A New Beginning

The game starts with the Norwegian Bent Svensson, a retired scientist who is trying to recover from a mental breakdown after dedicating his life to eco-friendly energy research. One day, he is disturbed by Fay, a woman from the future, whose Earth has suffered from environmental disasters. She is part of a mission to change the past by travelling back in time to prevent damage to the ozone layer; which was the catalyst in the Earth's destruction. Her first task is to convince Svensson to go back to his research that he has abandoned. It's easier said than done for Fay, since stating she is from the future isn't going to convince Bent so easy, and so he thinks she is just a crazy environmental extremist.

The game is a point-and-click adventure. To interact with objects, the player must hold the mouse button down to bring up a radial menu of options, which is rather on the small side, so can feel a bit fiddly to use. The options are context sensitive, so "Look" and "Close" may appear for a Door, and "Look" and "Break" may appear for the branch of a tree. The inventory appears in a toolbar along the bottom of the screen. Objects can used on the environment, or be combined to form new objects. Much of the puzzles involve improvising and making make-shift objects.

Most puzzles will seem familiar to fans of adventure games and therefore seem a little on the easy side. There's another type of puzzle which may see you constructing a device or defusing a bomb among others. These puzzles are less obvious what to do, but you do get an option to skip them.

The two main protagonists Fay and Bent have a stark contrast between them; Fay is young and charming, whereas Bent is old and bitter. They are not as likeable as other protagonists from point-and-click adventures, and are definitely a far cry from Broken Sword's George and Nico. The animations look a little awkward. Fay's arms hang too straight and too close to her body, and her posture makes her chest and bum stick out a bit too much.

The voice acting is very hit and miss. The lines can often be delivered in a bland manner, or have the wrong inflections or emotion; as if the voice actors/actresses were merely reading off scripts without knowledge of the actual scene. Occasional mix-ups in the subtitles and voice-overs do occur, in addition to delays between the voice-overs and subtitles in the cut-scenes, which are presented via comic-book visuals.

Sometimes the wrong language is used in the context wheel. This only seems to happen with objects that aren't used for the puzzles, so is not much of an issue. Nevertheless, this shouldn't happen and shows a lack of quality control within the game. The testers don't get a mention in the credits, because the credits only display for a few seconds before being cut short to the main menu!

Themes of environmental conservation do not appear often in games, but in A New Beginning, this is the prominent theme. Mixed in with sci-fi/time-travel and conspiracy, the plot ends up being pretty good. It doesn't reach the heights of other point-and-click series such as Broken Sword, and lacks the likeable characters and voice acting, but is a solid adventure never-the-less.