Saturday, 8 February 2025

Adventures of Bertram Fiddle 1: A Dreadly Business (2014)

Got through it in a single session as it's quite a short game and very easy. It looks lovely, though there's the occasional little fidelity mismatch (possibly exacerbated by playing on a massive telly in 4K, which Unity does provide as a native setting but may not have been considered a likely setup in 2014) and the backgrounds can sometimes get a bit close to Daedelic's Edna games for my tastes. Plus the cursor doesn't hide during cutscenes, grrrr! The character designs and animations are lovely. Voice acting is great too. The dialogue is fine, though far too dependent on puns. The main issue with the game is the puzzle design - even though I barely stopped the whole way through, I often had no idea why I was solving things, why my solutions worked and sometimes how I was even solving them. Why did using the cork on the street cleaning machine fix it? No idea, but of the few interactive items across the whole map, they were the two that seemed like they might do something, so I tried it and it worked. The game feels very much designed for mobile, with no examine, dialogue trees, hotspot highlight or verbs, and typically puts you in a space of three rooms at a time with an item or so in each of them so it almost feels like an infinite runner, just sliding through and clicking on things as you see them. (Speaking of which, the game also has a couple of action sequences where you press up and down to dodge incoming obstacles, which are mildly irritating and far too long but thankfully are very forgiving.)

Apparently the second episode wraps things up and is a lot longer with better puzzle design (though very buggy, at least on release), co-developed with a more seasoned adventure dev. It would have been nice to play a version of this with the design issues ironed out, but unfortunately I don't own it!

Rating: Pretty, but shallow and some spotty design

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