It is so hard to find a good adventure game these days.
When it happens I actually feel moved.
Saint Kotar offers a compelling plot and a great gameplay system.
I've only played it for an hour and it got me hooked like so few games before.
I'm so glad I backed this project and so happy of how it turned out!
I really enjoyed my time in Sveti Kotar, spend about 10 hours with the game, which makes the price quite reasonable. I read a lot of reviews criticising the voice acting. Its very important for me to state:
Voice acting has been redone and updated, it is absolutely fine.
What I like about the game:
- Nice setting in a fresh location (Dont know about any other game taking place in Croatia)
- Very nice story, atmosphere and narrative.
- Sublte horror and supense
- Elements of moral, ethics, religion
- While the game is not perfect, the Devs seem to have put a lot of love and work into the game. They have anounced more content, DLCS, etc. which will continue and enhance the story.
This game should be for you, if you like the above and look for a nice narratively focused game.
Gameplaywise the game is not hard at all, so if you look for a classic point and click adventure, to work your brain, this is not your game.
If you like a focus on story, you will be pleased.
I played the demo "The Yellow Mask" and was immediately intrigued: I thought "finally a professional looking, very atmospheric dark adventure title that is not fishing for infantile laughter, not following the indi-style trend of pixel art at low budget and amateur voice acting. This demo was indeed good, VERY good!
I paid full price on launch day and downloaded the full game straight way - which was a quick disappointment! The full game is much different and doesn't hold up to its own demo quality benchmark. The game is very tedious and has too lengthy dialogues that don't add much value to the plot. It's just clicking through hundreds of dialogue options that lead to even more boring NPC monologues, which is very, very tiring after a short while. I played 8-10 hours after I noticed that I haven't made any real progress in the plot...
Most disturbingly I realized right from the beginning that the voice actors have changed between the demo and the full-game. Also their character profiles and the entire plot changed which was quite disturbing. And the only character with no change is the whiny main protagonist, an unpleasant wannabe-hero who deserve a real facelift and more balls!
On the sunny side though, the game looks awesome, great graphics, excellent atmosphere, good animations, good voice acting and a dark "adult" immersive plot. But these tons of boring dialogues with no added value are so distracting that the game puts me to sleep after a while.
Biggest shortcoming in this game: "Don't read the plot, PLAY the plot!" - If you want to read a plot then buy a book, not a game!
I love the eerie atmosphere and locations in this game, for they bring me back to the times of Black Mirror. We start with 2 protagonists, and we can switch between them - but only when the game wants you to. We can't switch for most of the game. They are traveling together, but they seem to hate each other. As a matter of fact, they argue for the most part, trying to convince me (the player) of which version was the correct one. I wish they would just let me play and find out by myself.
The general story and dialogs were well written, and this is very important in this kind of game. However, many here have complained some dialogs were too long, and I have to agree. I found myself getting anxious when some dialogs took too long. Perhaps those could had been split between different dialogs, instead of pouring them all at once.
The exotic location was a big plus, making me want to explore all of them. But I suddenly started having trouble keeping track of Croatian names because they are hard for me to remember, and some game plot items were linked to them by name, but I couldn't remember who they were. I couldn't even tell if that was a male or female name, and that's a problem when the gameplay depends on it.
It seems to be a feature in this game that selected NPCs can give you a map of the location, but it can't be used for anything. It doesn't tell you where you are, and you cannot fast travel. It's totally useless. There are game locations that can work as a traveling hub to different places, but some destinations change later in the game, making navigation VERY confusing. There are game locations you CAN walk to, but your character says he doesn't want to. Why? Don't know.
One last observation is that the plot keeps the horror atmosphere from beginning to end, which seems a bit heavy handed. It could have periods of horror, but nope, it's 100% horror all the time. I have enjoyed playing nonetheless.
I backed this game on Kickstarter because my wife an me we like to play point and click adventures and the athmosphere of the screenshots spoke to me, felt kinda like the Black Mirror series - which we like.
I didn't play it right when it launched, it already contained the patch with the new voiceovers.
The best thing about the game is the atmosphere and nice looking backgrounds. And that alone carried it for us. We finished the game.
The rest of the game is pretty flawed in my opinion. The story is convoluted and because the names in the game are unfamiliar ones most of time we asked ourselves "who was that again?". It also jumpes all over the place, at one time one of the characters, all of which are pretty unlikable, is at one place in the mountain in the next scene he's back at the village and so on. Even though there is a map there is no quick travel. Double clicking on the exits of a scene does not exit it immediatly but you have to wait until your character walked all the way there. The animations are meh. There is just a handful puzzles in the game, none of which are remotely challenging. 90% of you playtime will be listening to conversations. There are deaths in the game which you cannot foresee and after one you can just continue where you left off and take the non-death route. The worst of all is that the end of the game is pretty abrupt and goes to the same credits that play when you encounter a death. We needed to double check that that was the end of the game.
So bottom line is that I do not understand why this game gets so many things wrong that the genre has left behind in the mid-90s. The games premise and atmosphere had so much potential.