It looks lovely so far, lots of Josh Kirby-esque gloopy, bloomy pixel art in a weird robot world that I haven't really started exploring yet. The presentation is fairly slick so far, with lots of nice little cutscenes or cutaways, and a dramatic opening that starts to teach you about the world and get you settled. (It was a little annoying being told 'get to the generator!' without knowing where it was, but I quickly realised I just had to find a "Hatch" hotspot a few times in a row!) The music and VO are atmospheric too. It does have the usual Wadjet Eye quirks, like the bloody egg-timer, Abe Goldfarb as a snarky floating sidekick again, and the 320x200 resolution (oh to see these pixel artists get to stretch their legs a little!).
Got stuck, so am stopping for now. But it's good enough that I'd prefer not to use a walkthrough, which is always a good sign. It's striking how much better this is than Deponia, just through good writing. (And solid puzzles, though nothing much amazing except for having to block that a defunct giant sand-steeped robot's nostril-like air vents to get it to open its mouth). There are a few too many cheesy jokes, especially with the snarky sidekick character, but overall the writing's really smart and the world-building is great. I'm loving the drip-drip of info about the history of my character and also of the post-apocalyptic world.
I just got a little further (with the help of a walkthrough - the puzzles weren't unfair or anything, I probably could have figured them out if I'd spent enough time thinking about it and wandering around). I've moved to a city area now, which is really cool and intriguing and stuff but also is one of those points where you suddenly have fifty things to go look at. So I think I'll try to make playing this for half an hour something I do in the evenings instead of watching tv. My gameplay experience of many games probably suffers a lot from playing in sporadic bursts rather than regularly. It just always feels like more of an effort than just putting The Blacklist on or whatever...
Well, I finally got back to this after a 3 month break. I don't know if I took such a long break because I was a little unenthused or if it's because of that break that I was unenthused when I came back to it. Probably more the former - I didn't mind the fairly bland puzzles when I was climbing inside giant half-buried robot heads in the post-apocalyptic desert, but walking back and forth bartering motors for other motors and doing logic puzzles in a city setting with the end goal of trying to open a couple of doors was a lot less beguiling. When it got to the point that I was having to remember characters' surnames in order to solve puzzles, I gave up. I had a quick scan through the rest of the walkthrough and it didn't seem like it ever got back to what I found really intriguing and exciting about the first act.
Rating: strong first act, gets bogged down in adventure game busywork a little after that.
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