-

Click for Gameplay Trailer

-
-----------This is my review account, because the low playtime.
+ completely hand drawn
+ always consistent
- only horizontal movements convincing

+ melancholy, loosened with humor mood
+ that pulls the player into its spell
- some cutscenes unintentionally funny

+ mostly very good speakers
+ very atmospheric music
- some characters fall off qualitatively

+ tasks of different difficulty
- but does not increase linearly
- little evidence
- too difficult for beginners to some extent

+ exciting situations
+ various smaller topics
+ some exciting twists
- act overall foreseeable

+ likeable, round protagonists
+ mostly succeeded caricatured minor characters
- the act but not always appropriate

+ usually extremely entertaining, credible conversations
+ great emotional range
+ often humorous
- rarely overdrawn

+ well integrated into the story combination puzzles
+ never a dull moment
+ mostly comprehensible
- but sometimes abstruse

+ solo playtime around 18 hours
+ over 100 backgrounds
+ different, varied locations
+ more than 50 characters and speaking roles


A New Beginning is a successful adventure that makes a lot right. Thus the gloomy future is pleasantly alive because people do not just have a different technology and futuristic forms of communication, but also a special way of thinking, which is dominated by an experienced climate collapse.
A New Beginning exhilarated, stirs and entertains with its own unique atmosphere. Although zeitigt the unbridled creativity of the puzzle designer from time to thoroughly reaction-en à la "Then the world goes just below me does not matter!" But long does such anger not to. For me the detail in every aspect drawn characters are too close, the mood poignant. Daedalic has finally established itself in this work as an outstanding adventure game studio.

gamestar.de

Sorry for my bad english.
Thanks for reading! If you Like my Review, give me a Thumbs up in Steam.
Your help is greatly appreciated :)

My Curator Page:

Sub

My Steam Group:

GameTrailers and Reviews

My YouTube Channel:

Steam Reviews

Overall - lacking.
The graphics are pleasing enough, and the music is nice. That said, the English voice acting is simply atrocious. A reader program is better to listen to, the intonation has nothing to do with the emotional content of the dialogue, and sometimes it's just plain wrong for English.
Oh, and the character design. Why does Fay have a uniform including a sweater that ends under her boobs? And does she have a back problem? She stands and walks with her spine bent in a highly unnatural shape, which is just painful to look at.
The characters themselves are also shallow, and even though in some reviews I've read about 'character development', that mostly means that they grow from one-dimensional to maybe two. And that's for the protagonists. About one of the main supporting characters, Duve, all I got to know was that a: he's upset with his father (understandably) for sacrificing their family for his work, yet b: he continues his father's work out of some sort of duty perhaps, though he claims to hate it, and c: he's gay. The latter had nothing whatsoever to do with anything, apart from mentioning that Bent "would have been okay with it", and providing a clue for solving a puzzle. Talk about token minority.
The plot seemed forced sometimes, and after the final plot twist, had motivation issues at some points in retrospect. All-in-all, it felt rather forced and didactic, and the conclusion really didn't make much sense to me.
Certainly not a game I will ever play again, and not one I could recommend, as much as I'd like to promote eco-conscious games. Only reason I played it through was that I hoped for satisfactory ending. I didn't get it.

[WARNING. SPOILERS]

this is the first Daedalic Entertainment game i've finished and... actually regretted playing.

This game has the potential to be a fun, enjoyable game. Puzzles, tricky areas that would not be the automatic response and even an additional level of depth to point and click that allows for pop-up actions (more about that in the negatives.). As always with Daedalic Entertainment, it's beautiful to look at and tha characters are... more or less believable. They make sense and seem easy enough to relate to. Daedalic Entertainment have also coined a 'hold Space to show Items you can interact with', this has made me so much more likley to buy one of their games just for that aspect alone! the character animations, although simple and repetative, always seem mostly in place and with exception of a few moments (if you want to pick) usually look perfectly fine and don't break immersion at all.

However... the entire game paints the image of 'the world is ending, it's climate change but you can fix it'. at no point did I feel hopful for the characters.
We're dealing with an aeged man who has ruined his relationship with his family, estranged his son and apparently made very little effort to fix that. you're also playing as a person who, during the entire game I was expecting to turn out to be lying to me and was unfortunatley not dissapointed. The 'good guys' turn out to be... well... kind of pathetic, sad and myserable people that I didn't want to even think existed, let alone play them for the whole game. The antagonists were rather unbelievably over-evil (MWAHAHAHAA! I WILL PAVE OVER THE WORLD TO MAKE A GLORIOUS SEAL-SKIN CAR-PARK!) and the storyline rather felt overly preachy...
The entire cast were unpleasant in even degrees... in fact, the person I liked the most was a doorman with an anger problem and a complex about his baldness!

