The Descendant

 PC
User Score
7.0

Mixed or average reviews- based on 22 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 10 out of 22
  2. Mixed: 9 out of 22
  3. Negative: 3 out of 22

Review this game

  1. Your Score
    0 out of 10
    Rate this:
    • 10
    • 9
    • 8
    • 7
    • 6
    • 5
    • 4
    • 3
    • 2
    • 1
    • 0
    • 0
  1. Submit
  2. Check Spelling
view
per page
  1. Pinnennet
    Mar 26, 2016
    10
    If you like Telltales games or Life is Strange then you’re going to love this!

    Right now they have just released the first episode so this will be a review of that, not the entire season. To start with the episode was quit short, just about an hour. That is my biggest concern this far. Humanity has destroyed earth ending it by nuking the whole surface. Luckily the governments built    If you like Telltales games or Life is Strange then you’re going to love this!

    Right now they have just released the first episode so this will be a review of that, not the entire season.

    To start with the episode was quit short, just about an hour. That is my biggest concern this far. Humanity has destroyed earth ending it by nuking the whole surface. Luckily the governments built the “arks”. They held 4.000 of the most important people underground and made sure that there would be a tomorrow for mankind. You get to play the story throughout two separate timelines. First you play as Mia, a janitor, tasked with maintaining Ark 01. And you also play as Glen, two hundred years later. And Glen tries to find out why Ark 01 never opened when the other arks did.

    Its an intriguing story set in a wonderful apocalypse environment. The graphics isn’t amazing but I believe its better than both The walking dead and Life is strange. Gameplay is point and click puzzles mixed with a lot of dialog and dialog options just like expected. For me the puzzles was somewhat too easy but that could be just me. Something that I really like though was that in the end of the episode every failure I made in the puzzles during my gameplay resulted in one dead member of Ark 01. How many will be alive when I finished the season?

    To make it short. A great episodic game, perhaps a bit short but well worth the money!    … Expand
  2. Lordmetacritics
    Mar 27, 2016
    10
    You got to love this Telltales like game! A bit short but dirt cheap to buy. I dont even mind the somewhat bad voice acting cause the setting is perfect and the story really got me hooked!
  3. PublicNuisance
    May 3, 2019
    8
    I love Tell Tale type games such as Tales of the Borderlands and Wolf Among Us so when I heard about The Descendant I had to give it a go. The first episode is free which is something I wish more episodic games would do. The taster episode was enough to sell me on the rest of the season. It wasn’t the best of the genre but was solid and enjoyable.

    The story was above average and kept me    I love Tell Tale type games such as Tales of the Borderlands and Wolf Among Us so when I heard about The Descendant I had to give it a go. The first episode is free which is something I wish more episodic games would do. The taster episode was enough to sell me on the rest of the season. It wasn’t the best of the genre but was solid and enjoyable.

    The story was above average and kept me entertained. You play as a “janitor” in a post apocalyptic world. Janitors kept watch over cryogenically frozen people, coming out of cryo sleep themselves every so often, after a nuclear war wiped out most of the earth. You are tasked with waking up the “descendants” of ARK-01 two centuries after the war and a couple months after other ARKs have already woken. You will find though that your goals are not what you had first thought and that things didn’t go smoothly at this ARK. The game is a combination of choosing dialogue options that not only further the story and branch it as well as various puzzles. The puzzles range from annoying to easy but serve the purpose of breaking up portions of the game and giving you something different to do well. If the game didn’t have them I would probably be complaining how there wasn’t enough for me to do outside of dialogue. The choices themselves are fairly well done overall. They felt like they gave me a good portion of control over the story and allowed me to make it my own. The ending to the story was rather abrupt and could have used an extra cut scene or two to fill in the gaps at least to provide more of a hint about how things were after the end. I don’t mind having to use my imagination and not having things spelled out but this felt more vague than it should have been. The graphics overall are decent aside from the hair on the characters which was pretty poor. It was neither the best or worst I have seen from games using the Unity engine.

    I played The Descendant on Linux using Valve’s Proton. It ran very well. I didn’t have to use any tweaks at all to get the game running. It didn’t crash on me at all. There was one scene where it only ran at 19 FPS but it only lasted for two minutes and then was back to normal. The game has a 30 FPS lock that is hard coded and can’t be changed. Luckily with a game like this it doesn’t hinder things too much as it isn’t a fast paced game and was at the full 30 FPS for the full game outside of that one scene with lag. There were a couple instances where there was some flickering on the floors but they only lasted a few seconds. Alt-Tab worked without any issues. There were only two graphics options to adjust in the game. I played version 5.0 of the game from Steam. It took me about 6 hours to beat the game. My total system usage for RAM was between 3.3-3.7 GB of RAM while playing. It used between 19-25% of my CPU.

    I paid $3.39 CAD for the full season but can say it is easily worth the full price which is $16.99 CAD at the moment. At the very least give the free episode a try especially if you are a fan of the genre. It is a solid game overall which is enjoyable with a good story and gameplay.

    My Score: 8/10

    My System:

    AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 19.0.3 | Samsung 850 Evo 250GB | Manjaro 18.0.4 | Mate 1.22 | Kernel 5.0.9-2-MANJARO | Proton 4.2-3    … Expand
  4. apokalipto
    Aug 19, 2023
    9
    Very good game. I enjoyed playing this game a lot. I strongly recommend this.

Critic Reviews

All reviews »
Metascore
61

Mixed or average reviews - based on 9 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2 out of 9
  2. Mixed: 5 out of 9
  3. Negative: 2 out of 9
  1. Everyeye.it
    Feb 24, 2017
    45
    Quotation forthcoming.
    Read full review
  2. CD-Action
    Feb 13, 2017
    45
    The developers from Gaming Corps don’t even try to hide the fact that they are shamelessly copying from Telltale. What’s more, The Descendant is a highly imperfect counterfeit – poorly written, not engaging, sometimes unintentionally funny and technically flawed. [02/2017, p.43]
  3. God is a Geek
    Feb 10, 2017
    85
    The Descendant offers a fascinating sci-fi tale intertwined with interesting puzzles, breathing fresh air into a genre that can feel stagnant at times.
    Read full review
See all critic reviews »