While Memoria continues the story of Geron and Nuri from "Chains of Satinav" in a way, this mainly serves as narrative framework for the story of Sadja and her magical staff. Which is a good thing, as Sadja is a much more interesting character than Geron and Nuri combined. Actually even the new supporting character Bryda is more interesting than Geron and Nuri. Even better, Memoria improved also in other aspects: there are much more animations and the user interface is slightly improved. Like you can highlight important objects now by pressing space. There are a few scenes though where not all of them are highlighted and I'm uncertain if this intentional or not. There are also sveral minor bugs where removed items or characters are still partially displayed or react to clicking them. And well, some visual issues are still there. Things like faces looking distorted (Fahi) and inconsistent look of characters. The puzzles are not quite as straight forward as in the first part. Both Geron and Sadja have several special abilities which are used in the puzzles. Also Memoria tends to trick you by letting you fail trying to use the obvious approach and then forces you to find a different solution - but not in an illogical or erratic way. Well, and there is this somewhat annoying maze which can be skipped though. All in all, this is a big step forward regarding story and characters compared to "Chains of Satinav" and definitely worth playing.
Since most point'n'click adventures try to imitate the wacky graphics and humor of classical LucasArts adventures, it's nice to see a different approach for a change. I wasn't totally happy with the graphics though. While the backgrounds are somewhat beautiful in a concept art way, some of the faces of supporting characters look distorted and ugly. There is also a certain inconsistency in the way e.g. Nuri looks in different scenes, conversations and as animated character. Talking of animations, while Geron has fluid walking animations, that's about it. In a nutshell, there aren't any major animations in this game. Besides, even the scrolling judders and Geron moves around like he's on drugs. Which brings us to the next problem: Gerold is a dull character and Nuri behaves like a 12 year old hippie girl most of the time - which is emphasized by the voice acting of both main characters. So their desperate love seems somewhat weird to say the least and it's kinda hard to identify with either Geron or Nuri. Then again, the story is interesting enough to keep you going and the puzzle design is very solid. Like most of the puzzles are logical and some are even quite clever. Unfortunately, the user interface isn't all that great and I got stuck a few times since I overlooked items that blended to well into the background (and there is no way to highlight them). All in all, it's a very solid adventure game and even if its successor "Memoria" is better, I kinda enjoyed it.
I guess there is no discussion that the Deponia series had a very positive influence on the development and perception of point'n'click adventures. Apart from its somewhat unique setting, the effort (and money) that was invested in animation and music is unrivaled at least in the last decade. Then again, I must admit that I never totally loved the games. The protagonist was not very likable, the puzzles were somewhat erratic and the mini games were mostly annoying and technically bad. And, well, there was this ending that most people didn't like and that the developers defended to the death. My personal opinion was that it didn't fit the game but mainly felt rushed and unfinished. To sum it up: the puzzle style is unchanged (only junk in inventory used in nonsensical ways), the chapter songs were removed (apart from a crappy one at the beginning and an unrelated song later), the mini games are still total crap (technically and in any other way) and the end will create more or less the same mixed emotions as that of the original trilogy. It's a bit like the developers felt the urge to tell us that everybody who didn't like the original ending was a complete and utter idiot. What I absolutely hated was the time pressure especially towards the end. I don't like time pressure in action games with well designed controls but it's an absolutely terrible idea in point'n'click adventures with sluggish controls. The whole time travel thing leads to entering the same scenes over and over again with only minimum changes (if at all) and at some point, the whole story is such a mess that you stop thinking about if there is still any sense in it at all. So, well, I really don't know if this was worth it or if the developers should have let the trilogy as it was. IMHO it would have been better to simply add a better ending to part three. Not necessarily a different one, but one that didn't feel so unfinished.
About exactly what I expected: an indie point'n'click adventure with a mystical setting and retro graphics. While I would have preferred a little higher resolution, the game actually looks pretty good. You shouldn't expect major animations or cutscenes though: the amount of animation is about what early LucasArts adventures (Zak McKracken or Last Crusade) had. However, the game never looks amateurish like some of retro style LucasArts fan adventures. There's also full-fledged voice acting for all dialogs which is actually pretty good and there's nothing to complain about from a technical perspective. No bugs, no crashes and a perfectly well working old school savegame handling. The story has supernatural aspects in the way that you could also interpret them drug hallucinations in a way. Which is OK for me but it's not like everything totally makes sense at the end if you decide to assume that everything supernatural actually happened. The game is quite a bit too short (~5 hours) for the asking price. There aren't lots of locations and they're rather small. Most of them don't even scroll and if so only a bit (game doesn't fill a widescreen display btw.). Most puzzles are pretty much straight forward and you are not tortured with hidden object crap. The main mechanism is talking to people to get new dialog options. The typical "distraction" type puzzle is also there of course and reused to a degree where you could call it a running gag. Tthe only somewhat complex puzzle (safe code based on poem) wasn't really well designed IMHO. Like the typical case of a constructed puzzle that looks logical to its designer but not so much to the gamer who can't really know which parts of a poem contain hints and what's just there to make it rhyme. And, well, there's one case of "adventure logic" where you need to put a tape on a scanner to load in into a computer. Err. Anyway, I'd be definitely interested in playing another Kathy Rain adventure. I sure liked her cheeky comments.