The general gameplay is point-and-click with the occasional puzzle. The puzzles were good and mostly self-explanatory, but the point-and-click was point-and-hold-aim-and-click for everytbing... that took extra time that was not needed when right-click-to-examine and left-click to walk to, pick up, adjust etc. would have sufficed.
The right-click for inventory was not actually needed at any point and could easily have been removed entirely and replaced by having the inventory there all the time. the only time it became needed to quickly open your inventory is if a game-event had closed it for you.

I did not feel like I had anyone on my side in the entire game. When i'm playing as him, i'm waiting for her to ♥♥♥♥ him over. When i'm playing as her, i'm waiting for us to do something strange and un-kocher.
The son, he was downright unpleasant. The old-friend from work was needlessly suspicious and came across as kaniving in places. The best-friend seemed... well... i don't know all that well beause i was honestly expecting him to mess us over too! he was too nice compared to the rather unpleasant crowd we were already in!
I can't complain enough about the worst of humanity in this. We have cheaters, liars, mercinaries, needless aggression, paranoia, disbelief, angst and all the other shades of things you don't want to spend an afternoon immersed in.

The storyline of 'time travlers come back to fix the world' is great. I was all for that! the idea of them coming back from a climate-desolate wasteland is a perfectly stable platform... what fails however is that they drop a plot-twist on us that... well, let's face it was rather un-needed!
"we came to this reactor to stop it blowin up!" becomes "we came here to blow it up"... umm... why?
Honestly, it boiled down to 'grab that stuff and run for it!'. the machevilian "let's tell the goodie all my plans" was old before this game was made and really made the ending of this... a total mess!
I've seen twist endings, back-track endings, not-as-you-expeted-it endings, the-goodie-is-the-baddie-is-the-goodie endings... but the sudden change of heart makes your one character seem totally heartless or a derranged sociopath, the baddie is... let's face it, totally insane for his plans and the other baddie is desperatley in need of a lead-lobotomy!
"it's ok, we reconciled this kid with his father and even managed to bring his sexuality into it almost out of the blue without any apparent reason"...
umm... yay?
what have we resolved here? One character we were really not that set up to like has got fame, another character we probably should not dislike this much is going back to killing himself with over-work and his son, who needs to get a grip for most the game, is all right now?
you might as well have written "and they all lived happily ever after"!
Oh, but it's ok, that person who let themselves get baked in radioactive steam instead of getting into one of the many easy-to-access doors on that level left you a picture to remember how she and all the other people you met from her time betrayed your trust, nearly got you and your family killed, killed off one of your oldest friends, destroyed most of your life's work and... should I go on?
The ending felt forced, bolted on and almost irrelevant to the rest of the game. The problem was that whole areas of the game had the same feeling.
"this is a great big conspiracy" why? everything points that way. Everyone says it's an accident and refuses to talk more about it... soooooooo? Why was everyone acting needlessly suspicious? No apparent reason. One person takes it to their grave and the other betrays you brutally without any kind of apology.

I actually felt miserable finishing this game. The gaming completionist in me refused to step away, but I was damn close! had the ending not appeared when it did, i would not have finished the game.
"No matter how beautiful the weapon is, it will hurt no less when turning against you"

Technical bugs were rife in the game. Many areas had options that were not translated. clicking on one item to examine blinked the subtitle and played no audio so if there was any useful information there, i missed that
There are parts where the subtitles run off in the FMV but the audio has not even started.
The dialogue overlaps itself, jumps pitch and volume mid-sentance, often lacks the correct inflection for the mood it's used and sometimes comes across as just plain wooden and eerie.
One moment, i'd be listening and the voice sounds warm and involving... while describing an inane object... then to describe something important, it sounds cold and emotionless? the mixed signals in this were easy enough to overlook, but when it changed pitch, volume and feel mid-sentance? split-personalities or bad dubbing...
There were miss-spelt subtitles, incorrect words and sometimes, the wrong used entirely.

