It looks very nice, it starts with a slick tv news bulletin with what seems like a combo of 2D and 3D graphics all boiled down to the small resolution, and the UI is fairly slick (though the short-term/long-term memory stuff can be a little fiddly, it's a pretty cool way of being able to ask any character about any object in any screen). It makes some strange choices right at the start, though. There are four characters and it seems like eventually you'll be able to switch between all of them, but to get you started it picks one for you, then once you're through that it lets you play one at a time in any order. This is fine, eases the player in, except the very first set of puzzles is 'find mobile phone in apartment, pick up key, unlock drawer, use battery on phone, make phone call' which is an incredibly dull way to start your game. Then the four character sections you can choose in any order are: 'talk to someone on the subway', 'hack into a computer by learning and resetting a bunch of passwords, 'cop on a stakeout moving position so you can get a better view of the perp' and 'little girl finding a way to hide from the DEMON breaking into your bedroom'. The second two are really exciting and cool and varied. The first two are, again, very boring starts to a sci-fi epic. And if you choose the order you play them in from left to right, you get the two boring ones first!
But okay, I got past the boring bits, enjoyed the exciting bits, and now I'm trying to break into the secret experimental science lab where an incident has happened and everything's falling apart and on fire! And two of my characters are together now! We're back on track! So I get in there and then spend my time turning valves and unscrewing screws and doing fucking wire-based logic puzzles. I really hope I didn't already play the only interesting bits of this game, because it looks great, the acting's good, and the writing's good as well (there are lots of nice gags hidden away in email threads and word of the day apps).
Okay, used a walkthrough to get past the 'logic' puzzle, and got a bit further only to hit a fucking maze. A maze with limited vision radius and which rotates occasionally to make things harder for you. It's got different levels to it and you need to find a memory (it's a dream maze) on each one. It does give you breadcrumbs to mark where you've been but I mostly just brute forced it. Then I got put straight into a QTE which while not quite as annoying as the ones in Gemini Rue still caused me to redo the same bit about four times because while I'd figured out I had to cut the rope with the glass shard, the game makes you do it in a close-up with manual controls (i.e. dragging the shard back and forth across the rope) which are fiddly as fuck. I really do not understand why adventure games in 2012 are still including all this annoying bullshit.
Other annoyances - the cursor is visible when idle; it does the Gemini Rue thing of using VO for spoken lines, text for internal thoughts, but the VO also displays text in big speech bubbles that you can't turn off, block stuff, and make the cutscenes feel a lot less dramatic; despite the four main characters being controllable, they still show up in each others' stories with you having nothing to do with it and getting no explanation (why did two of them show up at Anna's apartment just in time to save her at the end of the QTE? Who knows. Maybe I need to wait for some idle dialogue or go into a dialogue tree but it's not great storytelling); the big decision put to you so far is whether to trust the cop, but seeing as he's one of your four characters the answer is clearly yes (and even if the twist is you're controlling a villain, you're still going to want to make the other characters trust him in order to progress the game), and the characters ignore what you say/flip their opinions over anyway; this intrigue has been added to by having the cop drop a big bit of paper on the ground, another character read a suspicious sentence on it, then the cop coming back, saying hey that's private and grabbing it off them, which is hugely contrived!
BUT there are no portraits, so that's good. The dialogue is still fairly well written and it all looks nice. Also it seems like I'm about a third of the way through already.
Few more notes: The sci-fi conceit has people using particle resonance to destroy things, and the target gets atomised in a perfect sphere, so it has that nice Terminator 2 effect everywhere. It's interesting to be playing a game from a moment in time when there could be a running joke about how everyone thinks online journalism is just blogging. Sadly, the demon dream seems like it's going to be repressed memories about an abusive father rather than actual demons!
Ha ha, I just realised that when you're playing the cop you don't have the mysterious paper in your inventory. What a cheat!
Ugh, every puzzle in this is basically a logic puzzle even when you're controlling the characters as normal. I just got through an entire very irritating section where you have to distract two separate cops in the right order with two of your characters and then put a third person in the correct place, repeating this laborious process every time you want to try something new, and now I'm in a crates/magnets puzzle and I just cannot be arsed. I looked at a walkthrough and all the puzzles I've got ahead of me are either more fuse box minigames or 'use this code on this computer, check this email for the next code' etc etc, so I don't think I'm missing much by quitting now. Also, there's a romance between two of the characters developing despite their only connection being that he's been ogling her on the subway every day, so no thanks to that.
