So far, I am at the beginning of the third chapter.

The static graphics are okay, but everything is a bit plain, lacking detail, and in overly pastel, pink/yellow/reddish warm hues. The textures on characters are ugly, low-res, with shadows being extremely low resolution, with ugly flicker present most of the time. The characters have incorrect proportions and strangely deformed limbs.

What is beyond horrible are the animations. Oh my, they are so horrible, I cannot remember the last time I saw such horrible animations. There are some fights in Cairo, and they look so bad it's stunning - especially the nunchaku animation. I don't understand why didn't they replace the uber poor animated fights with static images like in comic books. The prologue comic book fight looks so much better. The main character walks like both his ankles are broken, you'd just have to see it.

The story has shows sign of being interesting, but is constantly bogged down by poor storytelling (dialogues, choreography, etc.)

If there is one word to characterize this game, it's "stiff". The character animation is stiff, the dialogues are stiff, the narrative is stiff.

Plus it has ninjas. Points down for ninjas, they are like mono-sodium glutamate of today's games and movies, a clear sign of cheap and inferior product.

Overall, 4 points out of 10. It's not exactly terrible, but it's sterile, uninspired... and stiff.

Grey Matter was much more pleasant experience.

what somehow makes that worse... is that the ninjas have no relevance or meaning to the plot.

Well, I have just finished the game, and I am lowering the score to 3 out of 10, mainly because of the pointless, quasi-action finale in an empty maze and severely anti-climatic ending where the plot just fell flat on its belly and stopped moving like a beached whale. It was obviously written with sequels in mind, but I can't imagine myself looking forward to them. If you compare this game to the utter brilliance that was Gabriel Knight that came - how long ago is it? 20 years? And it accomplished so much more with such modest technical means.

The only redeeming quality of the game is the music, the music is top notch. The rest is just mediocre to outright horrible.

The plot - The good old "secretive Illuminati groups fighting for the world changing occult power" theme, so brilliantly satirized by the fantastic Foucault's Pendulum from Umberto Eco, and so mundanely milked by the mediocre Dan Brown, done in a very unimaginative way. It seemed to start off nicely in the first half, but ended up being a dud towards the end. The developers evidently run out of something in the end - time, money, dedication, patience, I don't know.

The useless gadgets - I remember when Gabriel Knight 3 featured a laptop with a sizable hyperlinked encyclopedia of occult topics. Wow, I was impressed back then, it was a good reading, not entirely relevant to the game, but still a nice touch. This game gives you just a phone that is useless 95 percent of time, because you can't use it to initiate communication on your own, only when explicitly prompted by the game.

The "deduction minigame" - it does not make much sense, you are looking for analogies, they can be found anywhere, if you are willing to see them. Once again, this topic was beaten to death in Foucault's Pendulum - as the protagonists found in the end, the Rosencrucians are everywhere, even under your bed. Or, as current political debate teaches us, everyone can be compared to Hitler. Luckily, we have the Godwin's law.

The dumbed down interactions - the original adventure games featured text parsers. You have to think about what to do and then verbalize it. Sometimes it worked, most time it did not. But the possibilities were vast. Then came clicking GUIs, but in solid games like the mentioned GK, you could at lest examine almost everything, and some attempted actions returned clever and funny negative responses. This game clearly shows which item can be examined, which can be used, and only possible action are allowed, and only the bare necessary minimum actions for progressing in the game is possible. The world is empty, each "minilevel" consisting of only three to six locations.

Mundane and silly tasks - the protagonist often seaches for a source of light (eastablished adventure cliche) while having a smartphone with camera with him all the time. Everyone knows these devices double as flashlights. At one moment, he leaves a door deliberately closed so that he can fumble in the dark, when it would be sufficient to open it and let the light from the corridor into the darkened room.

The technical problems could be forgiven, if the game was good, but sadly, that is not the case.

Regarding the animation, it has been pointed out that changing monitor refresh rate from 120Hz to 60 would make the character animation look more normal.

