A failed mission?Crashed on a baren planet. Hardly any memory of the missions goal. Equipped only with her own apprehension.
Tessa, a space explorer at the service of the Intergalactic Mining Corporation, tries to overcome this impossible situation and to escape this place alive. The broken ship...
Crashed on a baren planet. Hardly any memory of the missions goal. Equipped only with her own apprehension.
Tessa, a space explorer at the service of the Intergalactic Mining Corporation, tries to overcome this impossible situation and to escape this place alive. The broken ship will not provide her shelter for long. The only support she has got is a small analysis robot called C.O.R.E. and his few but helpful functions.
This is the beginning of a quest for fading hope. If she can not help herself and can not call for other people, she is lost.
An unknown planet
Although her prison makes every effort to pretend its uninhabited, Tessa finds an old mining station between rocks and swamps which belongs to her employer.
While exploring the old structure and trying to bring it back to life a bad feeling comes alive with it. This place does not look as if it was left orderly.
A traditional adventure
Embark on a thrilling and emotional journey which leads you through a dense, murky and suspenseful atmosphere. Control the game by mouse, examine your surroundings to gather information and to understand their connections.
Use your ingenuity, combine items and control machines in order to solve and overcome Tessas struggle for survival.
Details
50 hand drawn locations full of atmosphere and detail
Three dimensional characters and motion capture animations
It's a nice game, reminds me of the 1995 game "The Dig" .
The plot is interesting and straightforward, with a twist that doesn't come suddenly, but emerges slowly towards the middle of the game.
With fairly polished graphics and details, fluid movements, a total absence of bugs, and good dialogue, both technically and in terms of plot it is a more than decent product.
If I had to find a fault with it, it would be that the game is rather short. We're not expecting 40 hours like in “The Longest Journey,” for goodness' sake, but something more than the current 4-5 hours would have been better. On the other hand, the integrated walkthrough is particularly welcome, allowing you to overcome any blocks in the game if required.
In short, given all the rubbish out there, a game like this is more than welcome.
- The story is good with, from my point of view, welcome and realistic mature elements, but the ending drags a little.
- There are plenty of puzzles, overall logical, and with good variety. The puzzles fit the setting very well. When needed, the game nudges in the right direction without revealing anything.
- I enjoyed the sci-fi setting and elements.
- I liked the 2D hand-drawn sci-fi art.
- Dialogs are okay for the most part. Some voice overs are rough, but thankfully the main characters are fine for the most part.
- The music is serviceable but nothing special.
Great storyline. Some on here complain that its an "It's all a dream", ending. It isn't. It's much more profound. Some of the puzzles were stupidly simple. No challenge at all. Some were pitched well. One puzzle is baffling, and you may need a hint. However, it is an intriguing plot, and held me throughout. Worthy of four stars, but not not a five star product.
Nice visuals of a strange planet, mostly good puzzles (some logic based are too easy and one has insufficient clues what exactly developers expect you to do). The story is good and don't be fooled by people saying the story is misleading and the twist is unforeseeable. If you're familiar with unreliable narrator concept, you can see the direction the story goes as soon as the second day. My only grievance is that after reaching titular monolith, there's much watching cutscenes/talking and less puzzles. The game gave me about 12 hours of fun (might be a bit less for you, as I like to check character comments for every hotspot and trying different item combinations just to see what happens) so 4/5.
And remember not to try scan surroundings when CORE is temporarily unavailable. The game will bug itself and you'll need to restart it.
Let me shout it from the rooftops: this game's story is BAD. What starts off as an intriguing sci-fi adventure, which gets weaker with a few stumbles through the middle, turns into a banal story of someone who's made it all up to cope with their own traumas, born from being too selfish toward their friends and family, after a car incident.
There is no point in discussing gameplay, presentation or plot (although I'll remark how everything gets worse after the twist). There is barely a character arc in here, shoved near the end, and there are no consequences (either from the "dream plot" or to the fact that the protagonist was absent in important times for her family all to chase her "secret" writing career). You perform some apologies (mostly in your head) and everything is fine and dandy. Wouldn't you know it? Your friend didn't even die in the car accident! It's all weak and perfunctionary.
I always had a soft spot for the old adventures by Animation Arts. They might not be perfect, but they had personality, and understood how to put together good set-pieces to keep you interested to the story, even if they might have been a bit silly or otherwise flawed at times. I was looking forward to a return to form, but instead this might be when I stop caring about the company.
The puzzles were nice (only a couple of negative outliers, but nothing actually bad), and the production values good enough for such a game, but what good does it all do if they pull off the "it was all a dream" in such a lazy way? The way it's handled is terrible (while it's obvious that something is "off", there is no good foreshadowing), and doing it so close to the end meant there was simply no way to actually develop a plot with the time left. Instead you get some cringy cliches about regrets and making amends (mostly in her mind so far, I can't stress this enough).
Don't buy this. If it was even slightly worse I'd ask for a refund after finishing it.