I played this in 2017 using the "HD" upgrade (Tenebrae). The graphics are OK for the age but there are clipping errors in the distance and motion blur while running can't be deactivated. Most characters/monsters are somewhat ugly and repetitive (e.g. women tend to look alike). The lack of eye candy stretches to architecture and world design. Quite a few low contrast scenarios ("Swallows", "Geographer's Mind") make it hard to see anything. Torches (which block one hand) and the single light emitting helmet just light your closest environment. The world is quite large but boring. E.g. on the desert island, more or less the only animals are rhinos, baboons, cheetahs and giant ants. Meh. There are several small islands to discover but they are either empty or only hold some generic enemies. The last island looks unfinished: only 10% used in normal story line and exploring it unveils only a few generic settlements of fish people. There's a fast travel system with additional teleporter stones but it only works outdoors. You can also use horses and boats but both is annoying. Riding needs repeated button smashing. Horses doesn't follow you and you can only call yours when it's near. Boats are very slow, get stuck on shores and there's no fast travel system. The core mechanics (skills, inventory, crafting) work quite well but quest markers don't. There are some annoying collection quests without any hints where the next piece could be located. The default keyboard layout is problematic: sneaking/running on the same mouse button and jumping/activating on Space. There are issues with voice/music volume where it's hard to understand any dialog in the (ugly) cutscenes even if the music level is off. The story is plain vanilla but with a stupid twist at the end leading to a totally annoying and stupid boss fight. The 1st DLC is a bit short but quite enjoyable. Finally at least a cool landmark (flying fortress) and a proper boss fight. Still, the world is somewhat empty.
After playing Bastion, I had high hopes for this game, but apart from its gorgeous visual style and great voice acting, Transistor falls short of my expectations. Also while I really, really liked the mixture of Art Deco an Tron, the enemies don't really fit in. Well, the music is nice but even there I liked Bastion's better. Now while Bastion was some sort of mini action RPG with stylized graphics, the only game mechanism in Transistor is a mixture of real time and turn based combat in arenas. The only other thing you can do is accessing terminals now and then to get story pieces and restore disabled "functions". The game has very little contents and is stretched by challenge rooms. This also serves to train using different "function" which are combat skills that can be either used as "active" or "upgrade" ability. If you die in a fight, you're punished by disabling one of your functions (until you accessed two terminals). This was obviously meant to force the player to also use function combinations that he/she wouldn't use otherwise. To be honest, this didn't work for me at all and found it totally frustrating to be forced into using a suboptimal function combination in fights that I already lost with the best possible combination. This adds to the already very unbalanced difficulty. E.g. one of the hardest boss fights in the game is very early in the game. On top of the already sufficiently confusing skill system the game also implements "limiters" which are handicaps that e.g. make the enemies stronger but give you more experience points. I must admit that I enabled some in the middle of the game without really understanding their purpose. Honestly I still don't understand why I should use them. The story is somewhat muddled. It's quite obvious that everything takes place in a computer and the characters are programs, but in the end all of this doesn't make any sense. So the storytelling isn't minimalist - there just isn't any sensible story to be told.
I loved the setting and the graphics but kinda hated the damage taken by heat and cold. Actually this nearly ruined the game for me until I found the according orbs later in the game. While of course all this freezing to death, collapsing in the heat and being hit by a tornado stuff adds to the feeling of being exposed to nature on a hostile planet, it somewhat destroyed the exploration for me at first. It's plain stupid being forced to waste hours waiting in a shelter since it's too cold/warm/stormy outside. I need to wait enough in the real world, I don't need to simulate waiting in games. Besides, the "cold" damage is totally over the top. Like the slightest drop of water lets you freeze to death unless you are in the burning heat of the sun. And obviously the sun doesn't even heat the water in the desert world. Well, and of course there is no savegame handling whatsoever. So if you're close to death in your last and only autosave, you can restart the whole game (if you don't manually backed up your save game). I simply don't get how an exploration game and this permadeath concept go together. Then there's the puzzles/secrets and honestly some of them are annoying and illogical. Like switches appearing at solid rocks just because you used some other switch somewhere else without any clues. Bad design. That being said, the story is interesting, the world design is great and I really enjoyed exploring caves, temple ruins and the like including all the scary and dangerous aspects. Still not everything made sense to me (e.g. how the lower race could even build all that stuff in such a short time letting aside how it could then deteriorate so fast, what moves corpses etc.) and the end is a bit of a letdown, but still I wouldn't want to miss the experience. It's just that this game could have been much better with a proper savegame system, less weather damage and some comfort features like a map, fast travel and some kind of quest log or hint system.
