Recent reviews by MultipleMonomials

I'm a big fan of the Edna & Harvey and Deponia series, so I figured I'd give this game a shot. I'd say that I enjoyed myself most of the time playing it. It has a pretty immersive story, and the gameplay of exploring stuff and solving puzzles can be pretty fun. However, it is a bit rougher around the edges than most of Daedalic's other point-and-clicks, and it doesn't quite have the magic that the other series do.

The first big difference is the tone. While Daedalic's other point-and-clicks are comedic (and often very black comedy), this one takes itself much more seriously. It's full of Very Serious People doing Very Serious Things and Saving the World. It's also a lot darker. Most of the characters are rather unlikeable and dislike every other character, which doesn't make them too easy to identify with or root for. At first I thought it was just weird writing, but I actually think it was quite intentional. I think the game's writers wanted to show how, even if grand plans and god-level technology were used to try and save the world, basic human nature and human flaws will likely win out and destroy us. It's a valid point, and one that I can't deny has merit after the last few years. But it's not exactly a story that will give one much hope for the future.

Also, fair warning: a significant part of the game is characters behaving absolutely awfully to the only woman on their team, talking down to her and assuming that she has no ability to do anything. The level of sexism is ridiculous and rather depressing. While I don't think that the developers themselves are sexist, they certainly succeeded in making the player experience what it's like to have people be sexist against you! I'd definitely understand if this turned some people off from the game entirely.

A New Beginning is also a bit technically rougher than other games. The English translation has a number of issues, with some item descriptions and other text labels here and there showing up in Russian and French (I think). Thankfully, it never blocks progress, but it's rather jarring. There are also a lot of typos and weird grammar constructs (some of which the voice actors fixed!), and the text has a weird aversion to contractions. The English voice acting is also middling to bad. In particular, the male lead's voice actor often reads stuff with the wrong emotions/emphasis, and it just sounds like lines being read off a script. Last but not least, I ran into a bug where one of the puzzles (the bomb defuse) behaved incorrectly, making it impossible to solve and driving me crazy till I looked it up. Considering the devs don't speak English I can understand a few localization mistakes, but none of their other games that I've played have anywhere near this level of issues.

Regarding the gameplay itself, A New Beginning can be a bit... some would say "challenging", but I'd say "unpleasantly hard". It's OK for 90% of the game, but there are a few places that require more brainpower than I was willing to commit. For example, 85% of the way through the game, you'll have to recall a password that was given to you in the first hour. Can't remember? Tough! Your only option is a walkthrough. Or how about when you need to get a certain very annoying person to move so you can search his room. You can't do it by talking to him, threatening him, or bribing him. You have to find a suspicious towel in a washing machine. Yes, seriously. Meanwhile, a lot of the puzzle sections are hard not because they are inherently difficult to solve, but because the game doesn't tell you the rules up front and you have to just struggle and futz around until you work it out. It's common for adventure games to have difficult puzzles, and some people might enjoy the challenge, but I really didn't.

But, there are some things I quite liked about A New Beginning. The art, for one -- it's very well done, especially in the larger outdoor areas and the cinematics. It's beautifully drawn and often quite detailed, and the mix between a more animated style and more realistic one fits the tone of the story well. The story, also, has some complexity to it. The basic premise is similar to other time travel fiction like Travelers, but it takes things in a different direction -- largely by having a crew of misfit time travelers who *don't* get along, and showing us how they handle that. And I have to admit, part of me loves how cynical Bent is -- after my few years in academia, I was feeling exactly the same way, like it was me against the world, and the world was winning. So he's pretty convincing to me. The ending resolves things in a clever way, and with a somewhat more optimistic tone than most of the story. Turns out that generating media attention about a near-miss catastrophe is as good at spurring change as, if not better than, the catastrophe itself! But, it also changes the context of most of the story before it, and you're left to believe one of three things:

*One character has been lying to you in their flashbacks for the entire game
*Another character has gone insane and decided to destroy the future rather than save it
*The two different time travelers come from different futures: one where no time travel happened at all, and the other where the first attempt to change the past failed

It's an interesting way to end it, and I have mixed feelings.

TLDR: Not my favorite Daedalic game, but still worth playing if you don't take it too seriously.