I would've overlooked many of the game's shortcomings if it had given me some challenging gameplay. Alas, this is one of the easiest adventure games I've played in a while. You mentioned the first Gabriel Knight 1, which happens to have a lot of tough puzzles.

I have seen many low-budget adventure games that were challenging. E.g. Dark Fall: The Journal.

Well, looking forward to the GK1 20th Anniversary remake.

I think there is something wrong with Malachi's proportions... his legs seem to long and thin while the rest is kind of big and bulky.
I'm near the end of chapter 2, so far I'm enjoying it... and going through the puzzles like a hot knife through butter. Just after finishing Samaritan Paradox those puzzles are pretty much hard to notice :)

I have to agree about the silly and mundane tasks, I only made it to the start of chapter 2 before I lost all interest with the game. What's worse, you can't even do some of those silly and mundane tasks until certain points in the story. 'Oh, look, there might be something back there in the dark. Well.... I COULD use my phone to light the way, or even just walk over and check it out(I mean, it's obviously light enough you can see there's something back there), or even perform what seem to be a serious of obvious yet unnecessary tasks to turn a bigger light on... but no, there's no reason to move that crate right now. I'm sure that mystery object isn't important.'

Instead of making me go through all this busywork, how about the game just lets me go to bed until the next day like a normal person? That's much safer than trying to impress some dangerous thugs for what I'm sure is very mundane information.

Instead of spending hours scouring the city for obscure objects so he can get something in almost the most difficult way possible, how about he just picks that thing up directly? It's not like it's full of some toxic chemical, it's just water.


The story seems like it has potential, but it's not interesting enough to get me through the unnecessary busywork.

I just finished the game (admittedly with quite a bit of help) and I am actually hoping for a sequel. Yes, the animations are awful and the game play pretty tedious but the story is excellent and kept me on the edge of my seat at all times. I also really dig the bromance between Malachi and David and came to really like this 'couple'. I just wish the characters looked more polished. Even the animation in Gray Matter looked better than in here and that was made a few years back.

Have now finished the game and read all the reviews I can find on various forums. Bothered that there is such harsh criticism. Yes, the character movements are often laughable but try playing old, now pixelated, GK games... I for one am grateful that there are still talents working on what is important in "adult" adventure games (yes, have played lotz of Big Fish HOGs and they are great for coming-home-from work and wanting to to DO something that is not a shooter). But, I come from the old immersive days..... ye gods URU and Path of the Shell, Longest Journey et al. Lotz of replays there.... And then the wondrous sassy GK games and Tex Murphy... so I'm looking for that element of adult fantasy in games that have a bit of heft in the story, play in the game, and some "graceful attitude". Found it again in Moebius.

Here's what JJenson does that other's don't - history interwoven in story (big deal) and great mix of fact and fiction (side quests off game time to look into which is fun -- like extra credit assignments in high school). Sassy characters who have an IQ but play to our "fantasy" inclinations. Different now with Malichi but when I woke up this morning the landscape is culturally very different than GK days so our sassy hero needs to be contemporary. Malichi suits the times and, unlike others, I thought his eyes were perfect. David is a contemporary throwback to Dudley Do-Right (Bullwinkle cartoon) and I loved it! No Grace in this game and she was missed sorely ... bring that stuff back as part of the Balance (bad reference to Longest Journey).

Would I have liked better/smoother gameplay - sure, hate pounding keys to make a character move and watch them move with chopsticks instead of legs. Yes, please "pump" that up. More locations, sure that would be good -- and always, longer chapters... And puzzles could certainly be a little tougher - can't believe anyone was challenged by the Chapter 7 maze as comments suggest, it was easy-peasy. BUT that said, please keep this stuff alive - there is a hungry place between shooters and HOGS. And I would guess those looking for those places have some coin to share and represent a market.

Bottom line, Moebius is not the greatest game but it was SORELY WELCOMED by those who still want a good point and click adventure with some smarts. So please, let's give this effort some room to roam. I'll be looking for the next one and hope all involved are still thinking about next steps, moving forward, and keepin' on keepin' on.

