I've heard mixed things about the gameplay but it looks real nice!
Okay, I think I've been combining this in my head with Harold Halibut. I thought the whole thing was going to feel very stop-motiony, but it turns out that it's 3D modelled characters on photographed diorama backgrounds, which unfortunately means it just ends up looking like a slightly crisper 2010 Telltale game. I think this one is supposed to have more actual puzzling in it, whereas HH is just a conversation-em-up, but also I read that the puzzles are very simple. We'll see. I've played a tiny bit so far, and it's... okay. It's not grabbing me. The tutorial prologue is a woman mucking about with fuses and wires at an abandoned petrol station to get her motorbike running again, and then the game opens proper with a man arriving in a Twin Peaksy town (yawn) with the goal of going to his hotel (yawn). BUT a ghostly guy just appeared in my hotel room so maybe NOT yawn after all?
Okay, this game is terrible. Gave up after finishing chapter one.
Firstly, the translation is awful (one very simple example is "knock the door loud and clearly" - how would even an amateur translator think that was okay?) and the actors misread almost every line as well.
Secondly, the puzzles and inventory system are a bizarre mix of inscrutable and hand-holdy. The only way you can interact with your inventory is via the 'use inventory on' option in your verb coin, which picks one or two options for you from all your objects. So the only thing you have to do is wander around picking everything up and then clicking 'use inventory' on everything and using the thing the game tells you to use. And yet, somehow, it's still difficult to get through because it does shit like forcing you to click through four incredibly boring backstory dialogue branches before giving you the one that you need to progress (so you have to ask the hotel manager five different things about the ownership history of the local mines before you have the option to order a beer - and there are no clues that she would possibly have beer to serve, btw, it's all totally random. Or putting a hotspot of one piece of food on a buffet table right next to the hotspot for all the rest of the food on the table, with no reason to look at that piece anyway (turns out it has a maggot on it, which you can then pick up).
Meanwhile, the inventory puzzles would be completely impossible if they weren't essentially auto-solved. At one point you need to retrieve a guy's pet fox. Initially it's on top of a hut, but at some point it moves across to a tree branch (I have no idea what triggers this), and so the solution is to put a blanket over a nearby rowboat then use the cheese on the cocktail stick and the schnapps and the hollow reed on the fox. This acts as a blowdart which makes it drunk enough to fall off the branch over onto the blanket which somehow is taut enough to act as a trampoline so the fox lands safely and runs off to the next bit of the puzzle. Another goal is to fix some broken live wiring. The thought process that I (or the user interface, I guess) was apparently supposed to go through was "I need to tie those back together by hand without getting electrocuted, the suit of armour in the town square got struck by lightning last night so it definitely doesn't conduct electricity so I should wear it and that will make me safe (??), in order to do so I need to smash it into pieces by throwing a can opener at it, the best place to find a can opener is in the lake, so I should get a fishing rod and some bait (even though I'm not trying to get a fish), for the bait one particular piece of old food on the buffet might have a maggot on it even though the rest doesn't and I can't see any maggots, there are fishing rods behind the hotel desk and the concierge wants me to give her 'a pawn' so I guess I'll give her the massage wand". It's all such egregious puzzle design that I can't even guess where I should be focusing my mindless clicking to get through it quicker.
Most reviews gave this an average score, tending to acknowledge the bad writing and acting and design but excusing it because the game looks so nice. Except it doesn't, it looks like the Land Of The Living section from Grim Fandango! They've clearly all just been bamboozled by the press releases about how they made the art, because the first two paragraphs almost without fail warble on about hand-made dioramas and photogrammetry and LED lights and all that. One review was raving about the very first screen saying it was the stand out of the entire game, seemingly wowed that they put some stars in the sky and a flashing neon light on the garage roof which, apart from being incredibly basic things to be impressed by, as far as I can tell weren't even part of the physical dioramas. Utterly bizarre.
Rating: terrible.
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