I only have chapters 1 and 3 of the three, irritatingly, and it'll cost £9.11 to get the middle one, so I probably won't do that unless the first one is spectacular!
Started it. Very slick so far! Impressive for an indie game (though at nearly £30 for all episodes, it had better be). Great atmosphere, looks lovely, good voice acting and music, and I immediately like the scoundrel I'm playing as.
Small issues: the characters are a mix of 3D models and 2D sprites (slightly different method between cutscenes and gameplay, I think) and their animations can feel a little stilted and canned (and the very first character you see doesn't have a great face design, unfortunately, which didn't help); it's a single-click interface; the first puzzle was opening a panel then opening four clasps then opening another panel then pulling a switch (in the name of tutorialisation and nicely presented as part of a little story beat, but still, ugh) and now I'm looking for ladder rungs so I can actually climb a ladder in my house and get the story started - it's all very 'my first adventure game'.
Okay, had to find a book in a room (by clicking on five hotspots) then a little logic puzzle (AGGGH, though at least this one was very simple). Now I'm into a slightly more meaty puzzle, finding three missing parts (of course!) for my plane. It's not the most exciting thing ever, but it's a step up and it looks like I'll be tempting rats with cheese and all that good adventure game stuff to get them
Incidentally, this whole thing is very Grim Fandango. Apart from the 3D(ish) characters on 2D backgrounds thing, the characters all have Afro-Caribbean masks for faces, the whole thing is very culturally specific with the VO and music etc in fact, and there's talk of the underworld as an adjacent location, there are some gangsters involved in some scam about the way to get there, and the inciting incident is a woman showing up in the lead scoundrel's life who has some connection to it all. Obviously some of that is rather broad, but all together and with some other little specifics, it is clearly a huge influence.
Just a shame the puzzles are a bit bland. By this point in GF I'm clambering up the sides of skyscrapers and befriending demons and reaping souls in the land of the living.
Got a fair bit further with this, and yeah, the puzzles are just uninspired. I'm breezing through it without really thinking. I got to a point where I was finally stuck, so will pause here for now, but I just checked a walkthrough and the only reason I was stuck was that I didn't realise I could get in the plane I'm trying to fix. Now, I should have thought of this really, because they showed me in there in a cutscene and I know the lady is in there waiting for me, but I'd only ever been in there in the cutscene and then they take you back out of it, so it just instinctively felt like a non-gameplay space, plus it turns out you get in via a small hole in the top rather than the big but inaccessible door on the side, so I can see why I didn't consider it.
One puzzle I did like was very simple, which was that I'd been looking at a lovely ceiling fan a lot, thinking 'that's rendered so well, and it looks nice and chunky, great art design', and then at one point realised that I hadn't seen clues as to how to get a propellor anywhere, and instantly clicked that I'd been walking around under one the whole time. They cheat a tiny bit by not giving it a hotspot before the plane puzzle (I think), but that's okay, it helped the moment.
Okay, finished Chapter 1. Good enough to play Chapter 3 (I'll do it straight away, rather than stick to its actual release date in this chronological playthrough), but not enough to buy Chapter 2 (especially not for £9. Maybe if it had been one or two quid, just for completion's sake?).
So, yeah, presentation is great even though it's still very clearly low-budget. The atmosphere, the music, the acting, the visual design, all top notch. It's a shame they couldn't go a bit further with the animation at times, and some of the character designs feel a little cheap, but an impressive amount of cutscenes.
There's not much story to speak of, but that's intentional, and honestly they probably could have done with even less - just have Lina show up, buy the book and then ask to charter your plane. Then goons show up and start shooting at you as you take off and intrigue is created. In the meantime, you've used the puzzles to sow the seeds of the big bad electric company etc. Honestly, the 'meanwhile' cutscenes of the villains feel a bit like padding, and without them this all would have been a nice 30-60 minute intro to a full-length game.
As mentioned though, the puzzles are a bit crap overall. The only places I got stuck were a lack of communication on the game's part which, as with many adventure games' sticking points, I probably could have overcome by dedicating more time to just wandering around and double-checking everything but shouldn't really have had to. Like, I had no reason to go back and check all those bookcases a second time and find out that there's a book on herbs in there which also has some pressed herbs in it of the exact variety I need. I had no reason to think, when I was trying to get rid of a dog, that I should go use a fishing pole with a buoy which was an ambiguous distance away from me because it had a crab in a cage on the bottom of it which I could use to scare the dog away.
There were some smarter ones, though, like a walk-in freezer that you can come back to and re-use for different stuff - at first you have to route power to the overhead heater to thaw the door out and escape, but later you can then re-route power back to the lower heater to use it to grill some bread. It's one of those nice Tim Schafer moments where you feel smart for using your learned knowledge to figure it out and you also appreciate the tidy layered design that went into it. There's another bit where you have to stop a lift halfway down (Grim Fandango!) so you can sneak up under a railway track and put something on it to get run over by a train. It's a nice FT/GF big-budget-feeling moment where you get to feel clever and cool. Shame there wasn't a lot more of that. For the most part, as I think I said about a recent game on this playthrough, it mostly felt like an idle-clicker for adventure veterans, like you see the matrix and it's all coloured keys for coloured doors.
Started Chapter 3. They're trekking through the Lower World now, and it's basically Africa, it's well-presented and nice to have a change of scenery, even if some of the wide shots are embarrassingly low-poly and empty. You get to a mining station which is basically the petrified forest from GF, but it overall is taking in a wider range of influences (Tomb Raider 1, Monkey Island, FoA, Terminator and Avatar, Last Crusade). It's a double-edged sword, though, because having these characters out of their element robs them of the charming specificity they had in chapter 1; they start to feel more like video game characters. You quickly move to the city, though, and see the local chefs from Chapter 1 have been forced to move there to survive and there's a big street market with a fruit stand and street band and so on, and you start to feel the cultural idiosyncrasies again of African immigrants in a western city. It reminded me a lot of North East London. Also, we return to the great running bit of Bwana knowing everyone he meets - even when you jump in a bucket chain (GF) and wind up being held at gunpoint by some revolutionaries (GF), you get out of it immediately because you're mates with that one soldier in the Rasta hat. Normally in an adventure game, you're meeting everyone for the first time. Here, there's this lovely feeling of community, and any outsiders stick out even more. It's like Deponia except good.
Otherwise, all the same issues with the puzzles and the story (very simple goal - find the professor - is a bit overloaded by conspiracy plot).
Okay, finished. Not much more to say, really just scuppered by the puzzles, but also I didn't really feel driven to get through them by the storytelling either. This might be to do with skipping the middle chapter, but I don't think so. The actual beats of the story or really just there to give you the occasional long-term goal, which is fine except there isn't much characterisation to replace it either. You never get to know any of these people. The street market that I was happy to see was there purely to give you a fruit sticker, that's its sole purpose, and they don't take the opportunity to let you chat with the vendors or anything. I was actually on the verge of giving up but then it went into the final act which was a bunch of little isolated puzzles (one of them is 'you need to tell someone the name of this plane, you can see the number of the plane and there's a manifest that tells you what names go with what numbers', that's the level of puzzle we're dealing with here) and extravagant action sequences. While it's cool and impressive to have things exploding and car chases and gods fighting each other, it also does contribute to this feeling more like a Lego game.
So, lots of stuff to enjoy but also some fairly big flaws. (I suspect some of these problems could have been solved by having an Afro-Caribbean person on the creative team rather than a bunch of white guys. I guess they copied that from Grim Fandango too!)
Rating: buckets of atmosphere and charm, but some big design and narrative issues.
No comments:
Post a Comment