An Indy Jones knockoff adventure by the Secret Files devs, this starts off fairly well - after a firefight with some mystical-macguffin-hunting Nazis, you get a little tutorial putting a disc into a plinth in an ancient Tibetan temple and getting magically teleported away, then it cuts to 1930s Hong Kong with a musical number in a nightclub and you switch to playing a scoundrel in trouble with the Triad, causing distractions and then getting knocked out and thrown into the harbour waters in a leaky wooden box. They've gone with hand-painted background art for this one, which can clash a little with the 3D model characters but is a big improvement on the soulless 3D renders of Secret Files, even if the art direction is fairly bland overall. Unfortunately, the writing is terrible. It's clunky as hell (as with SF, it seems at least partly due to a bad translation job), it's full of on-the-nose exposition dumps, and every conversation is three times as long as it should be. This is compounded by bizarrely slow dialogue delivery from the VAs.
Some other weird stuff:
The first puzzle as the scoundrel is 'hassle a woman into letting you buy her a drink'. That's it, just keep harassing her until she finally gets up and leaves. It doesn't help you achieve anything, and the game moves straight on to the Triad stuff once she goes. It's utterly bizarre. I guess maybe she'll show up again later and there'll be a Han/Leia thing where eventually you manage to wear her down into falling in love with you.
Hilariously, they seem to have cast one guy to play all the English dudes and he can only do one voice, so they all sound exactly the same. Whenever you get two in a room talking to each other, it's suddenly incredibly difficult to follow the conversation because you can't tell which one is supposed to be speaking!)
So, I think I'll keep playing until the moment I get stuck or my brain melts out of my ears from the interminable conversations.
Okay, giving up on this. Before I could get on the plane to Tibet, I needed to get a map. The only person I know who could help is an ex-employee, but I don't know where he lives, so I go ask the bartender, who tells me to ask one of the customers, who needs a photo of the guy, which I have in his personnel file (but not his address apparently) in my safe, which I can't remember the combination for so I keep it written in my wallet, but it turns out I lost my wallet in the harbour and some kid has fished it out but won't give it back to me before I help him catch a bat, but the bats won't come out unless there are some flies, so I have to distract a guard at the consulate by winding up an alarm clock then putting it in a bin so I can get a ball out of a tree on the consulate lawn and then combine the ball with a tape measure (??) and then hang it off a rod to distract an alley cat so I can use some bellows with some flies without the cat yowling at me and alerting the Triad, then use those flies with the lantern next to the kid.
To be fair, Fate Of Atlantis has Indy get up to some pretty stupid stuff, and this isn't Gabriel Knight 3 levels of abstruse (I figured it all out easily). But it's also unimaginative, rote adventure game stuff, and I'm skipping through every single line of dialogue as well, so at this point there's no reason for me to be playing it outside of genre fan compulsion. So I'm giving up and returning to BTTF.
Weirdly, the crappy translation was by a guy who has done some well thought-of stuff (Penumbra, Talos Principle, etc) and had a lot of buzz around him only a few years later. So I have no idea what happened here!
Rating: nicer presentation than their earlier games, but the same bad writing, VO and puzzle design
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