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Sorry. I couldn't finish the game.

I really loved the original, but the "evolution of gaming" magic is gone. It happens so late and after so many story hours (3.5 hours that felt like 3.5 years), that when it finally started, I just wanted to keep playing like I did. The 3D polygons felt so nasty that I just couldn't keep on caring about the characters. The game that I got used to was replaced with something that I wanted at first, but now it was too late. I just wanted to finish my pixelated adventure.

The game was fun at times, but more frustrating than not. Everything felt slow and sluggish from start, heck, you can't even run, and up to the point I was playing it felt more like a classical SNES era JRPG - with some bothersome mini-games that I just wanted to get over with.

Play the original Evoland instead. There, the "gimmick" is really a part of the game, and not just a bothersome mini-game.

Played it four times in a row.
It's not Earthbound, but it's as close as it gets.

Shmup-like Fighting mechanic works perfectly for me in this RPG world.
The bosses are probably the best I ever had in a video game (specifically the ending bosses).
Music is wonderful.

The story really messes you up (in a good way) and makes you think about life.

Try it. Don't give up. Be determined.

If you've liked The Neverhood, this game is for you.

This is an old school point and click adventure game, with all the good and the bad, and although I really enjoyed it, it also reminded me of why the genre is dead today.


The good:

+ Amazing clay-graphics and beautiful not-clay animation (in some cutscenes).
+ Great Terry S. Taylor soundtrack and great voice acting.
+ Deep and immersing story, especially if you read the in-game huge text-wall.
+ Balanced not-too-hard puzzles that you can solve if you sit and think about them for a while.
+ For a Kickstarter game that funded 950,000$, It's pretty long. If you know what you're doing in both games, I believe it's as long as The Neverhood is, although in The Neverhood the puzzles were much harder, so that would make the game much longer on a first playthrough.


The less good:

- Some pixel hunting and tricky hot-spots.
- Too much backtracking with no shortcuts.
- Puzzles are easier than The Neverhood, and sometimes not as original.
- Less animations compared to The Neverhood and smaller world. It FEELS like a Kickstarter game.
- You can't view your inventory, so it's hard to keep track on items you have on you or not. I solved two puzzles by mistake before using an item that should've given me a hint about one of them, and although I didn't need to use it later, it really confused me to hold an item that I couldn't use.
- Some repetitive puzzles that feel like an annoying mini-game you have to solve.
- A little expensive for what you get in my opinion.

And one last thing: you will need a paper and a pen when playing this, a LOT. I pressed the PrintScreen key and copied pictures to MSPaint every time there was some weird shape in the background, so I would remember small details for later puzzles. I enjoyed it, but you might not. It's that kind of puzzle game.

If you've enjoyed The Neverhood, it really is as close as you can get today, as long as the genre is dead. I felt at home.


Kickstarter games and expectations:

I've bought The Neverhood when it was out, at the end of 1996, and played it for hours. I didn't have an internet connection back then, and finding out how to solve hard puzzles was freaking impossible. We had to ask gaming magazines for help, and I still remember how happy I was when I finally solved the BOBBY puzzle.

Kickstarter is a great platform that helps small companies "skip" big companies, but I was first disappointed with Broken Age - only 15 hours of gameplay (for both parts), for almost 3.5mil$. Leisure Suit Larry Reloaded, Dreamfall Chapters and who knows how many more games that I decided not to fund, and soon to be Mighty Number 9, were all the same. I knew they would be short, but not as bad as they were (Dreamfall Chapters is probably the worst of them all. Seriously, if you think Armikrog is a bad descendant to The Neverhood, you wouldn't BELIEVE how far The Longest Journey and Dreamfall Chapters are from one another).

When I invested in Armikrog, I already knew it would not be The Neverhood. It barely scratched the 900k$ it needed, and you have to remember that not every coin goes to game development. 10% goes to Kickstarter, and who knows how many more to rewards, sometimes up to 30% (!).

