I'm proud of developers who insist on keeping their experimental designs short and sweet. Those behind Minit belong in this group too. The unique mechanic here - every life is on a 60 second timer - is not as punishing as you might initially think since there is no death penalty and you permanently unlock abilities and additional starting points through play. You'll often be within sight of areas you won't be able to reach until you've accomplished other feats. The time limit means level design density is high and you're rarely backtracking for long. If you ever fear you've not been efficient enough, you can press a button to voluntarily die and start back at home with a fresh counter. An afternoon or evening will probably suffice for this one. It's more of a puzzler than a twitch.
I can't knock the ambition in this one. There's a refreshing take here where the game is split into a series of episodes where you select two companions to come with you, and this decision changes the nature of how you need to solve puzzles. Whether this constitutes a fount of replay value to you will depend on how much the characters and story satisfy. Ultimately this fresh take was wasted by some catastrophically hokey content. Staten Island episode is an utterly laughable disgrace in dialogue and art direction. The house in the Bronx turns those laughs into tears. It's a shame really because at other times Unavowed approaches artistry. Everything about the Brooklyn episode was quality, and I quite enjoyed the Chinatown one too. The voice acting overall ranged from middling to excellent. There's far too much deus ex machina and I still don't understand what happened with some of the amnesia or out of body elements. For a game that eschews agency and approaches more of a choose-your-own-adventure, there's that much more pressure on everything else to be of high quality, and it just didn't come together here. Whomever had their child draw the merman so they could skip work that day should be ashamed of themselves.
For the right day in the right mood of the right gamer, this one is a special treat. You'll spend the majority of your game time reading - no voice overs - the stories of one of dozens of possible taxi passengers, some of them repeat customers who open up more on their second or third trips with you. It's narrow in theme - you're a Parisian taxi driver presumably of Arabic-French descent, and this game swims in it. Your interactive opportunities are limited to suit this constraint. For example, dialogue choices for you as a driver are usually scant or silence, but ripple in satisfying ways across multiple nights. Yes there is a whodunnit underneath all of this which ties in eloquently to the overall narrative, but I would hesitate to recommend this to those seeking robust mechanics of deduction (such as in Return of the Obra Dinn). In some cases the randomness of the clues you'll get will greatly hamper your ability to solve the case for that run. There is a tentative spirit of replayability here, more richly geared towards exploring the life stories of the people in the back of the cab than in solving the cases. Whether the journey will be more important than the destination for you comes down to whether you enjoy well authored dark and contemplative prose about the struggles of transient weirdos from the backseat of a cab. Pour moi, I would be quite sad if such a game n'exist pas.
The developers from from a pedigree of horror and it shows, but don't let that take away from the rest of the game, which is excellently written and voice acted science fiction.
It's hard to knock on GNOG. As an exploration of color and shape, it's executed flawlessly. As a game, not so much. The game is a collection of similar unrelated stages. Reasoning your way through them will only take you so far and what starts as a psychedelic and relaxing exploration hits a frustrating wall. You'll eventually resort to clicking blindly, looking up a walkthrough, or putting the game down altogether. The Lab-O and Hom-3 levels are particularly egregious, but it's a consistent struggle. Controls feel derived from a mobile port, and are particularly frustrating with the Vive motion controllers. You'll mostly need to hold trigger to activate while moving your arm in a wholly unrelated direction for all interactions. It's probably better on a flat screen, or even better a tablet, where the act of tapping blindly wouldn't feel as silly. One to watch rather than play, I'm afraid.
I can give fair plaudit for this as an ASMR walking simulator, for which this venture is unique. But that stings a little since there was plenty of space for this to be more. There's no denying it: the audio and motion capture craft on display here is top class and serve as a demonstration of what Ninja Theory could be capable of if they jettison the theatrical pretense and spin a better yarn. The one on display here is unbearably kitsch for taking itself this seriously. As a game, we're talking about Nordic alphabet detection and align-the-lines minigames (akin to my least favorite mechanic in The Witness). It's a puzzler, in other words, and quite easy to fall off the rails since those puzzles are abstract, vague, or I would even call mischievous. There's a handful of sporadic fighting sequences, but not enough to feel like a walkthrough amounts to much less than the game itself. The Orkney island setting and psychosis theme is rich. The technical execution is wonderful. But to be a worthy journey, we deserve more meat on the bones and a tale that isn't an eye roller.
Here's a special one. A nonviolent, nonverbal, and tranquil jaunt through whimsy. It's not long, but it's not too short either. It gets a bit too contemplative and unclear at times. Other times it's a bit too casual, hinting either with colors or camera angles where you need to go. It asks you to backtrack and is ok with you getting lost, and when it does it's not so bad. There's a touch of Assassin's Creed's tower climbing, or old school Tomb Raider's riddle solving. The graphics are expressive without being overly realistic, water and light in particular.
There's an attempt here in this Episode 1 (though they may not call it that) to carve new ground within dystopian oddball science fiction. And there are some moments it hits the target. Horror and dark subject matters are delivered powerfully and directly in a way that's rare or not to be found within the adventure game genre. What holds it back most is that this is both a short and incomplete story. But not far behind that problem is that this game is a rapid series of deus ex machina. There's too much creative license with pseudoscience to let the player suspend disbelief. And the sharp narrative twists are so severe that its characters are barely around long enough to feel for them. The visual quality varies considerably, sometimes to the point of parody. The main character for example has a textured shirt but no texture for his waist down. Some scenes are lovingly drawn, others are more of a napkin scratch. Animation overall is subpar. Puzzles are adequate. Music and voice acting are similarly inconsistent in quality - I felt more engagement with the sound off. In all, there's a lack of polish that doesn't even have a payoff at the end. Fictiorama indicates they've started work on the next chapter, but it's been two and a half years since the first was released (they worked on another game in between) and it's easy to be skeptical due to having only sporadic updates to go on. Overall, despite the occasional flourishes in DS:TCT, I'd recommend other titles of similar gameplay before spending time with this one.
