So I finally finished Edna and Harvey by Daedalic Entertainment who apparently went on to do The Whispered World and A New Beginning and even a sequel to Edna & Harvey's New Eyes.
I had heard about this game when it first came out in Europe (Germany?) and heard that it was a hit there and everyone loved it. When it came out here I read the reviews that were all fairly negative and still gave it a shot. The reviews said the game is kind of terrible but the story is charming and since I play adventure games 70% for the storylines, 30% for the gameplay, I figured it might be something up my alley.
First of, this game is LONG. Playing casually it probably took me at least 12-15 hours and I hear people say it's generally a 15-20 hour game, which I don't doubt.
At first the positives come to light, the story is a charming tale of mentally insane patients including our heroine who needs to escape the asylum and prove that her father was innocent of a murder. It's done very light-heartedly with touching flashbacks and there's a ton of humor as your MC is a little insane and has a talking rabbit which is more insane. You can click on EVERYTHING and everything has a unique interaction with every item in your inventory. Really insane amount of unique lines. But if you click everything on anything you see this game will take you forever and be slow as heck. I did that at first, but by the end I was hardly talking to any chairs/overs/soap dishes to see what they say back.
Around halfway you've explored all the rooms in the Asylum and all you've been doing for hours is fetch questing back and forth between rooms to solve a dozen quests that each move the story like 1 conversation further. As you play the puzzles get more and more obtuse.
But the last 1/3rd the puzzles are ridiculously difficult and obtuse and the story is just beginning to pick up gear and you've been playing for 12 hours already...and then it ends abruptly with a 10 second ending clip to pay off for this long slow adventure where very very little has happened over a long period of playtime and fetch questing with annoying puzzles. Yeah...it definitely had worn out its love by the time the credits rolled.
At first I wanted to like it and thought all those reviewers giving it 5/10s and 6/10s were wrong. But after finishing, yeah it's a pretty weak game and not worth the time you need to invest to play it all. It has some good parts, some good puzzles and the flashback scenes are all really great and the best parts of the story. But it's held back by really unconventional puzzles and awful pacing full of fetch questing. It's also really buggy and that can be a little annoying too.
Oh well. Now I'm kind of not interested in playing Whispered World or their other games. I've heard they are better, but I also remember WW got a lot of negative reviews as well as the positive ones, so I don't know....
Think I'm going to go back and finish up Telltale's BttF next. I got to the 3rd episode and it was just decent, but I might as well finish up the story. It's been a while since I played an adventure game that's really impressed me and made me feel satisfied for the time I've invested in playing it by the end. Gray Matter (rushed ending notwithstanding) and Machinarium are probably the last adventure games that were really satisfying throughout.
I dunno, I have a huge backlog of adventure games from the last few years, are any of these ones TRULY great games with compelling stories and worth their time in enjoyment? I love all the classics, but modern adventure games have been so hit or miss in the last decade :| And when they miss it feels like a waste of time if the stories don't pay off.
Gemini Rue, Whispered World, Syberia I & II, Dreamfall, Ceville, Runaway, Broken Sword II, Still Life, Blackwell series after the first game (wasn't impressed by the first one at all), The Book of Unwritten Tales.
