The Descendant is an episodic point and click adventure game by Gaming Corps AB. While I’m not averse to the genre, I can’t help but feel that this would be a poor representation.
I’ll start with the Graphics. They’re genuinely good as long as you don’t set the detail to minimum. Sadly, the developers decided that framerate shouldn’t be a priority, and this is most noticeable during cutscenes with a large amount of movement. A shame, since the character models have a nice texture to them evocative of a graphic novel or the like. Too bad you’ll be spending that time a bit nauseous. The facial expressions are also great, for what that’s worth.
The sound is suitable for the game. It’s creepy when necessary, and tense during high stress points. It knows when it’s needed, and gets out of the way when it isn’t. They at least get top marks for that. Their choice of voice actors was well done, as well. It never feels like they had poor direction.
The story and characters, on the other hand, should be the focal point of a game like this. The story once again involves the goddamn apocalypse and the grim darkness the survivors of it find themselves in. Roughly 4000 people survived the nuclear Ragnarok bought down on the world because reasons, which sounds like a really low number to promote growth to me, but whatever. Donnie and Randall have been sent out to check on the only vault that hasn’t opened up, and Randall is the only character in this game with any actual character. That character happens to be “asshole”, but whatever.
The problem here is that the game is so incredibly short, that no one gets to develop, especially since you jump back and forth in time at least twice. Even the small mystery at had isn’t much of one, as it’s a foregone conclusion that, due to the fact that you see what has happened in the present, little of what happens in the past matters at all. That was time that could’ve been better spent elsewhere, like making Donnie less of a non-entity. This makes the ending of the first episode incredibly unsatisfying. Granted, the fact that it’s also a small but definite timeskip also doesn’t help things, because jumping through time doesn’t help a jumbled narrative all that much.
When I said the game is short, I meant it. You can easily beat the first episode in less than an hour if you don’t screw around, or better yet if you know what to do at every opportunity. This is not the sort of thing that benefits from an episodic format; they literally would have done better to finish the entire game and release it as one whole.
Add to that the fact that puzzles are mostly simple. None of the difficulty actually comes from the puzzles themselves. Rather, the most trouble you’ll have with any puzzle is simply finding the damn thing, or the item you need to fix it. This is not made any easier by the odd flagging present in the game. objects which would be the solution to a puzzle can’t even be examined or picked up until you’ve reached the point where you need them. The first puzzle in the game forces this on you; you need gasoline to power a generator to power a computer terminal, which needed a crowbar to open the panel, which wasn’t even obvious in the environment until you found out that the control panel box was rusted shut. You can’t seem to hold more than one item at a time, and their solution was to force the situation so that you illogically wouldn’t be in a position where you would have more than one item at a time. Maybe years of adventure games have taught us that kleptomania is a good thing, but this drive me nuts.
To make matters worse, objects that can be interacted with require you to be within short range for you to click on them. Even if you know that, say, a computer panel can be clicked on, if you’re on the other side of the room, you need to move towards it, then click it. You can have a puzzle figured out, but finding the object you need to solve it will be a far greater puzzle, as you walk around a room looking for the object you need to click on. And in reality, there are really only two puzzles in the first episode.
I honestly can’t recommend the first episode of The Descendant on its own. It’s just too short and empty as it stands.Maybe following chapters will address this, but I’m not holding my breath.
Pros:
+ Pleasant character models
+ Great atmosphere
+ The voice talent is actually good
Cons:
– It’s very short
– Characters get little chance to develop
– Figuring out item interactions can be frustrating
– None of the choices you make seem to matter in the first episode
– I’m so sick of the post-apocalyptic future
*We were provided a copy of this game for review*
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