I played this after Deponia, due to confusion over country-specific release dates. It's a bit more amateurish - the art is all a bit MS Paint and the VO feels less polished - but so far it's got a bit more charm. At least the dickhead Rufus-type character is now just some orderly you're trying to get past, the graphics have a nice homebrew Charlie Brooker/DOTT look to them, and the lead character has a kooky Laverne type feel to her. It's a shame that they've put her in a surgical gown, despite her being an asylum inmate rather than a hospital in-patient, just so that we can look at her arse the whole time. At least she's wearing knickers, but they still have her sticking it up in the air to pick things up or crawl through pipes or whatever. Oh well, I suppose it's not like comics or movies or whatever are any further past this kind of stuff.
The puzzles are really rough - I'm only partway through the first one and already there's been pixel-hunting, misleading graphics/descriptions, mindless repetition and a huge dialogue tree with solutions buried in them (you have to be very confident of your writing to make a player go through like ten different branches!). But there is a nice narrative device they've just brought in where your talking rabbit toy can help you remember stuff from your childhood to get you past obstacles, by taking you into an interactive flashback.
Got a little further. That memory jump thing turned out to not really be that substantial - you just get sent to a different room and control Harvey to look at stuff then mention it to Edna so she remembers how to use it to do something, and that helps you back in the main game. It's still something a bit different though, I guess. Better than a logic puzzle, anyway. Otherwise, I've progressed a bit further and it's all okay (despite some further ropey/half-broken puzzles), but the writing and the setting and the puzzles just aren't that interesting, I'm not that involved in walking around a bunch of different hospital rooms trying to escape the building. It's all very 'impressive first AGS game'.
Okay, I played a fair bit more and while some of the puzzles are fun there's still a fair amount of bullshit. Stuff not signposted properly, pixel-hunts, the occasional thing that just doesn't make sense or is really obscure. And the whole thing's just not funny or interesting enough to push through. You're just wandering around a bunch of interconnected rooms in a hospital with the goal of 'escape'. It lacks polish in places too, like having to repeat the same little cutscene over and over when using the lift to get somewhere, or having to leave a room and come back to see if your puzzle worked (I'm guessing this is a Flash thing, as that's what the game was made in originally). So I gave up and watched a playthrough - it's a fairly long game, and you're in the hospital for most of it, then right at the end you randomly end up in a church for an irritating 'musical notes' puzzle, then you get back to your family home for all the reveals. There's an interesting twist (you've been planning to exonerate your father of a murder, then it turns out once you get all your memories back that you did it and he took the blame) and two-choice ending, but then it just abruptly stops. Obviously budget was an issue here, but even a wall of text or something would have been better!
Also, as with Deponia, it has adverts for their other games in the menu, but here it's all the mini-game crap that they publish rather than their own stuff, so it all starts to look like a tacky online store.
So, admirable early low-budget effort, but in the end it's just not very engaging and has a lot of rough edges.
I realise now that it was released in Germany in 2008, and took 3 years to get a translated version released elsewhere, so this would actually have been more suitably placed between Blackwell Unbound and Ben There, Dan That. It perhaps stood out a little better back then before indie adventure games had really started to break out.
Side-note: there's a bit of dialogue where they argue about who's Holmes and who's Watson, and I'm relieved to say it's not as funny as the Lestrade line in LOTCG.
Rating: mid, unpolished, usual Daedalic issues, but with some rough charm.
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