I kinda pictured this as a beautiful hiking trip through the Norwegian wilderness with some mystic elements .. and was somewhat disappointed. The graphics are OK but far from great even at highest detail level. Also the faces of the few (three) human characters look somewhat ugly/uncanny even when compared AAA titles from 2004 - letting aside to what is state of the art in 2017. The mediocre optics stretch to the surroundings and most of the monsters look somewhat silly instead of terrifying. Which doesn't matter that much as you typically don't survive coming close to them and it's dark anyway. Actually the darkness throughout large parts of the game makes it hard to enjoy the landscape. In a nutshell: there isn't much eye candy in this game. I didn't take a single screenshot - which is a bad sign. Plus I didn't like that shifted "over the shoulder" 3rd person view. Furthermore, there is no open world but levels with a very linear path. Sometimes you can choose between two ways or so, but that's just because you need to sneak around monsters. There is no map or compass or any other kind of in-game display. You can collect a few pointless items which are just displayed as text entries somewhere in the main menu. Also the text pieces you can collect obviously aren't stored anyway to read them again later. So 90% of the game, you just run through the level and try to avoid trolls and the like. Sometimes you need to sneak a bit, but that's neither hard nor thrilling. The only other existing game element is scaring away monster with your torch and that's about it. There are no riddles apart from one thing which might also be a bug: there was a shed with a combination lock close to Erik's house which I didn't find a code for. In the end I tried around 700 of 1000 combinations since no walkthrough mentioned or showed (Youtube) this lock, but there was just another text entry anyway. And well, the ending is 100% predictable from the very beginning. Meh.
Well, no, it's not really from the 90s, but it sure looks and plays like it was. The (pre-rendered) graphics look somewhat lowres/blurry and the animations are wooden. The movement is sluggish and neither dialogues nor (inevitable) death animations can be skipped. Most puzzles are straight forward but some suddenly involve guessing. Besides there is the typical 90s style "try and die" game design all the time where you walk into a room, click on something and are suddenly killed with no proper hint that this would happen. Anyway, there are no clues whatsoever from the protagonist - his only response is "this will break it" or "that's crazy". Taken the outdated design and implementation, the limited playtime, the predictable B-movie story and dull ending, this certainly isn't the "masterpiece" that other reviewers saw in it. Then again, it's not bad either and for sure quite unique in its genre. At least I couldn't name many isometric point'n'click SciFi horror adventures. So if you're into this and like game mechanics from the 90s, you could actually enjoy it. But honestly, it's nothing you'd regret to have never played, either.
I really enjoyed playing this because of its mood and voice acting, not so much because of its gameplay or because I thought the story or puzzles made any sense (as they didn't). So let's start with the things I didn't like (but keep in mind that they couldn't keep me from enjoying it): First of all, the story doesn't make much sense. I hoped it would to some degree, but it just didn't. Also most of the (few) puzzles don't make sense or show a complete lack of common sense. Things like 85 officers (!) in a submarine or tuning radio receivers (!) to open doors and mystic gateways or, well, almost anything else. Then there's time pressure (specifically for the idiotic "find three objects" puzzle but also for dialogues) now and then - which is bad idea in a slow paced exploration game to say the least. Also while the graphics are supposed to be stylized in an artsy way, they sometimes just look a bit amateurish and the 3D rendered characters don't fit 100% perfectly. The controls are somewhat awkward resulting in the character getting stuck, plus the walking speed is very slow and there's no running control (remember that in the context of that stupid time pressure puzzle: very bad idea!). Even worse, mouse/keyboard control will only work if you remove all joysticks. Surprisingly, it worked the 1st time after installation, but not when started again - which made root causing this issue even harder. Then there's absolutely no save game handling. Not even the chapter savepoints are really working (e.g. puzzle solved, map displayed, scene left and game still doesn't remember). So all that sounds pretty bad, but again, it's about the mood. Even if the graphics aren't really great, the lighting surely is. And last, but most importantly, the voice acting is absolutely great and the dialogues are witty. So yeah, it's far from a perfect game, rather short and nonsensical and still a fun experience.
