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Genre: Adventure Developer & Publisher: HomeBearStudio/Hound Picked Games Released: November 14, 2024 Requirements: OS: Windows 7 Processor: 2 Ghtz Memory: 4 GB Graphics: Intel HD 3000 DirectX: Version Storage: 5 GB available space
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Genre: Adventure Developer & Publisher: HomeBearStudio/Hound Picked Games Released: November 14, 2024 Requirements: OS: Windows 7 Processor: 2 Ghtz Memory: 4 GB Graphics: Intel HD 3000 DirectX: Version Storage: 5 GB available space
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By flotsam NAIRI: Rising Tide HomeBearStudio / Hound Picked Games After about 13 hours of playtime I witnessed the Pangolin (I know because a Steam achievement said so), yet much remains unanswered. The first game finished kind of suddenly and this one does too. Picking up right after the conclusion of the first, the makers are apparently aiming for a third chapter to finish things off, so be warned if complete stories are your thing. It is though a rich instalment, longer (I think) and more elaborate than the first. You don’t need to have played the first,, but this builds on what came before so you may appreciate it more if you have done so. That said, I confess I can’t remember what happened the first time around, and while there are references to the early events, I didn’t feel overly hard done by. Just go with it and enjoy. I remember enough though to know that this has the same look and feel as the first. Once again we are in a 2D animated world full of intrigue, conspiracy and anthropomorphic animals. The visual novel aspect is again prominent, and like the first there is no spoken word, but plenty of dialogue to read. A soundtrack (which I found a tad irritating at times so turned right down) and limited ambient sound, along with satisfying trills when something is completed successfully, provides the auditory accompaniment. Check out the screen shots to get a better sense of the graphics. The storybook presentation is even more pronounced in the cutscenes, with large headshots of conversing characters prominent in the foreground. Nairi is still on a quest to save her family, helped by a bevy of companions. About halfway through the game your little ensemble will split up, and you will venture forth ‘playing’ one or more of those companions for a while, but by and large it is Nairi who propels things along. The game plays in the first person, and you observe each screen from a fixed point rather than move your character around within it, exploring the particular location with the mouse. Each screen is discrete, in the sense that what you see on the screen is all there is – it doesn’t side scroll, you don’t look up or down etc. Arrows indicate the exits to the next screen. Move the mouse over an object of significance and the curser will (generally) change to a little magnifying glass, and/or the outline of the object will glow, and whatever interaction is available will occur. I say generally because there are exceptions. Primary among these are the collectibles you can find (coins and art), and so visually scouring the scene is required. You can ‘see’ these collectibles, but single coins can be very small and easy to miss. While coins can be spent on things (other collectibles and also hints), finding and acquiring them and the other collectibles is in no way essential. There are though a few times when needing to do something somewhere doesn’t come with any feedback, or at least none that I discerned. So be willing to try stuff. Which you will likely have to do anyway. While I thought the game did a good job of giving feedback (e.g., Nairi might say something like “I need something heavier for that”), the need to find and try items in places is part and parcel of the puzzling. As is doing errands for people, solving some mini type games, successfully answering conversation conundrums and (once you get the belt) crafting and un-crafting various bits and pieces. You can though combine and uncombine some things within the inventory ribbon itself, so don’t forsake that. You will find and use a wide range of inventory items but usually won’t have too many at any one time, and they get discarded as you go. Other items you find though will stay with you, including certain tools, but also things like maps and the whistle that enables you to fast travel (a nicely done aspect). Finding certain items (e.g., compass sets) also doesn’t seem compulsory, but might give you further insights when examining your maps. Puzzling is generally gentle throughout, but there are two locations where the puzzling ramps up significantly. One is a tower about mid-game, the other somewhere called The Schism which is at the end. Each involves managing and manipulating the environment in various ways, piecing together what it is that is required and how to make it happen. I enjoyed them a lot, once I had worked out what I thought I needed to do, and they are the most challenging part of the game without doubt. So much so that they both (apparently) come with the ability to skip them. I say apparently because whilst I got a little message saying something like “there are a lot of puzzly bits in there, would you like to skip them” before I entered the tower, nothing like that happened before The Schism. I also don’t know whether you can choose to give up halfway through, perhaps contained somewhere in your journal (which is where the hint mechanism resides). I had no interest in skipping so didn’t interrogate things further at the time, and there is no capacity to go back and see given how the save mechanism works. Indeed, the game could do a whole lot better in telling you how things work. There is a rudimentary pictogram menu at the start that explains the basics of the interface, but apart from that you are on your own. It took a bit of cursing to work out that ‘click and hold’ was needed to activate the exit menu, in contrast to just clicking to save, and I didn’t realise until very late on that I could interact with the exclamation mark above an inventory item in the same way and get an insight into what perhaps to do. I then found out that the maps can be interacted with, which suggests that those big question marks might operate in the same way. Perhaps that is on me, and perhaps it could be said to be part of the puzzling, but I do think some further explanation is warranted. I mentioned the journal, which is where you can find your collectible inventory, as well as dialogue transcripts and the hint ‘chicken.’ It will draw a picture in return for a coin, which I didn’t tend to find terribly helpful or always contemporary, but I make that judgement based on a small sample size, given I tended not to use it. If finding stuff is part of your thing, there comes a point before entering The Schism where you will be given the option not to enter. If you want to find all the art or the coins or buy all the figurines, or recruit more people to The Rising’s cause (you can do that too by stamping them with your stamp), then back away and explore some more. It is narratively heavy at times (up to 20 minutes of dialogue clicking), and while the broader story is a rather good one, some of the bits and pieces are, in my opinion, a bit dodgy. We really don’t need the character that is the bath-house penguin, or the dressing up as a girl to appeal to the university professor. The farting goose you can make up your own mind about. You can save at will (it doesn't tell you that either), but the game also saves at various points, including when exiting from the menu but not from within the game. There is only one save slot however (which is why I can’t go back and interrogate the maps) but you can have three games on the go should you wish to. Despite some grumblements, I will come back if there is a denouement. I played on: OS: Windows 10, 64 Bit Processor: Intel i7-9700K 3.7GHz RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 32GB Video card: AMD Radeon RX 580 8192MB
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