Born Punk

I admit that I have been a die-hard point & click adventure fan since the beginnings of the genre in the 80s. I also love good pixel art, exciting stories, cyberpunk and detective mystery. Accordingly, my expectations for Born Punk were very high. Even though the game is not entirely bad, it disappointed me in many respects. The pros & cons from my point of view: + Good voice acting + some enriching ideas within the cyberpunk genre + Design of an interesting setting and world. + Funny moments - not very exciting - little motivating, rather weak story - strong linearity of the story - an unsatisfactory ending - unnecessary, annoying, repetitive puzzles - unbelievable and illogical scenes and decisions - the design of the world is mainly revealed through heavy reading, which is not well integrated into the game flow - the main characters seem very superficial and clichéd - uncomfortable, unfamiliar controls - For the most part, the graphics are nicely drawn, but the high quality pixel art is not carried through and seems sloppy in some scenes. - The character sprites look a bit clunky and are very poorly animated. - The mostly schmaltzy rock music is not coherent for me and doesn't really fit the cyberpunk genre. - The recording quality of the voices varies and is also too quiet in some scenes. All in all, it can't hold a candle to my genre favourites Technobabylon, Whispers of a Machine, Blade Runner or Beneath a Steel Sky. I will certainly not play it a second time. But if there's a "retro point & click - low tide", there's nothing to stop you from trying it out. As we all know, tastes are different... As you can read from the many enthusiastic reviews here. In case of doubt, by buying a game, you also support the genre and the developers, thus enabling further, perhaps better titles.

I've played nearly all point-and-click adventures, maybe that's what has me mystified by the other reviews. Or maybe it's because it had so much promise? On a positive note, the voice acting is stellar, the art style and backgrounds are inspired. I'd be lying if I didn't enjoy some of Flash's + Eevi's banter. However, puzzles are wearisome, items are redundant and/or unavailable until you need them, and this already short game is padded by the lack of a fast-walk/travel feature. World-building starts, and then it's a careening downward slope from a promising beginning to a tedious middle and then it's over before you would ever expect — Born Punk's cheap cliffhanger ending is shamefully unfinished and pandering to a sequel I don't plan on supporting.

I haven't played a point-and-click adventure since the old days and my instincts were more than a little rusty while playing through Born Punk. A few parts of the game had me thinking that classic "what am I supposed to do here?" thought. I've only played the game through once, so I do not fully know every solution to each puzzle at this point but I can say that many have more than one possible solution. There is some replay value here. The story is fine. The overall plot is maybe a bit simple, though the great setting and details of the world prevent the story from feeling tedious or over-familiar. It should be noted that much world-building is explained through reading data files. Not my prefered info delivery-method, but I didn't find it detrimental to the experience. I like the humor, especially as it is very characted-based while still taking the setting and conflict seriously. The bread-and-butter puzzle-solving and detective work of the genre is good, although there were times I felt like I came up with a neat and reasonable solution to a problem only to receive the well-worn, 'I'm not doing that' type of statement from Eevi. Sound mix of the game is strange in some places. The ambient noise of locations or the music will be louder than characters talking. It isn't a constant issue, but I found myself straining to hear characters from time to time. Overall, I really enjoyed the game. I've largely docked the rating one star because of, well... that ending. It didn't even feel so much as culmination of the story, but rather that the story simply stopped. Cliffhanger, sure, but I think many players will expect this to be a single story rather than an on-going series. Perhaps I'm over-reading this, but it felt like the plot was building up to a conflict which simply didn't happen. When the credits rolled, I honestly thought I got the 'Bad Ending' only for it to be the canon ending. I was a strange sour-note to finish the game on.

I remember backing this game way back in early 2019 (I was one of the early kickstarter backers of this game) and had been waiting for this game (even though it slipped past a few deadlines, but that is the nature of Game development) and finally got to play it on launch and I somehow was not dissappointed. If you are a fan of old school point and click adventures, you will love this game. If you are a fan of old-school Sierra and LucasArts games, this is right up your alley (although it was slightly challenging to get used to that style and interface) FYI for Linux people I was able to play the windows port straight through without any problems using Lutris (the runner was set to 'lutris-fshack-7.2-x86_64') but would have preferred a linux port on launch.