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A Golden Wake, published by Wadjet Eye

Infinitron

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Press release: http://www.mcvuk.com/press-releases...-a-golden-wake-pc-adventure-this-fall/0134587

NEW YORK - June 26, 2014 - The Roaring Twenties: a bygone era of glitz, glamour, and promise. In Coral Gables -- a booming housing development near Miami, Florida -- the real estate market is taking off and even an ordinary guy like Alfie Banks has a chance to strike it rich. But with the mob on his back, the Great Depression on the horizon, and the Sunshine State's idyllic waterfront only a hurricane away from total devastation, Alfie's quest will not be an easy one in A Golden Wake, a new point-and-click adventure game coming to PC this fall.

Developed by Francisco Gonzalez of Grundislav Games ( Ben Jordan: Paranormal Investigator) and published by indie powerhouse Wadjet Eye Games ( Blackwell Epiphany, Resonance, Gemini Rue), A Golden Wake is a nostalgic adventure that spans two dramatic decades in American history. Set in the era of Gatsby with a plot that includes real people, locations, and events, A Golden Wake has story- and puzzle-driven gameplay, retro-styled pixel art, and a point-and-click interface reminiscent of classics like King's Quest and Monkey Island. Alfie's power of persuasion will play a unique role as he analyzes other characters' attitudes and weaknesses to figure out the best way to approach them.

"Having grown up in Miami, I wanted to tell the story of an era that's usually depicted in New York or Chicago," says A Golden Wake's designer Francisco Gonzalez of his decision to set a game during the Jazz Age. "Miami's land boom and bust during the 1920s and 1930s represents a fascinating slice of our recent history, and I was able to incorporate a lot of real people and events into the narrative of this everyman going after the American Dream."

"I first met Francisco in the early 2000s, back when we were both scrappy freeware developers. Since then, I've watched him move from strength to strength and I was so happy when he made the leap to commercial development. I feel very honored to be partnering up with him now," says Dave Gilbert, founder of Wadjet Eye Games. "As for A Golden Wake, I just love it. This game a fun, poignant romp through 1920s-era Miami that is both meticulously researched and perfectly relevant to our current times."

A Golden Wake will release in Q3 2014 as a PC download. View the new trailer, screenshots, and more game details at the official website: http://www.goldenwake.com
 

taxalot

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Color me absolutely uninterested thus far. The art looks horrendous. After Blackwell Epiphany, that's quite a shocker.

I was just hoping an announced for the new Dave Gilbert game. Hopefully, it doesn't look like to be this one.
 

MRY

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I think it's great to see a setting like this explored. Despite my own impulse for creating fantasy settings, I've always had a soft spot for games with a strong sense of real-world setting, even if it's a caricatured setting (like Heart of China or Gabriel Knight or The Colonel's Bequest). I don't know about the price hike, though. I'd rather see game prices drop than go up. :/
 

Crane

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Color me absolutely uninterested thus far. The art looks horrendous. After Blackwell Epiphany, that's quite a shocker.

Remember that Wadjet Eye is only publishing it. The Samaritan Paradox, another recent AGS adventure (though not published by Wadjet Eye), had a similar art-style, albeit both this one's and The Samaritan Paradox's strike me as unimpressive.

Regardless, the classic point & click adventure ala Sierra or Lucas Arts is part of a largely diminishing stock. That and the fact that Wadjet Eye is publishing it probably makes it a :d1p:for me.
 

Aeschylus

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Well, the game is made by the guy who did the Ben Jordan games, which never had the best graphics, but were mostly good as adventure games until the last couple entries. If this is in the style of the middle games in that series then it will be worth picking up.
 

Blackthorne

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The Colonel's Bequest

Laura Bow is the worst detective ever.

Everybody in this game acts completley irrational.

Haha, yeah, but this game was absolutely written tongue-in-cheek too. I think people forget that about Laura Bow/The Colonel's Bequest. For fuck's sake, HER name is a parody of "Clara Bow" the silent film star, the old guy who owns the mansion is fucking Colonel Dijon (Colonel Mustard)... the doctor is Wilbur C. Feels (WC Fields), Gloria Swansong (Gloria Swanson), Clarence Sparrow (Clarence Darrow). For fucks' sake, the BUTLER is named Jeeves!