Pros:
* Beautiful art
* Interesting and thought-provoking story for a good chunk of the game
* Good music when there is music
* Characters do have some depth to them, though they take their sweet time showing it

Cons:
* English voice acting is mediocre at best.
* Localization issues. Lots of typos and weird grammar.
* One puzzle bugged out and was impossible to complete, driving me insane for a bit
* The story suffers from a few bad plot holes and incredibly poor decisions, even accounting for time travel shenanigans

Depends on you:
* Most characters are quite unlikeable
* Gameplay and puzzles can get pretty difficult

For me, The Silent Age has a rare honor. There are many games that I stopped playing because I lost interest and my desire to play the game tapered off. But The Silent Age is one of the few that I stopped playing because I was frustrated at it. Frustrated at its gameplay, frustrated at its execution, and frustrated because I felt like I was promised something that was not delivered.

Now, the adventure game genre is no stranger to puzzles with crazy logic. Be it using a parrot with a police radio, using a stuffed rabbit with a memorial shrine, or using a balloon art wrench on a chandelier, I have played games with pretty weird puzzle solutions. This game is not that. In fact, I'd say the puzzles were on the easy side, at least once you actually found the stuff that you needed (there's no option to highlight the clickable items in a scene).

The thing is, most adventure games are planned out carefully so that you get items in a progression that makes sense. If you, the player, work hard to get something useful, it's comforting to know that that item can stay with you for the rest of the game and help solve problems. Think like the croquet mallet in Edna and Harvey -- you get it early, and use it for like 5 different puzzles throughout the game. This also helps with immersion and realism because your character takes (semi-)logical actions with the items they acquire -- they don't just pointlessly throw away something that would be useful later.

The Silent Age was clearly designed with no regard for this progression and it drives me insane. The worst example I can think of is when your character spends a fair amount of time acquiring a chainsaw and the fuel to run it. Finally! You can get through the wooden door that is blocking your way! Only, once you cut down the door, you're confronted with... another wooden door. Easy, right? Just use the chainsaw again! Nope, it's been removed from your inventory, with zero explanation. No "it broke" or "it ran out of gas". It's just gone, and you can't even go back through the door where you left it. Instead, you have to spend the next 10+ minutes moving stuff around until you find... an axe. To chop down the next door. Ooookay. This sequence completely ruined my immersion in the game, never to recover.

Frankly, I think that what happened was that each small part of the game was designed in isolation, with the assumption "oh, we'll just make the player character drop all their items" used as a hand-wavey way to stop people from playing the game in unintended ways. But this really hurts the game, because the puzzles end up being more about pixel hunting looking for the few items you need rather than thinking up creative ways to use items. Also, most areas ended up pretty confined and linear -- while your player character technically has a whole city to run around in, you often feel like you can only move on rails through a linear sequence of screens. Compared to other point-and-click adventures, it just feels very railroad-y and like you can't be creative.

However, the gameplay was only part of the reason I got frustrated with this game. Another big issue is the sound, or lack thereof. Unusually for an adventure game, The Silent Age is almost completely without music. At first I thought it'd just be the opening scenes, but I got over halfway through the game and most areas just had a background noise track playing. Maybe it's just my preference, but I'm a game music lover -- music helps set the tone of the game, and provides something for my ears to "do". Without music, the game feels... empty, impersonal. (A feeling not helped by the game's art, which, while it has a unique and attractive style, feels flat and undetailed when viewed on a large monitor). There is some voice acting for the more important lines, which is... fine, I guess, but it doesn't feel like it adds much. All in all, I felt like the game experience would not have been very different if I just didn't put on my headphones at all.

This brings us to the last big issue: the story. I'll try to keep spoilers to a minimum, but suffice it to say that the story feels quite unoriginal in a world already saturated with time-travel fiction and pandemic-based apocalypses. For pretty much every element of the plot in this game, I can think of something else (Steins Gate, A New Beginning, A Whole Nother Story, Doctor Who, Heroes, Travelers, etc) that did it better. But even if the plot is unoriginal, a story can be supported on the backs of its characters, right? Well, not in the case of The Silent Age. Your main character is simply an unknown quantity, an average Joe who has little personality and who we never learn much about. And the only other character who gets much screen time spends most of it being an unhelpful jerk to the main character and talking down to him for daring to try and save the world... and yet, he's also technically a good guy, so you have to work with him. Neither of these dudes are very likeable or charismatic.