Top it all off with the common feel of mid-eighties cartoons where the baddie just wants to make a new motorway or spill oil into the sea and realising that they might as well be brow-beating you for having the light on. Honestly, i would not have been surprised to find that this was endorsed by an extremist wing of a climate change activist group!
Yes, we get that nuclear power isn't the best, let's all feel damn sad for this. now, how dare you have multiple monitors on. We all poison every living thing in the woods for no particularly well-explained reason. Deforestation, fossil fuels, melting ice-caps... Anyone remember this from school?
I DO care about the environment, I'm happy to recycle, I proudly turn off lights and electrical devices not in use and rarely use more than what I need... I don't need a game to make me feel guilty for the environment change.


I would urge point-and-click enthusiasts to buy ANY Deponia title instead of this. If you want somethin a little more serious, buy 'night of the rabbit'. Daedalic Entertainment deserve all the support they can get, but this game is going to a special place in my "games I regretted playing" list.

The story is plain but good things are creative idea about climate change, challenging puzzles and good graphics in game. This game is good, just give it a try.

+ Lots and lots of pictures. There's a lot of time that's gone into that.

+ The story gets really good from around chapter 4 onwards.

+ Around 10 hours of gameplay.

- Some bugs. The ones I got most were 1. that the game would sometimes think I was clicking my mouse when I wasn't, causing the text to skip (meaning that I missed some of the dialogue) and 2. that there was sometimes a Russian or German word to click on or sentence spoken by a character, even though I played the game in English.
The latter only happened two or three times and I always knew what to do, so it wasn't that big a deal. The former I solved by saving often (or just not caring what was said).

- "I'VE GOTTA SAVE THE PLANET. I'M GONNA CRY OVER THIS DEAD BIRD. WHY DOES THAT GUY DRIVE SUCH A WASTEFUL CAR? WHY DOES NO ONE LISTEN TO ME?" Every. Five. Minutes. If you're not necessarily into the whole "I must save the earth right now" thing, you'll need a LOT of patience to try and ignore Fay (and Bent)'s constant eco babble.

- Baaaad voice acting (especially main character Bent). But: either I got used it after a while or it just gets better towards the end.

I recommend this game, as it's like most Daedalic point & click games: the story is good, the characters are okay (In the english dubbed version they sound really annyoying - but the personalities are quite developed), and the comic-like parts looks really great.
But then the negatives:
As good Daedalic is at making a good story, they are so bad at adapting it to another languages. So far:
I've found a cyrillic alphabet (I think russian) option at one of the point of the oil rig
Got a male guard referenced as she
"Hier is it" (hier is german)
"Savie the world" in epilogue
There are options for modifying how loud are: speech, music, and sounds. But you can't modify the cutscenes, they will boom at you with your computer's currently set volume.
Also the game doesn't saves your volume settings, they are getting reseted by restarting the program.
Lastly: the game CONSTANTLY changes between alga and algae. The whole plot is centered around this organism yet they can't decide how to spell it.

The voice acting is just terrible. I mean the characters are speaking clear, they are easy to hear, but they sounds like somebody's reading a really boring book. At one point the main character burst out, saying I think "no" numerous times, because somebody just straight out accused him of not taking his experiments seriously, while his family and private life was non-existant, he was so dedicated to his work. Hell, I'm more angry about burning my hand like this guy was. They could have said "No, I don't want scrambled eggs", the emotions were just as "intense". The plot twist part's voice acting is just plain atrocious, no better word.
Epilogue's voice and subtitles are out of synchron, too.
At the end:
Well made story, poorly executed in english, but it doesn't hinder you in any ways in completing (and kinda, enjoying) the game. Full price is 10$/€, it's maybe a little too high considering there is no replay value. If you can get in a sale at/below 5$ or in a bundle, go for it!

I can honestly say that I hate this game, it doesnt have good voice acting and the point and click puzzles are.... mediocre at best.

I watch dubbed animes. I can handle bad dubs to a point. This is one of the worst I've ever seen as Its waay off, its awkward and it sounds like a guy just talking into a mic saying something on a paper, no emotion no nothing.

There is a whole thing about the the world ending due to climate change yadda yadda, but honestly I don't want to be lectured in a game about what people should be doing in real life, don't get me wrong, I try my best to save our planet and ♥♥♥♥ like that, but I don't want a game to try and tell me thats what I should do.