The game is meant to be a little comedic/parodish and melodramtic... which is what I actually like about it. It doesn't take itself TOO seriously, and the location is pretty awesome. That abandoned island estate, with a washed out road? It's cool.


Bt
 
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taxalot

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Oh it's a lovely game alright. I wrote a very enthusiast piece about it on a retrogaming website. I just wished the characters would have started panicking and doing things at some point instead of just failing to notice that everybody around them is busy dropping dead.
 

Crane

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Demo was alright. Graphics could be better. Story is bourgeois as fuck so far, but a bourgeois tale is a novel concept for an adventure game. Voice acting is pretty good and has the obligatory Abe Goldfarb casting. Puzzles were very easy minus trying to match those 5 people with their respective houses. Overall I think it'll be an alright game if it continues the trend from the demo. I'm not expecting anything spectacular.
 

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John Walker review: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/10/09/wot-i-think-a-golden-wake/

Wot I Think: A Golden Wake
John Walker on October 9th, 2014 at 1:00 pm.

gold6.jpg


There’s something I wish I’d known as I began playing retro point and click adventure A Golden Wake. I wish I’d known that it was, in large parts, a true story. The reason I didn’t know this was because it began with a statement explaining that despite its historical setting, the characters and events were fictional. Here’s wot I think:

It turns out Coral Gables is a real city in Miami, Florida (you may have already known that, especially if you live on that continent), which was really established in the 1920s by a man named George E. Merrick, there really is a Biltmore Hotel, and the city really was affected by the hurricane of 1937. The game’s tale of real estate is based in a genuinely interesting time of boom and bust in American early 20th century history. In what is ultimately a rather bland game, I think I’d have cared a bit more if I’d known.


Not a lot more, I’m sad to say. Your character, one Alfie Banks, is a real estate salesman from New York. Following a rather unrealistic incident at his work, he makes his way south to chase the property boom in the rapidly developing Florida, to pursue his real estate career there. Yes, this really is a real estate salesman sim.

Starting out in Florida 1921, you must begin by proving your worth to the big name in town, one George Merrick. To do this, and this is the beginnings of why the game opens up with its mighty disclaimer, you must bully a man out of his home so Merrick can build on his land, steal plans (that you’re told were already stolen from him) from a rival realtor, and convince a seemingly straight journalist to write puff pieces about him. And you do all this with Alfie’s utterly charmless salesman ways.

gold2.jpg


Used occasionally, and certainly too occasionally for it to work well, Alfie has powers of persuasion. This allow him to discern the weaknesses and interests of a person, and play his patter accordingly. Except, despite the appearance of a Sherlock Holmes-style intuition, it never really works. The “correct” responses rarely match up in a meaningful way with the information you have, and the system feels far more based in luck than anything else. Never mind that most of the time this isn’t even applied, and the script just does the work for you.

The game continues on in clusters of three fetch-quests, which in some way becomes the focus of Alfie’s near-existential frustration with life. That’s almost an interesting idea, that the central character is demoralised by the mundanity of his existence, using the most mundane of adventure tropes. Except, you know, apart from the bit where you’re using the most mundane of adventure tropes.

However, all the interesting events seem to take place in the fades to black, as the time leaps forward in years. Midway through the game it finally stops being literally only about real estate, and starts to work in a completely hokum tale of the mob (again, you can understand the opening disclaimer, as real places and people are associated with them).

gold4.jpg


The major issue that Alfie is just a blandly unlikeable person. His charm is fake, but there’s no establishment of his reality. You don’t know him beyond the laminated veneer he presents as he sells. So when he starts to have huge crises with where his life is going, they’re out of nowhere, and completely unconvincing. The decisions he makes, despite any choices you might try to make, are ridiculous. And by the end of the game his wild fluctuations in personality and behaviour become farcical. His entire arc appears to be based in his having incongruous tantrums.

The puzzles aren’t, for the most part. It’s about as simple as point and click gets, with your using the only available inventory item on the only available object to move on in most places. There’s even a hidden object puzzle at one point, which is perhaps not ideally suited to a game hand-drawn in pixels running at 640×400, involuntarily stretched to the full size of your monitor. (Be warned, the usual Alt-Enter to switch to a window doesn’t work here, but instead resets the game to the opening titles!)

gold3.jpg


The art is nice enough, but never stunning. When opting for Adventure Game Studio in its late 80s form, there needs to be a lot more flourish to make it feel worthwhile. The character portraits are often poor, and the animated characters they represent only occasionally look alike.