Full disclosure, I only got about 2/3 of the way through the game, so maybe something happens with the story in the last few parts that makes it a lot more fun and satisfying. However, since, by where I stopped, they already strongly imply that time is immutable and the world is always going to be destroyed in a stable time loop, I'm not holding my breath.

I will say one nice thing about this game though, which is that the opening ~20 minutes is pretty good. You start as a janitor for Evil Science Inc, then, after a dying time traveler shows up in your lab, you get arrested under national security charges and interrogated. Just as it looks bleak, you are transported forward into the future, and escape your cell to find that everyone is dead and the place is covered in wanted posters where you are Public Enemy No. 1. This part has a lot of intrigue and subtle storytelling, I like it! It's just a pity that the rest of the game could not keep up this quality standard.

All in all, I do not think I will continue playing The Silent Age past where I am, and more than that, I feel cheated. Based on the trailer, the screenshots, and the description, this game had a lot of promise, but it just didn't live up to what I was hoping for.

Let me preface this by saying that Analgesic's previous game, Anodyne 2, is in my personal top 5 games of all time, and I still think back to it (and listen to the OST) several years later. So, I have been awaiting Sephonie pretty excitedly, and got it within the first few days after it came out.

I'd have to say that Sephonie is... pretty different from Anodyne 2, and not really what I expected (to the extent that Analgesic's games can be expected at all). Whereas Analgesic's previous games have drawn very heavily from 90s era 2D games (and some 3D ones), both for fun references and for actual themes and styles, Sephonie goes off in very much its own direction. As with any new experiment, there are some attributes of it that work amazingly, and some that feel like a bit of a step back.

Gameplay is mostly about 3D platforming and exploration, with occasional interludes to a 2D tetris-like block placing game. Personally I'm not a huge fan of hard puzzles in games when I'm trying to have fun -- it makes it feel too much like work. So, I was a bit worried that these might be game-interruptingly hard, but in fact it was the opposite: they are very easy. With the exception of one or two boss-level ones, they don't require any planning ahead, you can just place blocks in the current best spot and steadily advance through the level that way. There are *some* opportunities to get bonuses by being smarter, but it's very optional. By the end, you even get an "undo" and "erase" feature to help recover from mistakes. I found the levels enjoyable and chill, but I can't help but think that a lot of players would appreciate a harder mode that gives more of a challenge.

The 3D gameplay, meanwhile, involves plenty of platforming puzzles that start easy but get steadily harder as the game progresses. There's some somewhat fiddly wallrunning and wall-climbing involved, but the nature of the levels reminds me most of all of games like A Hat in Time and Super Mario Galaxy. If you've played those, there are likely some elements you'll recognize here. To me, the levels were almost always a fun challenge, and they're sprinkled with extra hidden collectibles. If you've played Anodyne 2, you know that the devs love making you borderline glitch the game physics in order to reach the most well-hidden easter eggs, and that tradition is alive and well in this game. Several times I saw some inconspicuous platform or extra ledge, spent 10 or 20 minutes figuring out how to get up there, and was rewarded by a hidden secret that I'm sure a lot of people would have missed. I know that some reviewers complained about the controls, but personally, playing on controller, I didn't really have issues. While the way that wall rides work can be a bit wonky, it feels like an intentional part of the game that challenges you, not a programming oversight.

The art style might be the single biggest difference to Anodyne 2, which used mostly pixel art but also featured a 3D overworld done in a very intentionally retro, barely-any-poly style. In Sephonie, the pixel art is gone, replaced by a fully 3D world that doesn't feel explicitly retro but still uses a fairly low-poly, low-resolution style. In Anodyne 2, the 3D art worked because it was intentionally kind of unsettling in many places, contributing to the game's general, very intentional feel of unsettlingness. But in Sephonie, without that explicit retro style, the art and animation just feels a little sparse compared to other games in the genre. I will say, the game does the job of creating intriguingly alien and sometimes beautiful landscapes that are also functioning levels, which isn't an easy task. But it wasn't something I wanted to frame and put on my wall like a lot of the pixel art from the Anodyne series. This probably just comes from the fact that 3D art is hard, and it's a lot tougher for a team of a few people to put together a rich 3D environment than a rich 2D one without economizing on pixel and polygon count. I just miss the pixel art from the other games, and think that it was a more unique and beautiful style for Analgesic to use.

