Edna & Harvey: The Breakout

This game was pretty delightful. The story is kinda wonky and the characters are generally shallow. The puzzles are sometimes very frustrating to figure out, and sometimes unintuitive, but usually I could look back on the puzzle in hindsight and understand how it worked. Where the game shines is in Edna's responses to the world around her. Most obviously, this comes through in the puzzle design: you can try just about anything on just about anything else and get a unique result or response from Edna that is entertaining and usually also hints as to whether or not it's actually a step in the right direction or just a silly thing you can do. These are game designers after my heart, here. This also helped to make up for the underused game mechanic of Harvey's ability to help Edna gain special skills: this mechanic was underused to the point that it seemed a little jarring when it actually was used. Unfortunately, to access this mechanic, you kinda have to try using Harvey on everything, and his unique responses just weren't a interesting as Edna's. Ah well. But also, Edna interacted with the stereotypical crazies-in-the-asylum NPCs in a way that was so compassionate and humanizing and wonderful that I actually couldn't tell whether the game developers actually held those stereotypes about people with mental illnesses or not, and kinda didn't care. I loved engaging with this brightly-colored world through Edna's eyes. I agree with the other reviewer that this is probably better to play in German. I'm a native English speaker and played the game in English; the minor translation errors weren't show-stopping, but I was glad that my smattering of German clarified them.

This game is so much fun to play. I did consult a walkthrough from time to time just to discover there is a really logical solution I could have found myself. Follow the developer's hints and talk to everything you encounter. It's a lot of fun and sometimes can contain small hints. You can also use the pen on every clickable in the game. Mostly it's only smiley faces, but sometimes its funny and may contain hints. Some critics have said the English translation and narration is bad -- I thjink it's the other way round. The voice acting in the original German version is so bad I didn't stand it and switched to English. Much better voice acting, so the jokes are much more believable than in German; also, they have been translated very well. This is by no means a short game. It's easy enough not to get angry at it, and it's hard enough to keep you at it. To sum it up: Edna&Harvey: The Breakout is one of the best and most relaxing point&click adventures I've ever played -- and I played a lot of them. A very relaxing experience. I bought it on special offer for 1.99, but in retrospective It's also worth the full price here on GoG. HAVE FUN!

Are you ready for a Point-and-Click Adventure with a sense of humor as warped as the artstyle? The writing is pretty solid, and the characters are all likable... the ones that are supposed to be, anyway. Of course, the star of the show is our heroine, Edna, who I liked from the very beginning. She has a cute voice, and speaks with such sincerity that I can't tell if she's being a smartass, or if she's actually crazy, and I think that was the intent. In some games of the genre, it's a chore to look at ever last speck of dust, for fear of missing that which lets you move forward, but in this, just the things that come out of her mouth alone make it a pleasure. Some of the jokes might come across as insensitive about mental health, but this isn't the kind of game that wants to make a statement; it wants to make you laugh. As someone who does suffer from illness, though, I was still able to turn my brain off and laugh along; there's nothing that's outwardly inflammatory, but do keep this in mind when considering your purchase. You'll run into some moon logic puzzles, for sure, but they at least play out in an entertaining way. Fortunately, there aren't any real action sequences or anything that can't be circumvented with a walkthrough, so frustration will be minimal, should you choose to go that route. That said, SAVE OFTEN; there are a number of game-breaking glitches that I ran into - very strange ones, too - not the least of which is that, for my copy at least, the end credits never appear. I got to see the last screen and listen to the credits music, but no actual credits, and the game didn't end, and since ALT+F4 doesn't work, I had to use Task Manager to exit the game from this. I was still able to get through the game just fine, though, so it all worked out fine, and I'm looking forward to playing the sequel.

Edna and Harvey: The Breakout is a very well done adventure game. Their's so many lines of dialogue. You can literally talk to any object. The dialogue is so clever and funny that it reminds me of LucasArts's old adventure games. The characters are very memorable and the voices are well done. Hard to believe that this game started as a student project for Daedalic cofounder Jan Müller-Michaelis (also known as “Poki”). We need more adventure games that's just as complex as this game.