Story: 2/10 (boring and makes me dislike the game because it tries to convey a message.)
Gameplay: 1/10 (Bad. little interaction, little fun to it.)
Presentation: 2/10 (You tried with the artwork, but you should have tried with making everything look right, and interesting, and SOUND go)
Soundtrack: X ( Must be a repressed memory)
Replayability: X (I'm biased here.)

So....this is a game I really wish I could enjoy. Conceptually, it is worth consideration even though the story is fairly cliche (world is mostly destroyed by nuclear disaster and the remnants of humanity travel back in time to try and stop it from happening). Outside of the obvious issues that the topic of time travel always carry with it (poorly thought out ramifications to actions being foremost on that list), the real issue with this game is that, since the sotry is so cliche, it really needs strong gameplay and voice acting to make it worth slogging though. The puzzles are in fact decent. Nothing too mind bending, but on the low end of Daedalic par for the course. The voice acting, however, is simply atrocious. If you are going to spend 10 or so hours with an adventure game, and the story is sub par, the voice acting better be on point. It isnt in this game, and as much as the completionist in me wants to retire this game under the "finished games" folder in my library, I cant bring myself to listen to the actors anymore.
IDK if you will enjoy the game, but me personally, it goes into the never finish files.

My Take: An okay point and click adventure with a nonsensical plot about climate change. It's fairly short, if you're dedicated to playing it, then it shouldn't take more than about 6 hours. The puzzles are dull and convoluted at times.

Graphics: The art is fairly well done, but the animations can be a little jittery at times. While the resolution can be set to widescreen, the game is played in 4:3; so you've got pillarboxing and unnecessary screen scrolling.

Sound: Voice acting is wooden and mostly boring. Not too much happening in the sound effects department. Prepare to hear a lot of clicks.

Music: Enjoyable enough to make this game a less arduous task.

Controls: Not really a fan of the “left click to bring up options wheel” scheme when left click is also move. Right click opens/closes your inventory.

Did I Finish It: Yes.

Will I Play it Again: If I really am bored and want to grab the four remaining achievements, maybe. I doubt that'll be any time soon though.

Should You Buy It: If you really wanted to play every point and click adventure on Steam, you could probably do worse than this.

A very nice point'n'click game with a decent story. If you can get it from a bundle or cheap somewhere else you should definitely buy it.

Personal rating: 8.0/10.0

I love this game. I have not played the steam version but I played the DRM free version and I love it. It has a nice story. Nice puzzles that I will admit I did get stuck on but still fun. There is like only one part that if you do thing in the worng order you have to load your last save. Glad that is only an issue once. Still love the game though. If you like point and click adventure games you will probably like this as well.

The worst voice acting I have ever heard, a heavy-handed political agenda, and bugs galore. All puzzles are too easy to solve and entirely skippable, Daedalic's contribution to the decline of the point-and-click adventure game genre. The tool wheel is frustrating, and context-sensitive item text will randomly turn into Cyrillic script for no apparent reason. Characters will often become permenantly stuck at room exits, forcing you to reload a previous save: So save often. I'm just glad that I didn't pay full price for this incredible disappointment. "More than 20 hours' worth of game time" directly translates into approximately six hours and possibly seven if you've decided to solve the puzzles yourself. Do not buy this game.

Despite flaws a captivating story about time travels, environment protection and friendship. Puzzles can get a bit dull at times, but dialogues are good.

This game is fun, the story is engrossing and it is true to the genre. There are some spots where the text is not fully translated from Russian, but these are very few and never the main dialogue. I highly recommend this game for fans of point and click 90's style games. I will play this game again every so often. One of the best I've played in 33 years of gaming.

Yeah I know this is that typical boring & stupid "point & click" game.
Stupid art looks like comic books, bla bla bla.. (Haters gonna hate)
That's not the selling point of this game.
It has an interesting story and ideas.
Each characters has a strong role in the story.

This game is about disaster cause of extreme climate change that doomed the earth.
A group of people being sent from the future to save the past before humans start to taint the nature.

I really like the ending of this game. It's quite a twist.
Too bad the epilogue is not as strong as the messages from the author.

7/10 is a great score for this game

The story is alright, but the voice acting is less than stellar. As others have said, there are some mismatches between spoken dialogue and the text, and the biggest offense is the text randomly changing languages. It's infrequent, and usually only happens in the flavor dialogue. There was one instance where I felt like I was losing out on puzzle solving information. I don't recommend this game to any but the genre fans who just can't get enough.

