I posted my whole rant in the game forum with the same title (Rant review about the game - It didn't fit in the char limit of gog reviews). SPOILERS AHEAD: It is a DRY and souless game. And I really feel bad saying this... I felt I was playing a walk simulator with puzzles that wanted to be difficult and creative, but with NO sense at all in the place and story they were put at. To play sudokus, you play The Witness, these types of games are not just about the puzzle but about creating a believable place and a story to engage with. After a couple of puzzles everytime I reached another place where you sense "ah, this is going to be another puzzle place", it was yet another complex puzzle with no justification at all and something you didn't even know WHY you had to solve it. All placed just because, forced to be difficult and had no meaning or purpose at all for the people living there. ANY of the mechanisms, blockages, made sense at all, difficult just because. Nothing to give you a sense of living in a real place where people actually lived and worked. Just 3d assets and environments scattered, a screensaver. The battery, the camelus, the elevators placed in weird places, rooms that are absolutely empty, the pointless huge buildings and transport spheres, that end up being... empty buildings with NOTHING inside, no closed doors, no rooms you can't reach, just passages full of cables, pipes, glass constructions, grand designs... and a SINGLE connector / button to push, at the end; Stupid blockages like a 1 meter jump, or missing stairs or paths up the hill, stairs going nowhere, buildings with huge art nouveau constructions with no justification at all, a bunch or rocks that a normal person would jump over, who designed all this?? If I was a guardian, WHY would these people would design it all like this?? Why no rooms?... doors with open mechanisms only on one side? places you can only reach after doing a very complex puzzle. (...)
Really amazing content. I'm very glad this was released. I'm amazed.
I haven't played the whole game, but I wanted to give some help to this project since I've been following it since the beginning. It's a pretty easy game (at least in the demo) but it is very nice, emotional, and even though it is a 2.5D game, it is woth giving it a chance. Seriously. If you're curious, get the demo and play it.
The game looks like those games from the time of resident evil and such. It's cool. Voice acting good enough. But I had to stop playing the game and leave it at the first chapter. Gameplay is terrible: - animations slow. - the longer the text the longer the weight after each of the dialogue items making dialogue really annoying and you have to click and click all the time to skip the waits. - weird interaction. After you discover you had to write click on an object or a place to discover something else is pretty frustrating. - massive pixel hunting - you are sometimes blocked in a place because they are waiting for you to get some item and you end up looking at it again guide because you didn't find anything. - getting out of the game and in again can crush it (this is the emulator or gog) - everything is super slow. You have to wait for the end of animations to start talking to somebody and such. Arg. I laughed the story and the game itself but whoever designed it didn't know how to design games. Seriously. I'm sad to let it go...
Took around 12 hours to finish in about two years. I love these brother's games. I supported this project very happily and will always do. This one was pretty impressive and it was a huge task for them. Congrats! Mick Gordon participated (music from Doom, etc), and it is mesmerizing. Imaginative and creative, based on south african culture, something that is fresh and different. 4 stars because: - Many scenes / huge empty scenes to explore. Thank god you added the blinking sign to find hidden objects. This also happend in Siberia. More work for you, not really needed for a game to show its potential. Hard to find stuff and remember what you left behind. - 3d lacks elements to distinguish depth / heights / perspective. It is quite confusing to find your way around the scenes and understand them. They always lack ambient occlusion and harder shadows and a little parallax between near objects and far objects. This is one of the most annoying aspects, it all has a lack of contrast. - The to-do list is not enough. I ended up with 5 papers full of scribbles, writing down stuff about each place to remember there was nothing left to do there, (which later on was not true, by the way), and writing down stuff that was still left or characters that I didn't know if would be interesting later on. The tree of options and the amount of data given in the game is so huge that if you're not a frequent player due to work or family, you end up absolutely forgetting what you were doing the last time. Next time, please, let us have our own notes in-game. Would be awesome to add a dictionary of discovered information. That would helped A LOT to understand what I was doing. - Some puzzles just made no sense and you needed to remember stuff from the beginning of the game. - Annoying to click stuff while moving, you have to wait till the character stops next to it to click it. - 3D would benefit greatly if you hired a profesional animator just for key animations and cut-scenes.
I've found myself playing with my partner to adventure games. It's a great game to enjoy if you already liked adventure games. Good stuff: - This one was very long compared to other games. I didn't like it that long, but It's a good thing anyway. - Voices are superb. If this game didn't have those talented voice actors it would have been completely different. Money was put into that for sure. - Story and atmosphere is great. - Awesome animations and graphics. Bad stuff: - Too long for some people. - Some stuff was pretty difficult to find (nearly pixel hunting). - Some puzzles were extremely difficult to get working, even with two people playing. - Some user interface confusions (like clicking left or right buttons in the same object returning different results. That's a bad design decision in my opinion. We need a little tutorial or visual guide before having to use that.
I just think this game is the best. Amazing OST which I've been listening for years and years. Amazing cinematography. Several levels of focus depending on where you have your eyes on on the 360 prerendered image had a really huge impact on game quality at the time. It was the same as Myst but this time you could turn around flawlessly. Sometimes it took a while to load each step you took, but it was worth it. Integrating real life shootings with the scenaries made it look even better. I can't recommend it more. Feels like a film. One of the first cinematic masterpieces at the time. Too early for its time.
I loved the game and hype was corresponded. BUT after a short while playing, just when you believe your creatures are going to be great , they bring you to build cities, no creatures anymore. Then the game expands to universe, and all the AI stuff and the really exciting thing about creating your creatures goes away. Really dissapointing. No evolution at all.
NO spoilers review. First off, I'm a huge fan of point and click adventures and a developer myself. I played this one with my partner and talked about it a lot. I backed this project and read everything and followed it since the beginning so I'll spend a while giving a review for the creators: What we loved : - Unique style! - Huge quality of graphics and details. Lighting. Amazing. - Sounds, atmosphere. There's an amazing work on sound effects and sensibility. - Voices were amazing. And that helps in the realism of the story. - Story is engaging. Interesting! What we disliked: - The character orientation is not aligned with the isometric grid. And the new game has the same problem again. How can be 3d so good in here and that missed completely? Is not oriented! - Animation was far from good. Please, let a professional animator help you with that! - Too much text in lots of paragraphs. I'm the kind of person who likes reading all to learn about the story, but that was WAY too much text. We ended up laughing at how much text there was. Why not separate it in pieces, give hints, or even read it. Sometimes very hard to read in that size and with those backgrounds. Honestly. Way too much... - Spanish translation had many many grammar and syntax errors. Just for your information. And some of them, serious ones. - Too many rooms (too much work!) for so little things to do. And that, for an indie game, is terrible! In terms of months of work. Yeah, they were amazing but not needed at all. The same problem we found on Syberia. Oh god, how much effort on very little things to do in them. - Thank god they added a light to find the pdas. Most of the time we were lost and had to look for a guide (which is a total failure for us) because we couldn't find the items in the place and some of them were extremely difficult to find. Maybe highlighting elements on the scene when you move beside them? - A couple of puzzles made no sense at all. But that happens to every game.
