Developer Vince Twelve originally worked on the game over many years before the game was picked up by the publisher Wadjet Eye Games. With Dave Gilbert taking on the role of executive producer and voice director, and his wife Janet Gilbert in the role of full-time programmer, the game could be completed.
Dave Gilbert has hired some of his favourite voice actors, alongside some new ones like Logan Cunningham of Bastion fame. So there's the likes of: Abe Goldfarb, Sarah Elmaleh, Edward Bauer, and Daryl Lathon. When examining objects, most text is not voiced.
Like the other releases, there's a Director's commentary mode which places icons in the scene. These trigger an audio commentary from either Vince Twelve, or Dave and Janet Gilbert. There's a couple of large spoilers though, one describing the main twist way earlier than you'd even have a chance to see it coming. Another annoying aspect is that the music is too loud and doesn't dim during the commentary. One commentary remarks the non-voiced lines were done because of the various characters that can interact with the same items, but there are some scenes which many characters aren't around, so then the audio seems lacking in these scenes.
The game opens with Tolstoy "Ed" Eddings being woken by a phone call. Professor Javier Morales is about to destroy their research in fear that their discovery “Resonance” will fall into the wrong hands. As Ed travels to the lab, he meets Anna, a doctor who happens to be related to Javier. When he gets to the lab, he finds the lab destroyed, but Detective Bennett is on the scene. Meanwhile, political blogger Ray is investigating an organisation known as Antevorta who are located in the hospital building. After you play these introduction scenes, the game really opens up with you switching between all four characters.
One player character can be controlled at any time by clicking the portraits at the top. I found the menu system slightly clunky and thought it would be nice if you could access them through hotkeys, like 1-4. You can make them move together if the character is told to follow them, otherwise they stay where they are. Although you can pass items between characters, there's a few where you can't such as Bennet's gun. He also has free movement in the police station, whereas Anna can access restricted floors of the hospital with her security pass. Some puzzles require multiple characters like the one where the sleeker Ed must crawl into a ventilation shaft whilst the more rotund Bennett stays on the ground to operate some controls.
One distinctive mechanic in the game is the memory system. You have menus for Long Term Memory and Short Term Memory. Each character has their own STM, LTM and inventory lists. The LTM partially acts as a story recap, a To Do list, and sometimes to recall important information. STM have to be managed yourself by dragging and dropping objects of interest into them. So in other point-and-click games, encountering an object will unlock dialogue options when speaking to characters, but here you have to manually add it as an option, then it can be dragged into the conversation menu.
There are a couple of optional puzzles, and I believe some puzzles actually have multiple solutions.
There are a few places where you can die, but if that happens, the game shows a rewind information and you can try the interaction again.
I think the game gets off to a bit of a slow start in terms of story with the character switching. The introduction to Anna's side of the story is via a child flashback sequence where she is escaping a monster who bangs on the door. The timed pressure so early on is frustrating, as is the constant banging every 1-2 seconds. In the director's commentary, the creator said he only learned through focus testing that introducing mechanics such as the item use was a bad idea at this point, so he added some item use in the initial scenes. That seems a very large and obvious oversight and had me thinking that the game would feature many other aspects of poor game design, but it wasn't the case.
I think when the game opens up and you have multiple objectives, it can be hard to start making progress as it is a bit overwhelming. But if you make some notes to keep track of objectives and points of interest, then it's not too bad; although newcomers to the genre may struggle. The journalist Ray has your objectives on his phone, but it takes a few clicks in a terrible phone interface to actually view it.
The story was good and I could imagine it being a good film or book. I often felt compelled to keep playing to see how the plot develops.
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