Personally, while all of their games suck me in, I have thought that Analgesic has struggled to find balance in their stories with both conveying their desired message and telling a coherent story. Anodyne 1 had a lot of beautifully written text and mini-storylines, but the overarching story made absolutely no sense to me and I have no idea who the final boss is. Then there was Even the Ocean, which, while an enjoyable game, has a big problem with pandering too explicitly to the player about its message and breaking their immersion (think Season 11/12 Doctor Who... oof). Anodyne 2, in my opinion, hit a perfect balance finally with a complex, eloquent, and intriguing tale that is not overexplained but does eventually make sense, and also expertly conveys Analgesic's anti-religion argument.

The story of Sephonie is both similar to Analgesic's previous games and very different from them. It's set a few decades into the future, where three scientists (and zero deckhands) take a boat out into the Pacific to study an unexplored island. However, their ship is destroyed by some sort of mysterious force field, and the three must figure out how to survive on the island until help arrives. As they explore deeper, cataloging plants and animals they find, they discover that it may not be as uninhabited as they'd thought.

The story is about their discoveries on the island, but also centers on the three scientists themselves: their struggles in childhood, how they got to the island, their relationships, etc. This is mostly told through tidbits of text with each secret collectible and through cutscenes after each milestone. The entire game is somewhat surreal, but these cutscenes are especially so, blending together 2D and 3D scenes from characters' lives into a bizzare slideshow that maxed out my personal trippiness meter. I found it to be a pretty unique way to tell a story that I hadn't seen before, but it's definitely a little more on the abstract side.

Also of note is the ending. If you are looking for a nice pleasant game to cheer you up, this game is not for you. Knowing Analgesic, I expected to take nothing positive at face value, and for there to be a sudden twist at the end, and both of these came true, but not quite in the way I expected. It's not that everyone dies at the end, but in a way it's almost worse. There is an epilogue that clears things up somewhat (don't skip it!), but it's still a very mixed ending at best. The message I took is that true connection and teamwork between people may be just an utopian ideal, impossible to reach. Sephonie definitely succeeds at making me feel all of the feels, but I won't deny that I walked away a bit depressed.

Last but not least, the music! I'm not a music critic, but while I miss the chiptune beats of Anodyne 2, the music of this game is mesmerizing in its own way, and definitely keeps up the Analgesic standard of having some of the best game music around.

In conclusion:
Pros:
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• Great music
  
• Unique story
  
• Fun 3D platforming
  
• Sense of mystery and exploration
  
• Trippy enough to make you go "whaaaat"
  
• Lots of easter eggs, for replay value and extra challenge

Cons:
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• 3D art and animations sometimes feel sparse and undetailed rather than stylized
  
• No pixel art :'(
  
• Ending sudden, feels almost unfinished

Depends on you:
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• Downer ending
  
• Story is more abstract, less of an epic quest
  
• 2D puzzles are easy
  
• Wall-riding is unforgiving of minor mistakes
  
• Less humor / more serious tone throughout

This game, overall, is pretty decent. Two things kept me coming back to it: the beautiful art (both the environments and the collectibles) and the intriguing story. The art in this game is exactly what it says on the tin: hundreds of detailed environments drawn in Jetons-esque, retrofuturistic style. If you're a sucker for that, like I am, then you'll definitely enjoy moving throughout the game's many locations. And while the basic premise of the story (robot escapes from an AI-run factory, has to scavenge a post-apocalyptic wasteland to survive) may not seem the most original, the game still goes in a direction I wasn't expecting with it, and I was genuinely somewhat surprised at how the plot ended.

Gameplay in Retro Machina is something of a mix between several different styles: Puzzle-solving exploration, exploration while fighting enemies, and enclosed encounters where you have to defeat a number of gradually spawning enemies to advance. Other reviews were correct to compare it to Bastion, but I feel like Bastion's combat is executed quite a lot better than Retro Machina's. In Bastion, movement felt very free and there were a number of different weapons and attacks you could try out until one fit your play style. However, Retro Machina's main character only has one weapon option and a small selection of upgrades and special attacks, none of which (to me) make that much of a difference in combat. Additionally, movement feels fairly rigid and not very enjoyable (more on that later). So, you will pretty much be fighting enemies a single way for the entire game.

