zereshk's reviews on GOG.com

I see you are a man of culture as well..

This game is intriguing to say the least. It can roughly be classified as a point-and-click adventure slash RPG hybrid or, to say it differently: This is an adventure, but not one where you duct-tape an avocado to a cat because that will disable a security camera on the moon, no, in this game you have to manipulate your _human_ environment through level-able skills. That human environment consists of late 1700s aristocrats and politicians and you are the highly educated son of an influential French occultist who recently went missing on the island of an eccentric nobleman. And that's how crazy the situation is at the BEGINNING of the game. By the time you finish it you will long for that calm and familiar territory. Your protagonist Louis is a man of culture. Well-read on both modern science and ancient philosophy and myth, a connoisseur of the arts, articulate and refined. The people he meets are the same way. That is a social environment that many attempt to write about. But it's hard to get right because it's hard to write people who are smarter than you. This game, on the other hand, manages to write its characters, and their interactions, in a way that I personally found quite convincing. Playing The Council for the first time is a pleasantly stressful experience. I don't think I have ever played a game that forced me so much to constantly pay attention to everything around me. Everything you see can become relevant later and the game will not spell things out for you, so you have to notice it, study it, try to understand it. Everything other characters say might be an important hint, and it's up to you to discern what's important and what isn't. Sometimes the obvious solution to a puzzle is the correct one. Sometimes the dialogue option that doesn't require a skill check is the most effective one. Much of what happens in the early chapters of this game turns out to not be important at all, but it's impossible to predict as a first-time player what will and won't be relevant. And isn't that a completely realistic situation for someone in a new social group with no idea who is important, who can be trusted, who has which secret plan? I could mention critically that some of the gameplay gets repetitive in the second half of the game. I eventually got tired of scanning every inch of the floor to find rare coins, and some of the conversations start to get a little too similar, especially on the occasions where you have to speak to multiple people about the same topic. One riddle suffers from a serious design flaw and made me replay the entire episode because I was so unhappy with my undeserved bad outcome. What Louis says doesn't always correspond to the dialogue option you choose. Also, the devs seem to have sometimes gotten lost in their own sprawling narrative, because on some occasions the characters agreed on a version of events that hadn't happened in my game or Louis suddenly just knew something that I hadn't actually found out. The replayability is also lower than I first suspected - sure, there are alternate versions of events that are interesting to see, but once you've finished the game you know that a lot that happens isn't important and it's a slog to get through it again. If you haven't played the game yet I'd recommend to play every chapter twice in a row, making different choices, before you continue. After all, the game originally came out in installments, and this is probably how the players who were around at the time approached it too. So maybe the game only deserves 4 stars, but damn, I just liked it so much! This is a game where you can go around a beautiful old mansion and your protagonist comments on the brushstrokes of each painting on the walls, and then later you realize that the placement of much of the art also has symbolic meaning. There's a riddle that requires you to listen to the protagonist retell a myth from ancient Greece in great detail. It has a fantasy version of the Freemasons, and your mom is their boss. When I first completed the game I intentionally got a bad ending because one villainous plot intrigued me. If The Council had come out a decade earlier, it would probably be a classic today, but nowadays we are swamped with games that demand less of us, so a game that forces you to think so much is a harder sell. It's not for everyone, but it definitely is for me. It's a game that kept surprising me, delighting me, charming me. I think that deserves a 1 star bonus. I'd love to play another game like this. By the way, this game has 13 possible endings and there are two things you can do in earlier chapters that lock you out of the good ones. Good luck!

Wholesome... if you like that...

This game gives you exactly what you expect and what the devs promise: A feel-good visual novel where everyone is nice, wholesome, good-looking, and no one has any real problems. The art is good and the controls are user-friendly. If that's what you want, definitely go for it! It didn't appeal to me much though. The characters are all too similar, the mood is too simplistically cheerful, and most importantly the love interest (yes, there's only one) seemed boring to me. I guess this is something that can come with only having one romance option: It has to appeal to everyone, so the person can't have too much personality. You can change Cove's character and looks a little, but really just a little. If a game offers me the opportunity to see someone grow up like this and spend so much time watching them develop and unfold (a great concept by itself), the person should be more interesting. I'd rather watch an unlikable but intriguing character grow up than a boring one. So I didn't finish the game. By the time the "adolescent" phase came to its close I was just skipping through the dialogue hoping for something to happen. The complaints about the LGBTQ content are way exaggerated. The game gives you the OPTION to make it into a same-sex romance (which is clearly stated in the description, so not a surprise), but you can also create a female protag or make it into a male/male friendship story. The only unavoidable same-sex aspect (at least in the first half, which is all I have played) is that you have two moms. If that is already too much, you need to pick a different game. Like the 90%+ that force you to be straight... Also, the game lets you customize your character in many other ways too - looks, diet, interests, opinions - and remembers it. It lets you choose tiny details like whether you play the violin or the bass, why should it not let you choose your sexual orientation? I give it 3 stars even though I didn't like it because I figure you can't give a café a bad rating for not serving you steak. It does right what it says on the tin, I just don't care much for "wholesome".