I knew that they would release a four hours game that would remind me of The Neverhood, and they did. Actually, Armikrog is FAR better than what I've expected. The Neverhood had so much more money, people, time and resources to work with, not to mention DreamWorks and Microsoft, who gave the development team everything they needed. you can't even imagine what great work they managed to pull off here with barely nothing.

Bugs are fixable, and they were fixed. Yes, it was wrong to release it like that. But would you rather them releasing it in 2-5 parts, like other Kickstarter project did? Broken Age was released, surprisingly, in two parts, because of money problems, and Dreamfall Chapters in FIVE! So yes, for the amount of money they had, I really am satisfied with what I got. I can only hope that a big company (like Daedalic Entertainment) would take these amazing people and fund a BIG project, like The Neverhood was at its time.

Armikrog is not The Neverhood and it was never meant to be. It's a good game on its own, and I had fun playing it. It's the only game since The Neverhood that made me use a pen and a paper. It has beautiful clay art, good enough music for the amount of money they had to pay for it, and fun puzzles. It's not perfect. It's not The Neverhood. But it's as freaking close as you can get.

This review is updated up to Book Five.

Basically, playing this game is like watching a film that stops every five minutes, and continues only after you walk around your house three times. Even though saying that, books four and five have MAJOR improvements compared to the first three, and are more streamlined and less running around randomly.

5/10

The good:

+ A direct continuation to TLJ and Dreamfall, and a satisfying conclusion to the whole series.

+ Very good graphics for the amount of money they had. The game feels AAA.

+ Some characters are fun and unforgettable (Zoe, Mira, ♥♥♥♥♥-bot, Bip, Crow, and the Yaga).

+ Voice actors or the above mentioned characters are great.

+ Specific scenes from episode four (Yaga and Oular Village) are just done beautifully.

The bad:

- Technical Design.

• On my Windows 10, Intel i7, GTX560 with 10GB RAM, the game barely scratches max FPS on the lowest possible settings. Sometimes it lags even then, not to mention heating up my GPU drastically compared to other, more demanding games. It feels like too much time and money were invested on looks only.
  
  
• The game lacks many basic animations. When a character picks up an object, jumps, falls or fights, even just stands still, most of the time it looks unnatural.
  
  
• Loading times aren't the best.

- Fake length.

• You move slow, even when you run.
  
  
• You can skip most of the scenes and lines, but there are many random unskippable scenes or dialog lines that must be fully heard - which freezes the momentum of the game. If you read the subtitles faster than the characters talk (which you probably will), you can't always skip them. I found myself yelling at the game more than once to "get on with it!". If you've played the first Assassin's Creed, you know what I'm talking about.
  
  
• Each book takes about 3-5 hours to finish, but if every scene and dialog line were skippable, if you didn't have to mess around with the maps so much and if you wouldn't run so slow or be forced to walk for certain scenes, they would take about 1-2 hours (while still listening to lines casually).

- Bad gameplay and puzzles.

• The most common puzzles are to reach from point A to point B, find an item by "pixel hunting" in a 3D world, speak to a certain character or just wait. Sometimes there will be action scenes, like sneaking behind guards or avoiding enemy attacks - which are done as poorly as possible.
  
  
• You will have to walk for tens of minutes without any sort of a fair guide. There are certain spots where there is a map stand, which you will have to find, reach, look at and analyse. Using the map to find out where to go is a must, and is probably the most annoying and common task in this game.
  
  
• A good puzzle gives you the solution in front of your eyes, and you only have to find a way to solve it by connecting the pieces. This game hides the pieces and forces you to find them in a big and uninteractable environment, and is punishing you by making you walk even more.

- Soundtrack is not interesting.

• With the exception of the background music for the Oular village from book four, which is the single music track in the game that I noticed, the music is not as interesting enough as to be in a story based game. Both Dreamfall and TLJ had great OST, and I really wanted to hear Bjørn Arve Lagim's music again.

