After trying to play BS3 from my Trilogy disc on Windows 11 and managing to wrestle it into installing but not actually running, I did a very brief skim through YouTube playthroughs of 3 and 4 instead as prep for the fifth game. Main thing of note is that they're both ugly as sin. The first two were never gorgeous - they were inconsistent, they fought against the limited tech rather than worked with it, and they had that same 'working from research photos' vibe as Gabriel Knight and so could feel a little too mundane - but they looked decent enough, especially compared to these 3D monstrosities. The gameplay and puzzles look fairly irritating and dull as well, though it's hard to judge, and wow do they continue the Broken Sword tradition of abrupt endings. Also, they do the Infernal Machine thing of escalating from an original that had two glowing rocks and some lightning, to fighting dragons and flying skeletons.
Now to see how they did with the fifth one!
Okay, so they've gone back to 2D backgrounds, but with cel-shaded 3D characters. It definitely looks a ton better than the previous two, and it's certainly sharper than the first two thanks to the HD resolution. But the art direction is cheap and bland, so it ends up looking like a hidden object game. It looks nowhere near as good as the recent Telltale games or even The Journey Down, to pick two recent games with similar 3D/2D set-ups. Frankly, it doesn't look as good as the Wallace & Gromit game from 5 years earlier, or even Grim Fandango from 16 years earlier, despite the higher fidelity. Good art direction always wins.
The acting is all solid, the writing is fine though it goes on too much, and the puzzles while a little goofy are so far fair and relatively entertaining for an opening section - you witness an art theft and murder, and have to investigate without the cops noticing because George insured the exhibition (he's in insurance now), so you're doing stuff like giving them coffee so they have to go take a piss, or dropping pizza on the floor and telling them the tomato sauce is blood spatter. I've only played about ten minutes or so; it's all fine and a step above, say, The Secret Files, but so far it's not standing up to the heights of the genre.
I've gone a little further with this, and really the word for it all so far is bland. I've also realised what it reminds me of - that awful 3D animated video advertising plots of land on that crypto island. Like, put together surprisingly well, but everyone's dead-eyed and there are no laughs to be had. There's even a dead rat in the background of one scene, with the hotspot label "stretch goal", so it's got the 'weird meta in-jokes about online finances' vibe in there too. Speaking of which, yeah, this was part funded by a Kickstarter. They raised $770K. Not sure how much the total budget was, but comparing it to Broken Age which had a budget of $3.4M (plus funnelling revenue from the release of the first half back into finishing the second half) suggests it wasn't a whole lot more than the Kickstarter money...
Turns out the characters are 3D models rendered into 2D sprites, which make it all the more galling that they didn't do them in 2D art instead, but I guess it's a budget thing.
Okay, looking at Wikipedia, they spent $500K of their own money, and raised $823K. So $1.3M ish budget.
Aagh, it crashed! Otherwise, I'm progressing steadily through. It's pretty hand-holdy, which is a double-edged sword - it does keep the energy up and the story moving forward, but also it makes me feel like I'm just here to do silly puzzles like capturing a cockroach or rearranging bits of paper (or neon sign letters!) rather than investigate the murder.
One more thing about the cheapness is that you never see the characters holding the items they're supposed to be using on things, they just vaguely wave an empty hand in the air. You can get away with this in old pixel art games but it looks pretty naff in HD with 3D-rendered characters. Also little things like conspicuously limited looping idle animations, or characters not moving their mouth if they're talking while, say, holding their hands up at gunpoint. I thought the point of going with 3D characters was that it's a lot easier and quicker to pump these kind of animations out, they've got the worst of both worlds here.
It crashed again, which happened just as I was on the verge of quitting anyway, so I'm giving up on it. This is very much a Broken Sword game - dull with crap puzzles. I'm halfway through the game and I'm still solving puzzles like 'the drunken widow smashed her obscure vinyl record and now won't help you until she can hear it again, the only other location you can go to is the random market stall opposite an office that is otherwise no longer relevant to the story, and they have just started stocking musical birthday cards'. Can YOU work out the solution? Just terrible. One of the main stumbling blocks in this game is scanning every screen each time you hit a new puzzle step, to see if any new hotspots have suddenly been unlocked. I need to look like the dead guy? Oh, I can now suddenly pick up a flower from his body that I couldn't before.
Rating: bland at best; ugly, dull and irritating at worst
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