izigame.me

SIDEWAYS Thumb !!
Ok, so this is a remake of Benoît Sokal's first game. I recently re-played the original, and while it brought back nostalgic memories, it had a few flaws -- enough to make me not want to play it again.
This remake is truly a re-imagining of the original, while also remaining faithful to the original. Still a point-and-click (no free roaming), but you are in a beautiful full 3D environment (can look all around) and "move" smoothly through it (i.e., no getting stuck on the edge of a doorway or chair when you're trying to walk across a room; ALL motion is pre-rendered short animations). They even added a few brand-new locations that were not in the original game.
I like the new inventory and investigations features; they MOSTLY give you feedback as to when you have finished everything (including finding optional background lore) in a given area -- HOWEVER, you can occasionally move past a missable observation without realizing it, and due to the automatic progress saving system (whenever you complete a siginficant "event", a new save is generated, and it automacally over-writes the previous one), you CAN't just go back and collect/do it.
I don't think you can miss anything that will make it impossible to continue through the adventure, but you absolutely CAN miss all sorts of lore and story background (which is ironic, because that is supposedly the entire focus of the game, so I simply can't imagine why the developers made it so easy to simply MISS so many of these things).
This is MARGINALLY mitigated by a "chapter select" feature, which ONLY unlocks after you have completed the entire game, but even so, this does not really work very well. First of all, you can only re-play each chapter from the beginning, which often means tedious grinding in order to get to the part where you missed something (the "chapter select" menu tells you how many, if any, things you missed in a given chapter, which is nice, but this problem remains), AND while this method is functional for viewing missed signs and documents, it does NOT always work for missed items.
For example I missed finding the statuette on the first island, completed the game without it, went to "chapter select three", found the statuette, and then went to the final chapter to use it -- but I didn't have the statuette!! After looking online, I discovered that the statuette is apparently stashed in a cabinet onboard the Hydraflot, and you hafta remember to pick it up out of there before walking to the final volcano, but I did NOT have the statuette with me (even though I found it in Chapter three, and then selected Chaper seven, but the Hydraflot wasn't even there, so there was no cabinet from which I could pick it up, and therefore I couldn't place it on the pedastal).
I even tried re-starting at Chapter 6, but the statuette wasn't in the Hydraflot then, either. Which means I prolly would hafta re-play Chapter 3, find the statutette, and then re-play THE ENTIRE REMAINDER OF THE GAME, and then I would (hopefully) have the statuette with me to use in the Volcano Temple at the end of the game. I am not going to do this.
The "hold Y button" to show hotspots and movement options is VERY useful. HOWEVER, there is a small handful of extremely sneaky, devious -- perhaps downright unfair! -- puzzles that rely on observing minute, tiny details in the environment, and while most of the puzzles make a reasonable amount of sense, and you have clear indications of exactly how many hotspots (where you can move, which journals, signs, and letters you can read, where you can pick up or use an inventory item, etc...), there are in any given location, these few OUTRAGEOUSLY more difficult puzzles rely on you spotting things in the environment that are NOT indicated as hotspots by holding Y, and EACH of these puzzles will stop you cold dead (i.e., it's not just like you'll miss a little bit of extra lore if you don't solve these; you're STUCK).
This is mitigated SOMEWHAT by the in-game hint system, but even though the actual ANSWERS to the puzzles were eventually given to me, so I was able to finish the game, this small handful of puzzles -- again with difficulty WAY out-surpassing everything else in the game -- basically ruined the game for me (why did they hafta do it this way?).
For example towards the very end of the game, you are in a temple near the top of a volcano, and after stumbling around you find five vertical sliders (each of which can be moved top, middle, bottom) arranged from left to right on a panel. From reading various clues, you know that these are supposed to open the air shutters. The "clue" for how to arrange these five sliders is COMPLETELY obscure -- even after I looked it up, and "found" it, I was still completely astonished -- NO WAY would I ever have found/thought that!!
Another negative is the amount of reading. OK, so I get it - this is a story-rich game, and normally I love this sort of thing - but OMG, the number of things that you have to read through (and often in a cursive font with no "plain typewriter text" option)!! Journals, letters, notes, posters, flyers, OMG!! I like being a completionist, and didn't want to miss anything, but holy crap; I thought I would NEVER get out of the lighthouse in the beginning, just because I kept finding more things that I had to read through!!
So, yah, sorry Benoît (RIP) -- these games will always hold a special place in my heart, but I really think those three puzzles (the angels in the church -- I STILL don't see 6 things around the final angel -- the giraffe summoning thingie, and opening the shutters in the temple coming TOTALLY out of left field in difficulty, along with the fact that all other hotspots in the game are CLEARLY indicated by pressing the Y button, were enough to RUIN this game for me.
Like, I played for several hours, and pretty much assumed that everything that I would need to look at or use was highlighted by pressing Y -- THEN ALL OF A SUDDEN THEY THROW THESE "TOTALLY SQUINT AND FIND THESE TINY LITTLE UN-MARKED DETAILS IN THE ENVIRONMENT OTHERWISE YOU WILL BE STUCK HERE FOREVER" things at ya.
I never like it when you play a game for several hours, and you THINK that you know all of the mechanics that are available to you, and then they throw something like this at you: HEY, guess what!? All of a sudden, we're going to occasionally throw a puzzle at you and we're NOT going to indicate the hotspots that you need in order to make progress, even though we have shown you EVERY hotspot in the first several hours of gameplay!
There's even another one of these aspects: As you pick up and collect inventory items, you can spin them in 3D, and each item has a few details on it, and the cursor clearly changes to a magnifying glass icon when you are in the right spot, and accompanying text, with little "complted" checkmarks, let you know when you have found everything on the inventory item.
EXCEPT FOR TWO OF THEM -- the alligator skin on the wall of the bar, and the little doo-hicky thingie that you have to place in the control wheel in order to open the heart of the volcano temple -- these each have a "hidden compartment" or "hidden piece that can be moved", and nothing else in the game operates this way, and there is no indication given at ANY point in the game that this is even an option. Should've been part of something in the very beginning, if they were going to include this mechanic, not spring it on the player after many hours of game play
Nope. Sorry, nope.
p.s. I STILL don't understand why the snake BIT me, then later on hissed at me, preventing me from moving a lever (but not biting me this time), and still later on slithered away (after hearing a flute-like noise in the distance), allowing me to pull the lever ... What triggered each of these three different possible reactions???