Resonance

Time based puzzles, pixel hunting and a maze - everything players love in p&c adventure games.

Been playing adventure games since Zak McKracken and have had a lot of fun with the genre through the years. Resonance drew me in immediatly with its pixelated graphics and scifi story, but it left me feeling a bit dissatisfied. Sometimes I laughed, sometimes I was amused but unfortunately too much time was spent being annoyed. I loved the game for the atmosphere, the setup and the nice looking retro-pixelated graphical style. Not to mention the musical score, which is great too. But on the other hand you have puzzles that are so far-fetched and illogical that you don't need to be very impatient to turn to walkthroughs (or just turn it off). The former Lucasarts alumni Ron Gilbert often talked about the bad practice of backwards puzzles. Puzzles where you find the item you need long before you discover the actual puzzle. This game is full of them, and some items sit in your inventory a looong time before they're supposed to be used. Another thing I found annoying was the pixel hunting. In some locations there's no hint whatsoever that you can find an item in a particular place, both because you're not looking for the item (because it belongs to a backwards puzzle), but also because you have no idea the item could actually be in that particular place. It's rather lazy game design that haven't been thought through. And that's a shame since one of the pillars of a good adventure game is the puzzles. The other pillar, story and dialogue, ranges from ok to good. I really like the scifi plot and the touch of conspiracy theory sprinkled on top made the game enjoyable between the puzzles. There's other well executed ideas as well. Having four controllable characters works just as well, if not better, than in Maniac Mansion. And the short and long-term memory inventories work much better than anticipated and are quite fun to play with. But the arbitrarily designed puzzles is what makes or breaks this game. Only you know if you can take that.

"Resonance" is my ninth Wadjet Eye game, a company which at this point means quality. These are *good* games, going toe-to-toe with the LucasArts games or pre-"Walking Dead" Telltale, and designed the same way: no dead ends, no death. The games are all very well-written, look beautiful, have great soundtracks (my favourite "Resonance" track is "Last Goodbye"), and the puzzles in them are logical (in a way that LucasArts wasn't always). However. The games also tend to reinvent themselves a lot—no two "Blackwell" games play in the exact same way, for example. This means there are different levels of emphasis on various adventure game mechanics: "Primordia" doesn't have as much inventory stuff, for example. In "Resonance," the big thing is long and short-term memory that's used to bring up topics of conversation. In other games, if your character examines something, they'll store it away for later reference automatically. In "Resonance," you need to do this yourself. While this is a great idea on paper, it sometimes leaves you frustrated; more than once, I knew what to do, and just didn't know how to express it. It's an idea that needs development, in other words, like how the 16 verb system in games like "Maniac Mansion" eventually became use/examine/talk to in "Full Throttle." The other thing is a minor pet peeve. I really like the actor Abe Goldfarb, who is present in every single Wadjet Eye game, but sometimes he plays two characters in a game and winds-up talking to himself. It's really distracting. When he's well-cast, like in "Gemini Rue," he's a delight. When he isn't—say as a gorilla of a police officer (a tertiary character here)—he's a bit of an eyebrow-raiser. But *you should play it anyway*. Great game. Great story. Great puzzles. "Gemini Rue" and "Primoria" remain my two favourites, but this one is really, really good.

An intriguing setup and a few new ideas thrown in the point and click adventure template get washed away by a cumbersome interface and unlikely story developments later in the game that veer towards unplausibility.

I don't know why, but this game just didn't sit right with me. Maybe because the reviews here hyped it up. I played other wadjet eye titles. I really liked The Blackwell series. I really, really, really liked Primordia for its' unique style and the story twist. But this game just didn't do it for me. The characters are okay, but forgettable. There were some really great horror moments, and a solid twist near the end, but in the end, it was really generic and unmemorable.