Recent reviews by 小.smol

this is not good game design, i am thrown into scenarios that i did not want to enter without having control in the scenarios or any way of going back. this is pretentious "art" in interactive form, and for fans of video games i cannot recommend this.

edit: also the controls are buggy and bad, don't expect even the game's only mechanic to work well

I'm reviewing this as a public service announcement that if you have the bug where the game freezes at Count Dracula Duck, you can work around it by changing CPU affinity to only one virtual core and skipping every cutscene related to the fight.

i just decided that bullet points are for wusses and that i am the foremost authority on things that are for wusses

One of those 'always in plain sight, but useable only later on' types of puzzle games. Very reminiscent of classic escape room flash games. While it follows a fairly logical line of progression, it's still unnecessarily convoluted and it feels forced a lot of the time. Prepare to use a walkthrough unless you enjoy pixel hunting. Music is relaxing to listen to. Art is really pretty, especially when it's not coloured (the 'drawn on paper' cutscenes). Very short, very free, very subjective if worth your time or not.

I wanted to like it but that's my fault for having high expectations from three years of labour spent on a 3-4 hour video game. Still, I honestly cannot recommend this game at anything close to original price.
As with many other projects spanning several years and several releases, this game series also seems to have lost its originally intended direction, and it's a damn shame.

- The game suffers from the same value for money spent issue as the earlier episodes (at their release).
- The puzzles are MUCH too easy and shallow, I could count the amount of long-lasting puzzles without obvious solutions on one hand; it feels like the puzzles were added afterwards to make an animated movie into barely a video game.
- The direction they went with in terms of ambiance and art style, however aesthetically pleasing to me, just seems really odd after having played the first two episodes. It's very far from having an "Afro-Caribbean" vibe. It just feels like the original direction of the trilogy was lost somewhere long ago and only the characters remained.
- Voice acting is remarkably atrocious at times. More often than not, this is due to poor mastering or recording, not due to the voice actors. Voiceovers and their scripts felt very rushed to me in several spots.

On the flipside:

- The sountrack is great, it's absolutely amazing, actually. Jamie Salisbury did a really good job.
- The story, while forgettable and without any real plot twists, had a decent conclusion.
- While (as aforementioned) unfitting, the art is gorgeous and I found myself appreciating the scenery of the city in a lot of places, especially when accompanied by the unique soundtrack. I'm a sucker for Blade Runner-like gritty cyberpunk. Dark nights, neon lights and lit up highrises. Raised highways with cars whizzing past. Views of poverty, crime, prostitution, cigarettes, unhappy populace barely making due. I won't go more into detail in fear of spoiling parts of the plot, I think you get the idea.

20€ > $20
http://steamoss.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=258341602