A great game as long as you treat it as a fun fictional adventure and don't fall for it as propaganda.

I like the occasional adventure game because they usually have interesting stories and fun dialogue. I looked at the art style in this game and decided to give it a shot. It is indeed a beautifully illustrated game with a combination of beautiful gameplay visuals in conjunction with comic-book-style cutscenes. I love beautiful games that I can just enjoy staring at and appreciating the animation that they created. The story, if you shut your brain off from the illogical eco-political messaging that would be propaganda if they were trying to push that message, is actually pretty good and gets better about halfway through when it changes more from search a wasteland for the occasional item to more find a few things, figure out how to use them, and then progress to the next story beat. I actually recommend it despite some of its flaws, which I'll mention below.

The Positives
-As mentioned, this game is quite stylistic, with beautiful scenes and character designs. While they did the occasional quirky thing with it like give Fay the most ridiculous posture (in an otherwise serious game, it sticks out as goofy), it's mainly just well-drawn and a fun story.

-I liked the story. It unfolds as a "what's going on/how does this world work" kind of thing early on, followed by a "how do they plan to save the world" kind of thing, followed by a "will they/won't they--who's telling the truth/lying and who's right and wrong" kind of thing. I really liked that dynamic. Again, you have to treat it as fiction or you'll think it's a stupid story using real-world knowledge, but it's a fun plot if you treat it as fiction.

-I read a few reviews that hated the voice acting. I thought it was fine. In fact, I prefer voice acting to purely reading, as it gives the character some life and personality beyond the text. I really liked Fay's voice, as it really made the character for me, and the other characters' voices were perfectly fine. I think the most interesting was the son's voice because that voice actor brought a lot of interesting emotions to his performance, which reflected the internal resentment and hostility he had for his father. Fantastically done.

-The pace picked up in the last few chapters, and I was completely engaged. So I think they really did a good job there with interesting plot twists and not making you stop for an hour to solve a puzzle in the middle of an emergency there at the end.


The Negatives
-For a "Final Cut", this game has a lot of mistakes. In the English version, many of the radial button selections are in another language. Like more than a handful (roughly 5-10 by my count). Strange spellings, pronunciations, etc. occur throughout. I also could've sworn that the voiceover and the text were different several times, with one time actually possibly confusing the player when trying to solve a puzzle. Strange, but not that big of a deal.

-I have to mention this just because it's possible that this is a piece of propaganda and not just a fun fictional story. Much of the plot makes no sense in the real world. Nuclear power is currently (as of 2024) the safest clean alternative source of energy to fossil fuels that exists today and is a fantastic transitional energy source to renewables. Anyone who tells you otherwise is spreading misinformation. An incident affecting a nuclear power plant would actually cause people to cling to fossil fuels for longer, not accelerate toward alternative sources. And, most importantly, there are no secret conspiracies to cover up clean energy. The problem with solar and wind today is that they don't generate electricity when the sun and wind are not around. We do not have the efficiency or the battery technology to transition to full renewables yet (we will one day thanks to the free market and private enterprises--see Elon Musk among others), which is why it will take time but will happen. The game even mentions the counterpoint that millions of people will die if humanity does not continue to enable electric grids in developing countries using current methods while pushing for greater efficiency and performance of renewables. Once renewables--thanks to private research and entrepreneurship--reach cost parity with fossil fuels, the world will change at the rate similar to that of the adoption of the smart phone. Trying to force it will only create more Solyndras. So don't take your education on energy science from video game developers. I hope this is simply fiction and not bad propaganda.

-I had a few bugs like the occasional crash and sound not working during the comic book scenes (I can't remember if that was intentional, but I recall having them when I started playing the game a year or so ago and might be mistaken), but I was playing on the new MacBooks with Apple Silicon and so will not knock the game for not testing it on technology that didn't exist when they developed the game.

-It took me a while to get into the game, so I did stop for almost a year after playing about a quarter to a third of it, but that was more me not being in the mood for an adventure game and switching to other games for a while. But once I got into it around Chapter 4 or 5, it picked up and I played through Chapter 8 no problem.

-I have to say that most of the puzzles--especially near the end--were much more logical or intuitive than other adventure games except for one or two that were pretty ridiculous. In two of them, I knew exactly what I had to do and had everything but one little step the developers added that was unnecessary, like switching signs when the person in one room could've just walked into the other unnoticed without that puzzle element. So those were bad, but the rest was actually pretty decent.


Overall, I'm recommending the game for the animation and the fun way of presenting the game and story. And it's not a half-bad adventure game. I would not recommend it if you'll believe what they're saying in the game as true, however, and hope that they just made this as fiction. In fact, the ending seems to waffle back and forth between admitting the plot or actions by the characters are not what we should actually do while occasionally pulling some "Captain Planet" moments and stating what they think should be done (still not ideal and only half-thought-through activist talking points that don't actually translate into reality). So I decided to treat this as a work of fiction and enjoy it rather than take it as serious socio-eco-political commentary, at which point I would've lost some IQ points doing so. And if something I know is not reflective of reality can still entertain me and make me interested in the characters, it's alright in my book.