Gemini Rue

Pros: great atmosphere, intriguing story, lots of interactive bits in the environment to explore. As others have said has tones of Blade Runner. Use of the in game database adds another level of exploration as you try and glean info on this bleak planet and background of all the characters. flipping characters adds another dimension to explore and depth. Cons: take all the above and ruin it with idiotic combat involving complicated shooting sequences. you have to use cover and leave it to aim/shoot. sounds great but doesnt work very well. Add in crappy 'combat music' just ups the annoyance. So.. get ready to leave wonderful exploration adventure immersion for some ganky, timed clunky shooting scenes where you die in rapid order over and over again. The dev instituted autosave at the beginning of each combat thank god but it still sucks, isnt fun and ruins the pacing of the game. some clunkiness with the mouse menu over hotspots adds to click redundancy as you explore. in short, if the game didnt try to be more than an adventure game then it would have been stellar. as it is, it tries to add combat for no reason that I can figure out, perhaps to lure more combat oriented players to the game? if so, then the unintuitive interface and lack of precision fighting will turn them off. some players didnt have a problem with it but for me it ruined the game. 3stars for the rest of the good stuff in game

Gemini Rue is a cut above most games in the storytelling department. It's narrative is split between two progtanists, Azriel Odin a gruff hard boiled ex-assassin turned cop and Delta-Six a man with no past and only a borrowed name. I can't go into detail for fear of spoiling something but believe me when I say the story is worth the price of admission. On to the gameplay. Gemini Rue is a basic adventure game. You have an eye to see, a mouth to talk; a hand and a foot to interact with the world around you and an inventory. The puzzles are logical (no insane 90s moon logic here) but at times a little too easy but this is the price paid for the excellent story focus that requires the player keep moving rather than spend hours rubbing everything on everything else. The only weakness I found, aside from a few puzzles being a bit easy, were the shooting sections. I found these to be cumbersome and annoying rather than challenging. If you can look past the occasional weak puzzle and dodgy shooting galleries then you're in for a good ride through the Gemini system.

Many other reviews have gone over the main pros and cons of this short but sweet point-and-click adventure: The puzzles are simple but appropriate, the visuals are engaging, and the soundtrack is surprisingly good. The story is well thought out and is only occasionally let down by silly dialogue. The only major strike against it, in my opinion, was the voice acting. I know it's an indie game and they had to work with what they had, but the actors make zero effort to infuse their performances with any context or emotional weight, and sometimes don't even bother to put emphasis on the right word in a sentence. Plus, you can only hear somebody respond to significant news with an airheaded "what?" so many times before it starts to sound ridiculous. This game is definitely worth the time and money, but do yourself a favor and just turn the voices off.

I found Gemini Rue to be a good but not great example of Wadjet Eye. The pluses would be a halfway decent story, characters and setting. I really like the classic cyberpunk noir theme, very up my alley. The minuses are a flaky interface, shallow puzzles and a drab color pallet (which makes it very difficult to spot some point and click items). The interface is especially annoying as you have no way to open your inventory other than right clicking on a hotspot in the environment. When you do, you cannot interact with the inventory, you can only choose to use an item on something else in the environment. You won't be solving many puzzles, and when you do, it's just a lot of running back and forth. If you need an adventure game fix, this will do it.

OK let me make this clear the only place this game loses a point is in the annoying combat system, other than that, this is exactly the reason why I like to buy games made by the Wadjet eye factory (I own the entire blackwell range) gripping story, retro graphics and awesome music, to sum up, the way PC games USED to be made in the good old days of Sierra, LucusArts and the like