Some extra depth is added to combat by the fact that you can remote-control one enemy of your choice at any time, in and out of combat. However, even once you get past the god-awful interface for selecting an enemy during combat, I didn't feel like this turned out to be that useful. The complex battles and some non-ideal controller button assignments mean it's difficult to effectively control two different robots in a battle at the same time, at least in my experience (but maybe I'm just bad). So, when I did control a robot in battle, I generally had to attack with the robot while constantly rolling and evading with my main character to avoid getting shot to pieces. Except in the cases where there are giant robots with very powerful attacks, it just didn't seem that worthwhile to do.

The best thing I can say about the gameplay is that the game has a huge area to explore, and it is absolutely stuffed full of secret areas and side paths. I think the devs hit a pretty good balance where I could almost always find the things I needed to progress the main story, but there were also a great deal of tough-to-find secret areas that I walked right by. It was always very rewarding to see something nearly out of view to the side, investigate it more closely, and find a collectible or upgrade that I otherwise would have walked right by.

I will say, I did run into a fair number of bugs, both inside and outside combat. For instance, about 1/4 of the time I fell off a ledge and respawned while in Atomic City, my character would be stuck and unable to move until I spent a few seconds wiggling the joystick and rolling in different directions. Additionally, there were a few areas where my character did not appear on the minimap at all, or where the minimap was actually drawn incorrectly relative to the game world. There are also a fair few typos and grammar mistakes in the lore collectibles -- they really need to go for a proofreading pass through those with a native English speaker, it was kind of immersion breaking at times. And last but not least, the game has no way to select which controller to use or disable the use of a controller, so when I first ran it, it detected my 3D mouse as a game controller and was unusable until I uninstalled the drivers for said mouse. None of these issues kept me from enjoying the game, but they definitely indicate it could have used a bit more QA.

However, the biggest problem with the game is not bugs or combat, it's the main character's movement system. Inexplicably, despite the game essentially requiring a controller, the main character's walking speed is not adjustable! It's on-off, either walking or standing totally still. Weirdly enough, the robots that you remote control *do* have variable walking speed, just not your main character. This makes the platforming segments a fair bit harder. Also making platforming annoying is the fact that you take quite a bit of fall damage if you fly out over a gap with the jetpack and then fall. However, there are 10s of secrets that can only be found by flying out over a gap and landing on a nearly invisible platform! It feels like the fall damage is the game's way of punishing you for guessing incorrectly that there's a secret platform, and I think the game would be quite a bit more fun without fall damage.

Also, Retro Machina is a game with a fair amount of backtracking. What makes this painful is that there is no way, no matter what upgrades you get, to move any faster than your character's base walking speed. Both the jetpack and the dodge roll seem to have been "balanced" so that you can't travel more quickly using them. This means you will sometimes be spending 5-10 minutes ambling at a walking speed through areas you already went through to just reach a newly unlocked door. The game has a fast travel teleport system but, especially in the earlier levels, the fast travel points are very far away from areas you'd want to go. Please, devs, if you're reading this, either add some more fast travel points or add a sprint function! It would be much appreciated.

Almost as bad as the movement situation is the lack of good upgrades. The devs made all the effort to put together an upgrade system and store, but then made it so you can only buy one or two things with each type of upgrade module. Many of these upgrades are not particularly helpful in combat, like the special AoE attacks that will likely lead to you taking a ton of damage if you try to get close enough to enemies to actually use them. Plus, these attacks cost energy to use, energy which recharges extremely slowly and is very rare to pick up. It'd be like if there were only 1-2 Black Tonics per level in Bastion, and only two possible attacks you could use them with. Devs, please, we need some more variety in these attacks and upgrades -- how about a ranged sniping attack, or a health regen upgrade, or a movement speed upgrade? We also need more ways to get health and energy. Here's an idea: since you naturally aquire thousands of the "gear" currency as you defeat enemies, and have almost nothing to spend it on once you get your upgrades, how about letting us trade gears for health and energy at vending machines? That'd make the whole special attack system more feasible.

All in all, Retro Machina's amazing art, interesting story, and engaging exploration are enough to make it a good game and worth checking out if all this sounds interesting to you. However, I think that if the devs were to put some more polish into the combat, movement, and upgrade system, this could go from just a good game to an absolutely great game.

Awesome music, beautiful pixel art, thought provoking and mind bending story, what's not to love?