A'men to that! And the accusations of misantropy and misoginy - come on, most characters are politicians or their families. They are probably even worse in real life :)

I very much liked the story, I though it was excellent and as a fan of Ancient Roman history I though the historic references were a very nice touch, story wise it one of the best adventure games that were made in recent years that I played, Jane Jensen clearly didn't lose her touch for telling a good story and while it isn't as brilliant as Gabriel Knight it is still better that a lot of other games, Malachi being a misanthrope didn't really bother me and the strong homo-erotic innuendos was a nice addition and not something you see often from a main character in a computer game.

The main failing of the game is the extreme limited gameplay, there is little objects to explore and people to speak to that isn't linked to the game progress, there is also a very limited freedom to try solutions, for example you could use your inventory items on a very limited numbers of hotspots, you can't try to combine two items unless it certain you succeed, in fact you can't even pick up items to you inventory until you come across the problem that you will need them for solving. This all make Moebius the most rigid and linear adventure game I ever played.

The puzzles were nothing special and were no problem to experience player such as myself (no need to use the hint system) some of the detective work where you need to make observation about the characters you meet could be very frustrating since quit often you have no clues to base your observation on and are going on pure guess work.

The graphics is another major failure, I'm not a graphic whore and normality don't mind outdated graphics, especially in adventures which in my opinions should be judged base on quality of story and puzzles, I do however expect the graphics to be done in a satisfactory way, this is not the case with Moebius - the characters proportions are deformed, their animation is buggy and in some cases missing altogether. Clearly this area lacked good professional input and was done in a very amateurish way.

Despite all the game failing I did enjoy it and the game manage to captivate my attention to the plot enough so I had no problem finishing it. I looking forward to a sequel and hope Jensen would choose another, more professional studio to work with, the quality of Phoenix doesn't do justice with her work.

Please explain to me, how could you possibly perceive the story as being "excellent"? What's so excellent about it?

Searching for fabricated analogies between historical (whose images were often quite distorted by the official chronicles) and actual persons to find a Kwizats Haderach who will save the failing US economy from collapsing. Add the thick, sweetish patriotic ketchup according to taste.

It's horrible, it's unimaginative, tired and without a single fresh idea. It's not even well narrated.

I thought the game was not worth its money.

Contrary to many of the reviewers here, I haven’t played any part of the Gabriel Knight series. I thought the game showed a lot of promise in its first part. The intelligent and cynic protagonist raised my interest from the start and I particularly enjoyed the game’s focus on analysing people and deducing historic references. It showed some, in games unconventional, romance between two men, but left the relationship ambiguous enough to not dominate the game. As a European I also quite liked the mentions of the EU in this game, although the game was a bit too biased. The story became a bit silly towards the end, so much even that I stopped caring about it halfway through the game.

The graphics were indeed a letdown, but something I can forgive. I don’t have a low tolerance for graphics, as I do enjoy playing old games too, but I can understand that people would find it terrible. It reminded me of the first Sims game a lot, especially the odd character proportions and animations. The voice acting and music were more than acceptable, if not good.

What really disappointed me about this game was the gameplay itself. The deduction puzzles became very repetitive and unoriginal as the game progressed and, more often than not, little thinking was required and simple trialling-and-erroring was possible too. This combined with some seriously annoying backtracking for items you already discovered and of which you knew you would have to come back for them. The overall point-and-click action was too linear and obvious, as there were no clever uses of objects to solve puzzles, but just ordinary items. The game is largely carried by its story, which is promising, but neither original nor thrilling. Other than that, there is little to remember about it.

Moebius is a let down in many ways and I'd say it's the weakest game Jane Jensen has done thus far in her career. The plot itself started out okay, but it falls on its face pretty quickly and the characters just aren't very interesting. The only interesting design point of the game, the Holmesian quick analysis of people and objects is also quickly flattened by making it a simple chore of finding the least ridiculous statement among ridiculous statements.

there were in the beta, when that post was written. Ninjas dont beat him up at the end of chapter 1 now?
EDIT: they are definitely still in the game.