4 people found this review helpful
Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 13.4 hrs on record
Posted: 31 Jan, 2021 @ 9:47am

I'm a backer of this game, so this review could be somewhat biased.
I backed it, because it looked interesting. I never played the demo or saw a trailer before backing it and only started playing it after both story parts were done.

This game is a classic point'n'click adventure, so you travel locations, gather items and solve puzzles to progress further in the story. Almost no interaction to solving a puzzle was absurd, I only had two or three instances of "combining everything with everything". I don't know how that is for people new to this genre though, because I play games in this genre for about 20 years now and so you get used to certain things about how puzzles work. Nevertheless I would say the game is not a hard game in this genre; so you might get stuck a few times, but never to the point that you are stuck for hours.

The story is about our protagonist Lazarus 'Lars' Bundy solving a murder case in Miami. In his investigation he stumbles upon a kidnapping, which leads to a way bigger case than he imagined. Due to help of Alice, an intern, who works for his former boss, they end up in San Leo, where they uncover the intentions behind a bigger plan and try to stop it. In the end this doesn't end as well as planned and they have to chase after the culprit ...
The story is divided into two parts (one for Miami and one for San Leo) and has a few twists here and there, which I didn't see coming and even hit me emotinal sometimes.
Overall the story is nothing ground breaking new, but I love detective stories and the twists and turns got me so much that I wanted to know what happens next. I have to say though that the last part of the story felt a bit rushed compared to the big build-up to it.

The characters were quite enjoyable, you got a few stereotypes here and there, but that's quite normal for a game, which has comedy in it. Also some puzzles are centered around the characteristics of certain persons.
Another thing to mention is, that you can see how Lars character shifts from part 1 to part 2 after a reveal of a certain story twist. Before he was a character, who made jokes here and there, but after that he got more serious and didn't make so many jokes anymore.

The sounds/musics used fit pretty well and helped to make the game more atmospheric. There was only voice, which bothered me. This probably happend due to the COVID-19 situation, because I guess everybody had to record from home; so the voice of Gaia used a microphone very different from the others and you can hear that pretty good in the game.
Also the background music used in the catheral bothered me, but this can probably be fixed easily. The problem here is the loop used ends abruptly - so you know, when it starts repeating.

So overall I would recommend the game to everybody that likes point'n'click adventures and everybody that likes detective stories with comedy parts in it, it doesn't matter if you are new to the genre or not, because it's not a hardcore adventure game like older games.

Ps: Even though the story of this game is done, the devs made an ending, which can more than easily result in a potential sequel sooner or later.
Pps: I haven't played the Broken Sword or Gabriel Knight series yet, so I can't compare it to them like others did.
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