- Overall annoying characters and mediocre voice acting.

• Most characters are boring or annoying. This includes mainly Kian, which was not interesting at all even during the original Dreamfall. It might be because that is the nature of those characters. Most are plain and uninspiring.
  
  
• Some favorite characters from earlier games had their voice actors changed. Without spoiling any appearance or non-appearance of April Ryan, changing her voice actress, for example, would feel horrible to old gamers. Some characters suffer this fate.

- Useless choice system.

• The choice system feels useless. The choices never felt important or in place. The game keeps telling you "This character will remember", and "This will have consequences", but you never feel that your choices matter. At the start and end of each book you will be reminded that "Your actions DID matter!" and that "Your future has changed!" but it feels like the game is pathetically trying to defend a flawed mechanic that it wasn't built to hold, and might have been implanted only to draw fans of the genre.
  
  You would rather play Life is Strange or ANY Telltale game.
  
  
• Some choices have such bad balance between them, that one of them is clearly the "right" one, and according to the book-end results more than 90% of the players chose it. If the game wants me to make a specific decision, why include a choice at all?

- Bad writing.

• There is no clear objective at any point, and you don't know or care most of the time.
  
  
• Cliché and expected lines.
  
  
• Kian's parts especially are a "snore-fest".
  
  
• The story as a whole is just not interesting and barely moving forward. While TLJ was one of the most interesting and inspiring story based video games I have ever had the honor to play, Kian saving the world from his people or Zoe finding out that everything is a conspiracy is hardly interesting, compared to April in TLJ, which always had a clear objective that lured me to keep wanting to help her.

In conclusion:

Even a story game should stick to what it knows. This game is heavily based on the worlds of the two previous games, TLJ and Dreamfall, but the new story is unlike them at all, and this game tries to be many things it isn't: It tries to be a Telltale game by including a choice every second, and it tries to be Game of Thrones by including so many war-politics, both which only hinders the game.

The fourth and fifth books tried to change things, and felt much more like the original Dreamfall (which is still light-years below TLJ). It's an improvement, even if it might be too little and too late, but let's face it, no graphics, sound or story can save a game from horrible gameplay.

The worst things about the original Dreamfall was how much backtracking, walking and running we had to suffer. There are no fighting scenes this time, which is a good thing, but the long and tedious runnings are still here, not to mention an unrelated action scene here and there with Kian, and these hold the game back from turning into the beautiful masterpiece that The Longest Journey was.

The game is long not because of its content, but because of how much time is wasted by reaching from point A to point B, and only after you find out where point B is, and it is SO hard to find out where to go, even if you know the name of the place. Like I said at the beginning, playing this game is like watching a film that stops every five minutes, and continues only after you walk around your house three times. Although, again, this is true mostly to the first three books.

I had bad Kickstarter decisions, but this is the worst of them all by far. I did find the ending of the game quite satisfying in giving a complete conclusion to many open threads and characters in the whole series, and the final scene placed a smile on my face, but too little and too late. During most of this journey I was screaming "I don't care about Kian! Go back to Zoe and let me play the game!" and I would have rather watched a let's play of it on Youtube.

After playing 1,000 hours I finally reached the point where I can play this game while doing something else. This is the best game to make my hands busy while listening to lectures, audiobooks and podcasts.

EDIT: 7 years later and almost 2,000 hours and I STILL play this game. The latest update (Repentance) adds more of everything. If you want a return for your investment, this is one of the best games out there.

Amazing and beautiful, but a little less amazing and beautiful as what I wanted it to be.

It's a great game for the nostalgic adventure gamer, although not as great as the 90' point 'n click adventure games. For something made in our time, it was really good. Not as good as Botanicula or Machinarium, but far better than The Dark Eye or Deponia, which I really enjoyed as well.

Expect a small game. This is what it is.