izigame.me

I love old games. I love them to the point of often choosing an original release on some outdated console over a more accessible port or remake. When the remake of Amerzone was announced, I felt careful excitement. Curiosity prompted me to try it out on release despite my anxiety that it could spoil the greatness of the original.

Overall, I will say that these anxieties have been proven completely wrong. This remake is very faithful, both conceptually and spiritually, to the work of Benoit Sokal. The dialogues, newly recorded, are the exact same ones as in the original. So is the story, for the most part. The developers have added side quests, puzzles and a lot of material exploring the lore, and they do the part very well. I would smell fakeness from a mile, but there is none of that in the remake. All of the bonus content has clearly been carefully thought out, created with love and respect to the original work. I truly applaud the devs for being able to take someone's past project and let it grow organically rather than artificially bloating it with popular or sellable nonsense. What I personally particularly enjoyed is the exploration of our protagonist. He's got a model (hands and body, at least), we can read his thoughts in his journal, we can get to know him more. As someone who has been imagining him as a standalone character for the past 15 years, this was really fun for me. Although, if I must, I'll admit the amount of new content made the new system a bit complicated to navigate. The original Amerzone was very powerful in its simplicity, which is not the case here. Not a fatal flaw by any means, just an observation.

Now for the audiovisual side, graphically it is beautiful, but I found the music underwhelming. It's not that it was bad, but it wasn't memorable or atmospheric enough for my tastes, just generic BGM to forget. This might sound funny considering the original game only had one piece of music, but it was very memorable, unlike the pieces playing in the remake.

Unfortunately, the game runs poorly on a powerful machine, which makes me think there are optimisation errors. I haven't encountered game breaking bugs, but some were present nonetheless. When you take off the diving suit (Shipwreck Island), the player's hand model is his regular model, not the suited hands. In Puebla, you can move away the planks at the graveyard to reveal a path, but the planks move back to their original location, so essentially we are walking through a wall. With the rumours of the game developers being laid of, it feels like a great shame to strip the remake of future optimisations and support, and I can only hope that won't be the case.

The base price for the game is steep. I understand the effort and time that went into creating it, however I would probably look for at least a 50% discount for people who are interested in trying it out for the first time. Still, I recommend Amerzone as an enjoyable remake of a cult classic, a good way to experience the game for the first time. But of course, playing the original is still the best way, I think.