character, and that it might as well have been a comic-book, an audio-drama or maybe even a short cartoon. Playing this game is fairly easy, and even if you're struggling you have a notebook in your inventory that tells you exactly how to solve each puzzle. You also can't interact with too many things in your environment, and you usually don't need to interact with items more than once. And if an item stays in your inventory after you used it, it means you need to use it again later on. Not to say it's a bad game - the artwork is amazing and the voice-over is very good, but the game is just too simple to be much fun. You do get an interesting mechanic to try by having to interrogate people, hopefully causing them to slip up and divulge important information, but it's implemented so poorly, you might as well try every dialogue tree until coming across the right ones. Trying to find the best approach to an investigation is more guesswork than deduction. There is also a fighting mechanic, but it's fairly easy to master, and only serves as nostalgia for the NES era. But my biggest gripe with this game is its lack of focus. It introduces a slew of characters, but most of them are non-playable and superfluous. The game being so easy, each area you'll encounter will include as few interactions as possible with as many characters as possible. This game just seems to throw everything but the kitchen sink at you, in the hopes of introducing you to the complete universe of Dog Mendonca - witches, demons, werewolves, an invisible man, gargoyles, monsters, gypsy curses and so on and so on. It makes everything feels detached, and the mystery to become less interesting. It also doesn't help that being introduced to four main characters, you only get to play one - Pizza Boy, the most uninteresting in the group.
Divinity 2 is a very well designed game from all possible aspects, yet it's not very fun. The world this game takes place in, for example, is very interesting, but your role in it is fairly minuscule. At first you're told you are groomed to be a dragon slayer, and hunt the last dragon around, which sounds very exciting, but when that dragon appears, you're put on the bench, since you're not really ready. It's a forced twist I didn't enjoy, and it's followed by another forced twist - you join forces with a dragon and become the thing you were taught to fight. All of those twists just make me wonder why the hell I even bothered playing, since they arrive so quickly. The game could have started after those twists, and no-one would have noticed. The constant twists, and having no influence on how the story progresses, meant I had a hard time being invested in it. You can choose several responses to things NPCs tell you, but it doesn't really change the outcome of the conversation. Also, a lot of the responses are comical ones, which take me out of the game. Divinity 2 seems to have a large emphasis on comedy, and although funny at times, I wanted a serious plot to get invested in, not a series of jokes. If I'm going to spend dozens of hours doing the same things over and over again, I need a pretty good excuse for it. It doesn't help that Divinity 2 is basically an RPG with training wheels. You can jump from a cliff and not die, the combat style in this game means you can tackle much tougher opponents and not die, and stealing has no repercussions. Going into someone's home and stealing everything there doesn't produce any backlash. Making it easy to acquire so many weapons and so much gold early on, that you wouldn't know what to do with them. You also have an ability that causes mercahnts to lower their prices, if you ever feel the need to actually buy weapons - I didn't. Which means you can easily and fairly quickly become overpowered, making you complete quests before ever receiving them. It makes large portions of this game into a boring fest of hacking and slashing dozens of enemies, in the hopes of maybe finding new areas to explore. Divinity 2's map is simply too small, and even when later on you uncover new areas to explore, they're still fairly small and repetitive, and sometimes come at the expense of previous areas. It doesn't help that quests are far and few between, maybe in an effort to avoid wearing the player down. Divinity 2 isn't a Two Worlds style game, where people need you to deliver letters from one house to the next, or constantly clean their cellars from goblins. But it also meant that I didn't have much to do besides fighting for large parts of this game. The game does try to make itself fresh later on, by giving you the ability to turn into a dragon, but even that isn't as enjoyable as it ought to be. Most of the time I just used that ability to quickly go from place to place. Later on you also get the option to change your character's skills, and customize him for any fight. But what really killed this game for me, besides the handful of crashes and game freezes, were a couple of quests where no matter how overpowered I was, my success in them depended on luck, meaning I had to redo them dozens of times in order to succeed. That's when I had to call it quits, having braved several highly annoying platforming segments.
