State of Mind

I love this game, but it sucks as a game. By that I mean that while it portrays a fascinating, cyberpunk'y dystopia, has fantastic characters, great voice acting and an Orwellian (as in the game, Orwell) art style, and it tells a story worth telling, it feels like the developers realized at the last second that they needed some interactivity in order for it to not be called a 'Walking simulator' and so, they threw in a bunch of unnecessary, irrelevant, David Cage-ian tasks. "Hey, you can change the background music in your apartment! And you can buy a balloon! You can even look at this random flower and get a description! That makes this an interactive experience, right?" There's only a handful of puzzles in the game that rise above mundane, and they're still extremely easy to solve. Still, the game is carried by its story and characters and is definitely worth experiencing for that alone. But, kind of like how David Cage's games have always been met with criticisms of "Why don't you just make a movie? It's clear you just want to make a movie!", I can't help but get the feeling that this story would have been told just as well in another medium - there's just not enough relevant player interactivity to make it feel like YOU have a stake in what is going on. They do throw a couple of hard choices your way, so the potential for interesting choice-and-consequence is there, but they all literally happen in the final 5 minutes of the game. All in all this is a good idea (a great idea, even) with a somewhat flawed execution. Highly recommended for the story, but don't expect any interesting gameplay.

Being a fan of the cyberpunk genre and graphic adventure games, this game was a blast. It has all I wanted on a game like this: - Great locations. - Original and simple, yet beautiful graphics. - Great plot (with nice twists). - Nice soundtrack. - Interesting characters. - Nice narrative. Seriously, great work by Daedalic.

This is a tough review, overall I enjoyed the game and the story but... I think the story could've gone further, things were even hinted at for this direction (I won't be specific for spoiler reasons). This game has some of the worst animation and character designs I've seen. Part of it is for a reason (which I won't spoil) but since it was applied throught the entire game I have to ding some points off it. There are some typos in the title cards that appear, including an incorrect date which messes the story up.

Beautiful world, great story telling and decent acting. By the way -- "low-poly characters" -- the characters are stylized to look the way they do. Look at the environment, it's not as "low-poly" as the characters -- it's deliberate.