Time Travel is real and history is up for grabs! In this point-and-click, you play Fia Quinn, a time agent for the ChronoZen agency. Your job is to keep close watch on seven travelers who have the desire (and the bank accounts) to sightsee in the past. Some are simply curious. Others have unf...
Time Travel is real and history is up for grabs! In this point-and-click, you play Fia Quinn, a time agent for the ChronoZen agency. Your job is to keep close watch on seven travelers who have the desire (and the bank accounts) to sightsee in the past. Some are simply curious. Others have unfinished business to resolve. And they’ve all put down a lot of money for the trip, so it’s vital that you keep them happy while ensuring they follow the rules. But what could go wrong? It's only time travel, after all.
Features:
Seven eras of history to visit! From the speakeasies of Prohibition to the gangs of the Gilded Age to the morning of September 11th.
High resolution 1920 x 1080 graphics! That's 3x higher than Unavowed.
Lots of puzzles that require temporal thinking to solve.
Death! You CAN die in this adventure game, but time travel means you can try again. And again. And again.
Musical score by Thomas Regin (composer for Unavowed and the Blackwell series)
The main story is good, but unfortunately it gets lost in the flood of all the other side stories, which are boring and have no connection to the main plot. The main storyline only becomes clear halfway through the game, and after that, you only get fragments of it. By that point, I'm already frustrated and bored with the pointlessness of the previous events. Overall, the game is good and enjoyable, but the lack of focus on the main plot is a downside. The puzzles are like in every other Wadjet Eye game — you use one item only once in the entire game, and everything is solved through conversations and logic. I'm giving it five stars because I believe the studio makes great games. However, in this particular game, I miss a stronger emphasis on the main storyline.
*First of all, there should be a clear disclaimer that this game promotes homosexuality* Other than that...
From remarks such as "Full voice acting! Our largest cast yet" or "High resolution 1920 x 1080 graphics! That's 3x higher than Unavowed" I got the feeling that the game was a very ambitious step for Wadjet Eye. Unfortunately "largest" or "higher" doesn't always mean better...
- The graphics, although of higher resolution than previous games (actual pixel art ones) don't look as nice. My guess is, they wanted the simplicity and charm of the of the pixel art at he size of HD but they didn't manage it. The graphics in overall - although not exactly bad - seem to lack the details, the characters more than anything else. Also the general body-types appear strange and the movement of the characters look awkward (especially when they most of the times walk in couples, which also looks funny at best). Another thing I didn't like was that in most of the scenes there's just left-right movement with the camera placed on the same place, so there is no depth and no different angles. And last about the graphics, why have this "main" screen-hub to jump to the different scenes? It's not a huge negative but still, feels unnecessary.
- The soundtrack is good and the voice acting is fine but a bit exaggerated at times, which makes some characters really irritating.
- The story started seeming interesting to me but ended too fast and abruptly. Then I kept on playing, expecting when the main plot will start to unfold but this never happened. I just played and played (but without getting bored I must admit) until at the very end of the game I understood that the main plot is that there's some irrelevant connection between the separate plots of each chapter. Maybe it was my fault but the individual characters' stories were so indifferent that I didn't feel engaged to the story at all.
I was expecting much better than an okay-ish or meh game from Wadjet Eye. Maybe the next one!
Five stars for the complex, ingeniuos time travelling plot, the dialogues, the voice overs, the playability, the charm.
Minus one star for the horrible graphics in cutscenes and in some character animations.
Minus one star for the lgbtq thing, which was already everywhere in 2023, now it's just boring to death.
As usual with Wadjet Eye Games, this was enjoyable to play. I bought nearly all of their games on release. However, this one was unexpectedly different, and I have mixed feelings about it.
Gameplay was solid, writing was interesting, there was a wide cast of characters and locations, and there was no lack of things to do. The puzzles were logic, the kind that requires writing things down. If we get stuck, we can always ask Nozzo for help, which was a nice touch. All point and click games should have that. Fia's bedroom has a Ghost in the Shell vibe. Cutscene's art quality was all over the place, though.
Having that said, DEI + LGBT was heavy handed in this game. They usually put that in the game tags list to inform customers, but not here (or at Steam), and I somehow felt misled, like they omitted that info on purpose. It caught me totally by surprise. They made this game a love letter to the DEI + LGBT movement but decided to keep that a secret.
Considering how deep that is embedded into the characters, the story and how it ends, the least they could do would be to add the appropriate tags to the game description. When I realized what was happening, it was like I went to a party I wasn't invited. What if I am not into that? I thought maybe I can choose a different path, but no, all choices led to DEI + LGBT on your face.
I don't regret playing the game, and I definitely had fun. Time traveling is a fascinating theme and challenging to write. But the relationship between Fia and Em was forced, hollow and shallow. Zero chemistry. Even Nozzo said it didn't make sense. When it comes to character development, they hinted like Nozzo was written and designed to be Fia's love interest but then changed their minds midway.
I recommend this game, as I would for all others from Wadjet Eye, but be aware of DEI + LGBT contents that define how the story develops and ends. They should have added that to the game tags. That's what the tags are for.