Man, I really wish I could give a thumbs-up to the game-play, but a thumbs-down to the story. As a game, I really enjoyed the puzzle-solving aspect and the beautiful, hand-drawn backgrounds (though the character animation leaves a little to be desired - Fay's posture and walk are perplexing, to say the least). Like many good point-and-click adventure games, the puzzles involve thoroughly searching your surroundings to find needed objects, and then figuring out where and how to use them. Other times, making certain dialogue choices when interacting with other characters will lead you to your goals. I got stumped quite often - sometimes I'd just fumble into the right solution, and other times I'd work it out logically - but in the case of the latter, there were many times when I'd think I was on the right track, only to find I was still several steps away from the solution. While there are harder adventure and puzzle games out there, at least this one can be enjoyable for people who are both fans of the genre and newcomers.

What may make the game less palatable is the story - if the heavy-handed, sometimes unintentionally-funny preaching about global warming doesn't put off even the environmentally-conscience, then the ending that seems to go against everything the rest of the game stood for probably will. The game's plot doesn't stay focused on one reason for mankind's destruction, shifting from global warming to a more catastrophic event, and then there's something about a solar flare which is going to wipe out everyone, anyway, no matter what they do to the environment. (Seriously, pick one disaster and go with it!) And the ending kind of makes you feel like it was all for nothing, along with leaving several questions unanswered.

The voice acting is mediocre - I've seen some pretty harsh criticisms of it, but I've heard worse, so I wasn't terribly bothered by it. Sometimes it doesn't match the onscreen text or gets details confused. Examples: "Chrome Dome" is said in one scene where the words "Bald Pate" are clearly spelled out, and at another point, the dialogue can't decide if it's DH54 algae or DH45 algae. Also, use the knife on Bent in the final puzzle if you want to see Fay mouth two lines of text in German (the game's original language) with no voiceover. These issues, plus weird glitches like dialogue cutting off at the end of a sentence and poorly matched lip-synching give the impression of a lack of polish for the English translation.

Oh yes, the world's savior is named Bent Svensson. Yeah, I know, maybe it's a legit Norwegian name, or maybe it's short for Bentley. It still sounds hilarious to English-speaking audiences.

Rating: 2.5/5

Purchased this game when it was on sale, was less than £1 so thought why not.

Pleasantly surprised. This is the first game of it's series I've played and while it isn't my usual cup of tea it is very much enjoyable. The story is simple enough to follow, so far anyway, and the gameplay is easy to pick up. The design and style of the game is different, with a classic cartoon feel, and it's one I feel partners the game well, and with the comic style dialogue too, gives texture to the game.

Puzzles can be difficult but then when you do complete them you are surprised with yourself that you couldn't solve them any quicker. There is also a skip puzzle option for when you are stuck. What a life saver.

While not the usual game I would consider playing, this is definitely worth picking up in a sale.

If you can ignore the enviromental message being beaten into your brain with a hammer, you will find the game being actually fun.

I played the game for a couple chapters, but eventually decided that I wasn't having nearly enough fun to justify spending any more time on it -- nor, for that matter, to justify taking up 4 gigs of space on my hard drive. It's a point-and-click puzzle game, but the puzzles are seldom of the "reasonable challenge" variety; they're either painfully obvious, or painfully obtuse where you only stumble across them by trying absolutely every way to be wrong (e.g., boosting a laser's power by adding a lens cut away from the plastic cover for a neon sign, which you may recognize as a technique that wouldn't work). This is often magnified by the puzzles having perfectly logical solutions that the game ignores in favor of going around in circles and repeating the same action several times until it finally gives a different result. (It even gives an achievement for putting up with the "Quickie" computer character that embodies one of these moments.)

I grew up with the puzzle games from Sierra and LucasArts; I get that lateral thinking is a large part of the genre, and that it's easy for developers to miss the mark and come up with a "solution" that can only be seen in hindsight. But those games balanced it out by making it worthwhile with good stories. This game does not. It's an extremely heavy-handed story about climate change, bearing a strong resemblance to the film 2012 in its "We're all doomed RIGHT NOW" approach. It's not that I object to the message itself; it's that the message isn't entertaining, which is the one and only possible purpose of a video game. I'm not really geared up to spend several hours lecturing myself. Coupled with protagonists who are utterly unlikeable (one terminally depressed, one aggressively arrogant, both humorless), and there's simply nothing to make me want to play much past the beginning of A New Beginning.