The voice acting is lovely, nearly every character well presented. There are a couple of weaker ones, but of the main cast it’s a very strong showing. It is a bit of a shame that the font used for the un-spoken information has only a single pixel difference between ‘o’ and ‘a’, which makes parsing it occasionally annoying. Although it did lead to a favourite moment where I was told,

“In the distance, you can see an old fart. It looks as though it’s been around for centuries.”

gold7.jpg


There is definitely a lot to be said for using adventure games to explore more mundane events. They don’t all need a murder, or a ghost, or a time travelling robot. But I would argue they do need something more than real estate. There was a large opportunity to really explore the historical significance of the establishment of Coral Gables, the City Beautiful movement it inspired, and the era of prohibition and the Great Depression. But instead these are just background events to tell a remarkably plain story about an unremarkable man.
 
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tuluse

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John Walker complaining about lack of puzzles? We're through the looking glass now.
 

Crane

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The game continues on in clusters of three fetch-quests, which in some way becomes the focus of Alfie’s near-existential frustration with life. That’s almost an interesting idea, that the central character is demoralised by the mundanity of his existence, using the most mundane of adventure tropes.

That's meta as fuck. if only Depression Quest had done this, Zoe Quinn wouldn't have had to sleep with all those guys. It would have been genius personified in text adventure form.
 

MRY

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I don't like that WEG moved its price-point to $15. Of course the market is the only thing that can decide what a fair price is, but $10 seems more appropriate for the quantity of gameplay in past WEG titles, including Primordia. If anything, I'd rather move the price down to $5 or so to encourage price-sensitive players -- particularly in less prosperous countries -- to try out more of the catalogue. Oh well. I still think it seems like a nifty game.
 

Copper

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I dunno - you can't do a discount sale if the base price isn't high enough, and with thet price point, you can routinely slash older games down to 10 or 5
 

Jaesun

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I don't like that WEG moved its price-point to $15. Of course the market is the only thing that can decide what a fair price is, but $10 seems more appropriate for the quantity of gameplay in past WEG titles, including Primordia. If anything, I'd rather move the price down to $5 or so to encourage price-sensitive players -- particularly in less prosperous countries -- to try out more of the catalogue. Oh well. I still think it seems like a nifty game.

I agree. 15$ is a bad price point. If I was doing my old job, and I was working for WEG I would have suggested the price point be $9.99. That price point will lose them some sales.

Still hope it does well for them.
 

Blackthorne

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Man, price points are a tough decision. I would have gone with my gut and priced QFI at $14.99, but I went higher on the advice I was given. It'll be a bit of time before I can reduce it to $14.99, too. Ah well. You live an learn, I suppose.


Bt
 

Jaesun

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For most companies, when pricing things the *magic price-points* are: 4.99, 9.99 and 19.99. 14.99 is a rather dead zone price-point. You are (usually) better off pricing something at 9.99 than 14.99, because you have a better chance at selling more at 9.99 than 14.99 (volume wise). But you don't want to de-value the product (make it look cheep) so sometime it is really a tough call. Sometimes, because of the cost of the item, and not sure of the sales, a item gets the shitty 14.99 dead zone. But sometimes, that ends up selling great at that price. This shit can be just mind blowing. heh.

For *most* indie games, I recommend the 9.99 price-point. Unless it IS a full, lengthy in depth cRPG (like say The Age of Decadence) of which I believe VD has set at a 19.99 price point. Which is perfect. Adventure games kind of get the shaft in this however. Sticking at a 9.99 (depending of the perceived value of the game) should get you good volume in sales. But you need to keep in mind, are you de-valuating your game.

EDIT: In de-valuating your game. If you are selling a game that has say 40 hours of gameplay, and selling it at 9.99. If your next game, SEXY SPACE BOYS II, also has 40 hours of gameplay, but now you want to price it at 14.99 you have then trapped yourself, because the perceived value is the same. Consumers will wonder, why is this priced more than the old one? etc... etc...
 
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