I can wholeheartedly recommend this game. It's gorgeous, it has a nice story beginning to end, the characters are likeable, and the music and voice acting is excellent.
I'm pretty okay at adventure games, but not the best. I've played quite some (among my favourite are Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit the Road, Machinarium and Book of Unwritten Tales), and I'm familiar with theI can wholeheartedly recommend this game. It's gorgeous, it has a nice story beginning to end, the characters are likeable, and the music and voice acting is excellent.
I'm pretty okay at adventure games, but not the best. I've played quite some (among my favourite are Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit the Road, Machinarium and Book of Unwritten Tales), and I'm familiar with the general way of how adventure game puzzles are structured. The puzzles ranged from simple to challenging, but I never found them dull or illogical. I reached for a walkthrough once, and when I read the solution to that puzzle, I immediately realized where I had forgotten to connect the dots. I had disregarded some comment by one of the characters as irrelevant and forgotten about it, but it turned out to be relevant after all. That's something that happens to me a lot more in adventure games, and I'm fine with that. Never have I thought "Well how was I supposed to come up with that?". As is common in adventure games, sometimes you do think "Why can't I just solve it this way? That would be way easier!" or "Surely that other character has the necessary qualifications to solve this issue for me". But obviously, if it were way easier, or you would let someone else fix things for you, you wouldn't have a puzzle to solve, now would you? :).
There are some puzzles where Vella or Shay will give a hint when you do it wrong a few times. Sometimes I thought they were a bit soon with that, I would have preferred to muddle along a bit more without any hints.
The characters often have funny things to say, and I've laughed out loud on many occasions. I have properly enjoyed myself playing the game, and I found the end satisfying. Sometimes a game is very nice while you play, but they botch up something at the end that leaves you unsatisfied even though you enjoyed it right up to the end. Luckily, this is not the case here. Oh, on that subject: the pictures surrounding the ending credits give a sort of epilogue to the story, so even if you usually click through the credits, you might not want to do that for this game.
It runs fine on my Linux machine, which is nice, because I only boot Windows for games that don't run or don't run well natively on Linux. But I could use my preferred OS just fine.
I could only find one problem with the game, related to clicking on objects in a scene. It turns out I need a lot of explanation to make clear what the problem is; so here goes.
When you try to use an object from your inventory on an object in the scene, the object in the scene is highlighted. However, when you simply hover your cursor on an object in the scene, it's not highlighted. The cursor does indicate you can click, but the thing you're clicking on is not indicated. This can get confusing when you're trying to determine if something is clickable or not; whether it's background or a usable object. Say there's a person in the scene, and a space ship control panel next to that person. When I hover over the control panel, the cursor indicates I can click. But when I click, it becomes clear I've chosen to interact with the person. This can be confusing: is it indeed the case I can't click the control panel, or was I clicking too close to the person? After several clicks which initiate talking to the person, I'm concluding the control panel is part of the background scene. This can be annoying, because knowing what you can interact with is very important in a point-and-click adventure. Note that there is no pixel hunting in this game; it's not as bad as that. Everything you can interact with has a decent size, it's just that not everything that has a decent size can be interacted with :).
I'm surprised by the amount of negative publicity around this game. These negative reviews are the main reason for me to write this review, because I think they paint a wrong picture of the game and might put off people who would love the game. So I'll admit I might be somewhat biased in my review, although I'm really doing my best not to be. But I feel a lot of the negativity and bashing is also not because of the actual game itself but because of other things surrounding it. People seem to be actively looking for things to fault the game for because there is something else they don't like for some reason or the other. Whether that be consciously or unconsciously.
This game might not be your thing, and that's okay. But I find it very hard to find fault with the quality of this game. If you think this could be your thing, don't be disheartened by the negative reviews. It would be such a shame if you decided not to buy this game because of those, and missed out on the great joy you would have had playing it!… Expand
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