A New Beginning: Final Cut

Despite the interesting setting (ecological/technological/futuristic) and the pleasant presentation the game didn't appeal to me. I tried to fight the verbose storytelling but stopped playing because it just was no fun. The biggest problem of this game: There is not a single likeable character. And the mood is too little postapocalyptic-severe, but instead staggering melancholic. Too bad, I really wanted to like this game.

The game follows most of the point-and-click tropes, although it fails at an execution. Lack of logic (some puzzles have much simpler, obvious solutions, but nooo... you have to do it the hard way! It might have worked for Monkey Island, but this game pretends to be serious), bad voice acting for the female lead, very bad lip-sync, bugs, bugs, and more BUGS (crashes, clunky interface, freezes, occasional Russian text), really silly puzzles (at least there's a SKIP button)... and to top all that, anti-scientific crap spilling out of a theoretically SCIENCE-fiction game. The list of mistakes and impossibly scientifically inaccurate things is too long to include in a GoG review. This is a real shame, because otherwise, it could have been a nice story. A word of advice if you do try it nevertheless... do NOT approach this game without a walkthrough, you'll just suffer.

First: This is an unfair review, since I didn't finish the game. My one star rating is representative only of the experience I had, and I don't pretend that it is a holistic assessment of the game's value. That said, I know there are others like me out there: adventure game lovers who can't resist a game like this, but who ultimately can't countenance it's butchered English translation. I'm a long-time apologist for Daedalic. I've enjoyed many of their games, and I ordinarily feel that their mistranslations are harmless. At their best, they add character to the material, and at their worst they can be simply overlooked. Not so here. The first chapter contains some of the worst dialogue I've ever heard, anywhere. It is nonsensical, trite, boring, and grammatically criminal. It is delivered poorly, by actors who can't find whatever rhythms or emotional notes it is meant to contain. If this sounds like it could be a deal-breaker for you, I encourage you to find a "let's play" of the first few minutes of the game. Assess for yourself whether or not you can stomach this linguistic catastrophe. I could not, and that is why I'm posting this warning. This could be a great game, with a fascinating story, but I'll never know; for me it's unplayable. Try to assess the dialogue for yourself before you buy, so you don't waste your money as I did.

The story layer on thick of eco-friendly story line but the last 15 min plot twist made the entire story pointless and destroy the believably of the supporting characters . Overall the game was alright, there were some pixel hunting that seems unreasonable and story farfetched but still within realm of I can accept it. However, the plot twist made me wonder why I wasted my time on this game.

I like point-and-click adventures, and I've even made peace with the silly inventory and the absurd puzzles that are endemic to the genre. New Beginning has a pleasant enough story, engaging politics, and characters that should be fun to play. Honking bad translations, flat voicing, erratic controls, and general carelessness, sadly, render it a tedious and unpleasant experience. The game-stopping bugs are not as bad as advertised - I had one, toward the end, and backtracking half an hour or so fixed the problem. I was able to save games up until the end, though many could not. But that didn't make it any better. For long stretches I wondered if the two leads were being voiced by rendering software; everyone is bland, all the time, unless they're being squeaky or growly. The actors are clearly not native speakers, and the translation is frequently impenetrable. Apparently the German version is better; maybe so, I can't judge. The scenes leading to the (boring, and often dopey) puzzles rarely contain any clues about what you might want to accomplish next, so you're always navigating in a sort of flat fog, pushing buttons and collecting objects in the hope that whatever they do might give you a clue about what you're supposed to be solving. There's a good twist at the end, for those who make it that far. The backing art is solid and interesting stuff, but there's little of interest to do once you've looked at it.