Wednesday 21 August 2024

Anna's Quest (2015)

It's produced by Daedalic but not developed by them so I thought I'd give it a shot. So far, I'm not really enjoying it. It's incredibly twee and bland, from the artstyle through the voice acting to even the font (which is either Comic Sans or very close to it). The VO also goes at a snail's pace and contains fairly regular misreads. The storytelling isn't up to much either, starting with a pointless prologue then the inciting incident told via storybook cutscene (terrible decision) and gameplay kicking in with you stuck in a small room and doing some rote puzzles. It's in the Daedelic engine, so it does also have a few of their standard problems like the characters moving too fast for their walk animation so they look like they're sliding around, and the tacky adverts on the menu screen. Also, there are no custom animations for any interactions which, as I think I've said previously (probably with a Daedalic game), you can't really get away with at high resolution. And even Monkey Island etc would have a few of them! It just feels really cheap. At least that Daedalic guy didn't insist on singing a song at the start, I guess.
Anyway, I just got stuck (which I maintain should not really happen at this early stage of an adventure), and looked up a walkthrough and the solution is nonsense. Basically, you've got to get the collar off a tired but grumpy cat, so you need a bed for it so it'll go to sleep. I got the lumpy pillow and put some toy stuffing in it to make it comfy, but it's still "not appealing enough". That's all the hints I get. Apparently the solution is to use the scissors to cut a bit off the curtains and use that on the pillow. I have no idea why this is the case.
So I'm going to give this a tiny bit more of a chance but I doubt I'll be spending long on it. 

Re. the curtains puzzle, if you try to use them, she does mention that they're soft. So I suppose that if you've guessed that the problem with the pillow is that it's not soft enough yet, then you might decide to try to cut a strip of curtain off and just lay it on top of the pillow, but it's a hell of a reach, especially when the player character Anna is giving you the solution to a bunch of other puzzles before you get to complete them.
Another classic Daedalic issue at play is the ever-present question "is this bad writing or a bad translation or both?" If the lead character didn't say "oh" or "pardon?" or "sorry?" every other line the game would be half as long and a lot more bearable.
So, I got out of the witch's cottage by gathering the ingredients of a spell, then went to a village with a tavern and a blacksmiths and a church and yawwwwwn. My quest is to cure my sick uncle so I go see a wizard and find out my big mission is to... gather the ingredients of a spell! Nope. Along with a new character whose VO is so bad I can only assume they were a backer or something (the main feature of the extras is what seems to be fan art of the game, so they were crowd-sourcing at least some stuff), this is the last straw. I had hoped it would get a little more exciting once I escaped the cottage but it went the other way if anything. So I'm done with it.

Rating: twee, rote and bland with infuriating VO.

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