Developer: Daedalic entertainment
Publisher: Daedalic entertainment
Platforms: Pc, Mac
A New Beginning – Final Cut – Review
A New Beginning- Final Cut is a re-release of the 2010 point and click adventure game A New Beginning by Daedalic, the makers of other adventure games like The Whispered World and Edna & Harvey: The Breakout and Deponia. A Final Cut brings the game to steam adding steam achievements and also making the game available on Apple. It also bring a lot more localization and, according to the developer, fixes a lot of bugs from the original version. I put the game to the test to see how it was and if it could live up to legacy Daedalic has built with its other games and if it makes true on it’s promise of bugfixing.
Story:
A New Beginning takes place in the early 1980’s and tells the story of Fay, a young woman from a future where the earth is ravaged by massive climate changes and humanity is pushed to the brink of extinction, and Brent, a retired scientist and environmental activist who spent a large part of his life trying to find an alternative power source to replace nuclear power and oil. The story is a very strong and mature one and kept me interested from start to end. A fair warning though, A New Beginning really pushes its message of the threat of global warming and the need for change in humanity, to the point where it can get a bit annoying sometimes.Still, it’s nice to see games being able to handle serious topics like this and treating it in an appropriate way. The other thing that bugged me about the game’s story were its characters. I tried my best throughout the entire game but by the end of it the only thing I could think about 90% of the main characters was that these guys were just complete assholes. A New Beginning has some of the most unlikeable characters I have seen in a game in a long time, and though it bugged me throughout the entire game and to some degree still bugs me now, after finishing the game I couldn’t help but feel that this was somewhat an intentional thing. But like I said, even though it might have been intentional, it would have been nice to put at least one likeable character in there or give one of the existing ones some more redeeming value.
Graphics:
A New Beginning is a very nice looking game with a lovely style. The entire game uses a nice hand-drawn, more comic book-like style and it works. The cutscenes are actually presented in comic book frames and it’s this unique style that gives the game a lot of charm and personality.The quality of the drawing in both the game and the cutscenes are superb and give the advantage of making the game run great on any rig because of the low graphic requirements. Of course you would assume this means that the graphic options are limited which wouldn’t be that bad for a game of this genre and style, except for the fact that A New Beginning doesn’t limit options, it flat out doesn’t have any at all. Now like I said it’s not that strange for a game like this to not have that many graphics options but the game doesn’t even let you choose resolution and on top of that runs in a 4:3 ratio meaning that if you’re playing it on a widescreen monitor like most people today have you’re gonna be playing the entire game with two massive black bars on the sides of your screen which is a shame. I know it might be nitpicking but I feel adding at the very least the option to choose your own resolution should have been added and I can’t imagine it being that hard to implement either.
Sound:
In the sound department there’s good news and bad news, and considering the type of game this is, the bad news is kind of a big one so I’ll start with that. The game has a lot of voice acting in it, every single character has some amount of voice acting and sadly enough the English voice acting goes from barely passable to just plain awful. A lot of the time the intonation or emotion put into the voice work is just completely wrong for the situation, the entire voice acting just sounds very stiff and rigid throughout the game and at a few points just sounds like it was done by a computer voice. As if that wasn’t enough the game has some problems with voice work looping in the second half of the game making the voice work even harder and more annoying to listen too. And for a game that has several hours of voice acting in it, that’s just bad and really it brings down the quality of the experience. Well now that we got that negative stuff out of the way, we can talk about some of the positive things, which is basically EVERYTHING ELSE! The rest of the sound is this game is absolute top notch. From the absolutely huge amount of sound effects to the fantastic original soundtrack it is all just fantastic. Every time you click on something it’s a pleasure to hear another great new sound effect.On top of that the music just creates such a wonderful atmosphere I sometimes just left the game turned on while I was doing something else just so I could listen to the great music. If only the developer would have put as much effort into getting some decent voice actors as they did into getting a great composer then this game would have been lifted to a whole new level.
Gameplay:
I’m gonna be a bit shorter than usual about the gameplay section this time seeing as it’s a point an click adventure and there’s only so much you can say about those. The game is well made with a nice variety of puzzles ranging from “right in your face” obvious to “How was I ever supposed to find that ?” hard. It is I feel a game meant for a bit more of an experienced audience because apart from a very short tutorial it does almost nothing to explain things to you. Like for example the fact that you can hold down the space bar to see everything that can be interacted with on screen. Or the fact that the big button that appears on the top of your screen after a while doing a puzzle is there so that you can skip past those puzzles if you’re really stuck. But overall the game is very well made and plays well. As far as the promise of bug fixing goes I can only say that in my case it delivers and that in my entire playthrough of the game I never encountered a single bug or glitch gameplay wise.
Conclusion:
So, where does that leave us on A New Beginning – Final Cut? I’d say overall it’s a really well made interesting adventure game with a great story that get’s dragged down by some really bad voice acting in English. Does that mean you shouldn’t get the game? Not at all, even though I’m not a fan of point and click adventures at all and even though I had my moments where I cursed the game and some of it puzzles, I felt compelled to play it through to the end and after finishing it, felt like I had a fun experience despite some of the flaws the game has.
A New Beginning - Final Cut - Review ,
No Comments