It's Daedalic's third ever game and reviews were mixed, so I don't have high hopes for this one, but I'll give it a quick go at least.
Played through the tutorial. The overall presentation isn't as obnoxious as most of their other games, and visually it's gorgeous. The voice-acting is a bit rum though - Sadwick sounds like John Leguizamo in Ice Age, which is certainly a choice for your player character, every sound clip has been trimmed a quarter second too close on either end, which is a bizarre error to have been consistently made throughout, and there have been many misreads already.
It really does look nice, though, and I've got a cool slime grub pet for a sidekick and there's a massive beasty having a snooze on the first screen, so I'm not fully disengaged just yet.
Okay, played through the first chapter and I think I'm going to give up. Partly because the dialogue is all over-written and clunky to the point where the whole thing feels like the Merry/Pippin/Treebeard scenes in Two Towers, plus the dialogue clip trimming and inconsistent volume levels make it all extra irritating, and partly because the puzzle solutions tend to be pretty dreadful. There's a lot of wondering if you're struggling to solve a puzzle or there's just an extra step that simply isn't clearly required, sometimes the signposting is really bad, and occasionally I solve something without really understanding what the logic was.
One puzzle requires me to get an egg off a little lizard creature who's playing with it. The egg's red, and your brother's idle animation is juggling some red balls, so the solution is to swap them for the egg. They're much smaller than the egg and they're not ovoid, you can't talk to him about the balls or examine them or anything, but they're red so I guess that's enough. You can randomly talk to him about being scared of things, so of all the animals pick the ones he doesn't believe in and describe them to him until he is scared. If you tell him they have two heads, claws and sharp teeth, then you can combine two turtle statues, a bear claw from a rug, and some dentures, by applying tree resin (which you must collect with a bowl AND NO OTHER WAY) to one of them and then use that resin-covered item on the others (this is not intuitive at all) to make a tiny fake monster which scares him so much he drops one of his balls and covers his eyes. With about five changes this could have been just about reasonable, but as is it's terrible.
And that's without getting into how you're supposed to intuit that a clown hat turned to stone is the perfect thing to put in the top of a cannon and then sit in so you can get launched somewhere, or remember that weird thing from the tutorial where putting your slug in a bowl of water gives him 'sphere shape' mode and realise that this means feeding him a firebug gives him flame powers (but giving him some electricity or him eating a magic stone does nothing).
Another minor irritant is it's one of these games with loads of inventory items but only a few onscreen slots (because we simply must take up most of the screen with the surrounding sack graphic), so loads of scrolling through every time you want to try something, which especially doesn't help when you're trying things a lot thanks to bad puzzles.
Also, while it does look really nice, and there are lots of lovely custom animations, there's often the feeling of different levels of fidelity butting up against each other. Like, the animations' frame rates are sometimes too low, or the cutscenes' art feels a bit too soft, loose and bare compared to the in-game graphics. Again, it's the Daedalic thing of looking nicer in screenshots than in motion.
Before moving on, I had a scrub through a playthrough vid. Your pet slug's different abilities seem to be where any interesting puzzles are at, they really should have focused on those. I forgot to say much about the story - it's bland fantasy stuff with vague prophecies and a humble little creature being tied to the world's fate etc, and it starts off in a really messy way, telling you to go find an audience for the circus (and also practice your human cannonball trick, though this is actually just a distractingly placed set-up for a later puzzle) so your entire goal is 'walk around a bit'. And as soon as you find someone, they turn out to be on an epic all-important quest which for some reason you lie about your own incompetence to join, despite being a whiny sadsack who doesn't have any interest in or suitability for adventure. But then you find out that it involves finding an oracle who might be able to decipher your recurring nightmare and this gives you personal stakes. They should have just cut out the quest, had him wake up from his nightmare at the start and decide to go find an oracle. It's all just really unsatisfying. On the upside, it does have some fun Labyrinth-y concepts, like the two talking rocks who face away from each other and have only ever had the one view each but refuse to let someone move them. But it's all written and performed so irritatingly, it's a bit of a waste. Lots of nice creature and background designs, at least.
Anyway, turns out the game ends with a reveal that it was all a dream of a comatose boy having a fairytale read to him by his father. And I guess the quest to find the king was really the quest to wake up and also we're supposed to feel sad because Sadwick's sacrificing his existence to wake this kid up even though he's a non-sapient imagining of a fictional character and then he breaks the mirror and the kid wakes up THE END. It's all really clunky and sudden and unoriginal, and a very Daedelic thing to do!
Rating: pretty but otherwise very clunky
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