With a heavy heart I must give a thumbs down, this game had so many little annoyances it was infuriating. (I played with true gamer difficulty)
Let's start with just the UI, it's classical LucasArt Maniac Mansion / Monkey Island verb set, but even with hotkeys it's slow and janky. Dialogues do not progress by themself but you must click and it doesn't feel very responsive it's like there's 0.5sec delay to every click. Also, you can't scroll the inventory, only click - all in all, a lot of clicking, a true point & CLICK indeed.
Dialogue with item puzzles is mostly useless, if combination is wrong the main guy will just say "I shouldn't" without any indication or hint what is wrong. You know what? Monkey Island is the only adventure game I passed without ANY walkthru and reason was responsive dialog: with every item interaction Guybrush nudged me into right direction.
And the item puzzles themself? Jesus christ, moon logic. By the end of the game I had learned the rules, "ok apparently need a pilsner, it must be something fkn stupid, let's piss in a jar and drink it and what do you know it worked!"
On top of everything you rarely know your objective. The absolute best was when npc gave me a task, I forgot the details and tried to talk him again and what says main guy? "I don't need to talk to him I got all the information I need". For f sake, YOU have, I don't. Wasn't even the first time.
And red herrings. Someone went overboard with those. 50% of your inventory is trash. 90% of trash cans are trash. 75% of NPCs are hotspotted but you can't talk to them. For every single puzzle there is at least one fake solution at your reach.
The praise:
- unique and great looking art style
- satire against the over saturated craft beer scene hit the spot
The nag:
- unhelpful dialogues
- everything is cluttered with red herrings
- old lucasarts style UI (it's more of a gimmick than pleasant experience)
- moon logic puzzles
- no autoskipping dialog / can't skip dialog using other than LMB / skipping is not responsive enough
- no "exit to desktop" in pause menu
izigame.me
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