Correct_Carlo
Arcane
I'm a bit surprised to discover that this game has a pretty good reputation among adventure gaming types, so I was wondering what the general Codex consensus was on it.
I thought it was awful. Like, one of the worst adventure games I've ever played.
I was expecting something like a CSI type adventure, and it kind of was for maybe the first 20 minutes or so (which has you investigating a crime scene), but then it takes a turn towards the nonsensical and half-assed with puzzles where you have to get your boss coffee and one of the dumbest adventure game puzzles I've ever encountered in a game, where you stop what you are doing in the middle of a murder investigation to bake fucking Christmas cookies for your dad (based on a coded list of ingredients that you have to decipher). And you can't continue the investigation until the Christmas cookies are done! Seriously, couldn't the designers think of any puzzles that related to the plot in someway?
And then there are the awful, out of context, puzzle-puzzles. I don't mind these when they make a minimal amount of sense in the context of the game's universe, like when a guy who is into puzzles locks a box with a logic puzzle (which is one puzzle in the game I didn't mind). But other times they are completely retarded, like when construction workers lock their crane using a logic puzzle (because apparently they live in a universe where everyone is too retarded to do a logic puzzle, so this is just as safe as using a key?).
Plus, the lock pick puzzle, which is maybe the worst logic puzzle-puzzle I've ever encountered in a game. It's just endless, seemingly arbitrary, brute-forcing that took me over an hour to solve and which is made needlessly frustrating by the fact that the game never explains that you can re-lock the unlocked portions of the lock, which is necessary for the final solution (or it doesn't adequately explain it anyway. It gives you like 2 pages of instructions prior to doing the puzzle, where it vaguely alludes to it, but I didn't think it was made clear enough. And giving the player 2 pages of instructions for just a one off puzzle is shit puzzle design to begin with. They should have had several of these through out the game and had them get progressively harder as you went. Which would have made the mechanics easier to grasp, although it wouldn't have made the game much better as they aren't that fun to do on their own).
Of course, all of this would be somewhat forgivable if the story was good, but it's not. It's just a bunch of warmed over 90s serial killer movie cliches. The switching between time periods is a sort of neat gimmick, but the story sucks so bad that it's kind of pointless. The dialogue is terrible, the acting's bad, and I didn't particularly like any of the characters (the best probably being your ancestor who you play as in the past, who's kind of interesting in that he marries a prostitute, I guess, but you don't really get to see that).
Plus, the game has no ending. You spend like 15 hours investigating a case and then it just kind of stops. You never catch the bad guy and no mysteries are solved. It's like the developers just ran out of money or something.
I thought it was awful. Like, one of the worst adventure games I've ever played.
I was expecting something like a CSI type adventure, and it kind of was for maybe the first 20 minutes or so (which has you investigating a crime scene), but then it takes a turn towards the nonsensical and half-assed with puzzles where you have to get your boss coffee and one of the dumbest adventure game puzzles I've ever encountered in a game, where you stop what you are doing in the middle of a murder investigation to bake fucking Christmas cookies for your dad (based on a coded list of ingredients that you have to decipher). And you can't continue the investigation until the Christmas cookies are done! Seriously, couldn't the designers think of any puzzles that related to the plot in someway?
And then there are the awful, out of context, puzzle-puzzles. I don't mind these when they make a minimal amount of sense in the context of the game's universe, like when a guy who is into puzzles locks a box with a logic puzzle (which is one puzzle in the game I didn't mind). But other times they are completely retarded, like when construction workers lock their crane using a logic puzzle (because apparently they live in a universe where everyone is too retarded to do a logic puzzle, so this is just as safe as using a key?).
Plus, the lock pick puzzle, which is maybe the worst logic puzzle-puzzle I've ever encountered in a game. It's just endless, seemingly arbitrary, brute-forcing that took me over an hour to solve and which is made needlessly frustrating by the fact that the game never explains that you can re-lock the unlocked portions of the lock, which is necessary for the final solution (or it doesn't adequately explain it anyway. It gives you like 2 pages of instructions prior to doing the puzzle, where it vaguely alludes to it, but I didn't think it was made clear enough. And giving the player 2 pages of instructions for just a one off puzzle is shit puzzle design to begin with. They should have had several of these through out the game and had them get progressively harder as you went. Which would have made the mechanics easier to grasp, although it wouldn't have made the game much better as they aren't that fun to do on their own).
Of course, all of this would be somewhat forgivable if the story was good, but it's not. It's just a bunch of warmed over 90s serial killer movie cliches. The switching between time periods is a sort of neat gimmick, but the story sucks so bad that it's kind of pointless. The dialogue is terrible, the acting's bad, and I didn't particularly like any of the characters (the best probably being your ancestor who you play as in the past, who's kind of interesting in that he marries a prostitute, I guess, but you don't really get to see that).
Plus, the game has no ending. You spend like 15 hours investigating a case and then it just kind of stops. You never catch the bad guy and no mysteries are solved. It's like the developers just ran out of money or something.
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Microids have a "thing" for making lockpick puzzles, you see.
