Resonance

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 13:10:26 GMT

I finished Resonance.

The plot is very interesting. I somewhat apologise for my previous review: what I said was probably still right, but it was somewhat unfair on the game, because the later plot is really interesting, but I happened to be annoyed by the bit in the demo because it was similar to too many other games and I'd got bored of it.

It avoids several cliches I feared were coming and does quite interesting things instead. It develops the relationships between the characters very well, with a number of scary developments that work surprisingly well. In a mostly-linear game where you play all the characters it's hard for the characters to have any meaningful developments other than "we work together", but it does it very well. I felt it could have taken it further, but honestly, it did a good job where basically no other games do anything at all, so it wins there :)

Several of the puzzles are pretty good, including comparatively free-form puzzles where you have to do things like "type in a PIN" or "choose a door to kick down" and the interface supports doing any one, but you have to work out for yourself what the correct one is.

I also like the way they handle dangerous situations. Most of the time, you just automatically don't walk of cliffs, etc, but if you're somewhere you might plausibly get killed or otherwise lose, if you get it wrong, the game rewinds to the beginning of the scene. I've seen this occasionally, but I like it a lot (it's like a restricted version of my "undo" adventure game) because it doesn't keep breaking immersion to make you reload from save every time you make a mistake, but nor does it break the suspense by making the dangerous thing infinitely postponed.

Several puzzles throughout the game did annoy me someone for being too "interfacey". After the first few scenes, I got the hang of the style so I didn't have any problems figuring out what to do, but I was still sometimes annoyed by knowing what to do, but not being sure how to communicate it, or having an interface element thrust on me for doing something I hadn't yet realised I might want to do. (I suspect some of the gratuitous dialog boxes were forced on the developer by the engine.)

But on balance, I enjoyed it.

comments

jack

Resonance