I got this game for free so I cannot complain, for a free game it's enjoyable, hence the three stars. However, it wasn't particularly special. The art and sounds are really nice. I really liked the art in particular. The story doesn't have much depth and some things are left unexplained. The gameplay ... a frustraing clicker. Once you figure out the right rhythm to obtain resources, it's just a dull "make characters collect stuff" game with random damages occurring to your spaceship so it drags on and on. You need parts to leave, but you also need parts to repair the spaceship so of course thing will break right when you're about to get the right number of parts. Things sometimes break again right after you repair them (talking about one in-game hour later) . Some things you can just not repair and do without. Sometimes characters get stuck. You need parts to upgrade your storage too, otherwise you cannot collect enough pieces to fix the machines to begin with. The characters do start with different abilities, which was cool, but they also can learn many of the other abilities with time, so in the end the difference among them is subtle. You start with random characters, but given their learning curve that really only affects the first few in-game days. The tutorial doesn't really explain much. Not sure about the survival mode, but I finished the story mode in around 5 hours (including restarting from scratch once cos one character died and I'm a completionist lol)
If you're a fan of Syberia, it's still worth playing as it will remind you of that atmosphere, but get it when it's on sale. Most of the puzzles don't make any sense, and the lack of subtitles makes it almost impossible to understand what's going on during the dialogues. The story is still interesting (albeit not really explained in depth), but I would only recommend it to die-hard fans of Sokal and Syberia
One on side I liked this game. I played it after Still Life and it's definitely better than the crap that Still Life 2 was in some aspects. The atmosphere was nice, I liked that you could do the same thing by following different paths (also replay value), I liked the main character. Some people complained about the gameplay but I didn't think it was bad. My main issue is the plot: it starts out with a nice premise and mystery (you are hired to investigate a gruesome homicide by a mysterious woman), but little by little the plot becomes less and less believable and the ending was just... Meh. I don't mind the supernatural being involved but I felt that in this case it was just put there cos it was the only explanation possible, does it make sense? The dialogues also didn't make sense sometimes, the sequence of the conversation was all over the place and you had to repeat similar lines twice, or it wasn't clear how different lines lead to different results. The puzzles had me stuck in a few places, but I thought some of them were quite interesting. All in all I would grab it on sale and for one dollar it's definitely worth the price - you can expect less than Still Life, but better than Still Life 2!
A bit of backstory: this is one of the first adventure games I ever played on my PC... but unfortunately it didn't work. It was the 90s, I was very young at this game was very difficult for me back then (I also played it in Italian since I didn't speak English). When I finally arrived to the goat scene, a blue screen of death fell upon me. Tried to uninstall and re-install a million times but it didn't work, and since a lot of time had passed from my purchase, I couldn't bring it back to the store to exchange it. Long story short, I never finished the game - back then there were also no Youtube gameplays, and internet was still WinMx and mIRC. Flash forward some 20 years later, and I FINALLY FINISHED THIS GAME. It only took me 20 years BUT I DID IT. I cannot really say if the new version is better than the old one because I don't remember much and even if I did, I'm much more well-versed in point-and-click adventures now so the comparison wouldn't make sense to me. I also was able to play it in English, and while the Italian dubbing is good, I think some accents are lost in translation (I wouldn't even know how some of the characters would sound speaking Italian with their own accent, as their accents are not very common). So 5 stars by default BECAUSE I FINISHED IT. The story is interesting enough (altough I preferred starting with the bomb scene as it's more immersive - you're as clueless as George in that case), and while the graphics might be dated, the game is still enjoyable if you like point-and-click adventures with a retro feeling. I didn't think the game was particularly hard, and judging from the reviews the old one was harder, but if a barely teenage me could play it then even the original is probably not that hard.
Disclaimer: I didn't play the original, I was probably too young or it wasn't a big thing in my country. I like point-and-click adventures so I bought it, and since I liked it I also bought the sequels. As someone who hasn't played the original, I thought the game was very good - the puzzles are at the right difficulty and they mostly make sense (except *that* one), the background and graphics were great for someone like me who likes retro-looking games, the story was interesting enough, the voice acting was okay, the game was long enough for the (sale) price albeit not really replayable. I don't really like Gabriel but I can live/play with that. If you haven't played the original, I would definitely recommend it for its value as a game in itself.
I can't play this game. My people either starve, die because of the cold, or stop reproducing. I probably more than 20 villages so far, and all my attempts sucked. Having that said, I love this game, and if you consider that ONE person created this... I'm mindblown. This is such a good game for being a one-man effort. I liked that there was no fighting, as I don't like to fight in games, and I recommend it to people who also don't like to fight. The graphics are cute, it runs on my shitty computer, and it's a good game to play if you have some time to kill and don't want to think too much. It might probably get repetitive after a while, unless you suck like me, then it will always be fun cos you will never go too far in the game. It's not a perfect game, sometimes the AI is pretty silly. For example: I'm building something and they have to cut down a bunch of trees and get rid of some rocks to do it. Instead of using those trees and rocks to build the building, my people have to carry them aaaaalll the way to the stockpile and then back to the building. Makes no sense. But for a one-man effort (and the price on sale) I can't really complain.