Buggy, boring, vexing flashes of genius

After Syberia 1 (which I loved) and Syberia 2 (which I hated), it took me half a year to gather the courage to install Syberia 3. Well, it's poetic that I see myself forced to give 3 stars because this game is a mix of what made the first game great and what made the second mediocre in the worst sense of the word. THE GOOD PARTS Most of the game is the same drudgery as in the second game - generic locations, forgettable characters, quests that are annoying busywork or just trial and error. But there is one part of the game, roughly the third quarter of it, that to me makes up for a lot and brings back the vibe of the original. I was so delighted to play it that I will add two stars for that experience alone. I wish the entire game could have been on that level, then it would have been the sequel worthy of the original. It has the dilapidated beauty of S1 locations, you once again shovel your way through the ruins of high modernity. Faded Soviet posters adorn the crumbling walls while you explore an imaginative and surreal place that has falled into disrepair after a disaster, then you meet the one person who just can't move away. I don't want to spoil the details, but this brought back everything I loved about the first game. It's poetic, sad, magnificent. Alas, the rest of the game isn't this way. GAMEPLAY - The camera perspectives give the impression that you see the entire game through the eyes of surveillance cameras. I often got lost in the town area because I would, for example, leave an area to the left and appear on the left side of the new area, meaning I had to go right next. Confusing. Sometimes I had to use the WASD keys to leave a weird very close camera angle because if I clicked anywhere, Kate would start running in circles. - It's nearly random what Kate actually does when you click somewhere. And sometimes the cursor just disappears. Controls are unreliable and imprecise and there's one riddle that depends on doing something in a fast and precise way which nearly made me throw my laptop out of the window - You can't skip through dialogue or cutscenes. - The dialogue system is less annoying than in S2 at least, though it now suffers from this common issue in newer games that the dialogue option you click is only a few words and Kate then says something completely different. - There are a LOT of bugs, some of them game-breaking. The game gives you only one savepoint, which it will overwrite whenever it sees fit. Make frequent back-ups, or you may be stuck and have to start over! It would have happened to me twice if I hadn't had back-ups. There's an optional area late in the game where you WILL get stuck if you enter it. There's also an optional item that will crash your game if you pick it up and then look at it. 9 years and this hasn't been fixed. If you already are stuck: The studio offers downloadable savepoints on the website. I guess that's cheaper than fixing the bugs. The game is entirely linear, so you don't miss out on anything by using the downloaded save points. GAME SEEMS OLDER THAN IT IS (to me) Somehow I had it in the back of my head that the game is from 2007, not 2017. I was surprised to find that it's a relatively new game - the game mechanics make it seem older than it is, and so do the animation and the rampant ethnic stereotyping. The Russians are all either corrupt villains, stupid and racist, or drunks. The indigenous people are childlike oompa loompas who can't think very far, can't speak in full sentences, apart from their leader, and whose culture seems to be an amalgamation of indigenous cultures from across the world - Turkic yurts, Eskaleut(?) language, Native American dreamcatchers. Seems dated. I guess they had to stick with some of the old sins from Syberia 2. CONCLUSION In conclusion, this game demanded a lot of patience from me, but since there were certain promising signs in the first part of the game (the level design, the illustrated brochures and books you find, the attention to detail that I loved in the first game, the weird design of the "snow ostriches"), I kept hoping that the game would eventually become good. And it did! Only to then become boring again. But I certainly don't regret playing it because the third quarter made up for a lot.

The Darkness... it beckons...

The year is 2017. HBO's "Game of Thrones" and History's "Vikings" are at the peak of their success and history-inspired grimdark fantasy is all the rage. Grimdark is an artistic concept that asks: What if we crammed more misery than is humanly possible to endure into this story? and answers: Why that would straight-up hypnotize our audience, that's what! Everyone likes a good execution, and even if they don't like it, it's still impossible to look away! So along comes, that very same year, the game you are reading about right now. Being a cheapskate, I bought it three years later, in winter, started it, realized quickly that Senua's story is really very (grim)dark and playing it in the darkest and coldest part of the year would absolutely wreck me psychologically. So I shelved it until I came back to it in late June 2026, during a heatwave, decided it (hopefully) wasn't going to get any warmer and brighter than this, and if I couldn't handle the abject misery of Senua's existence then, I never would. Well, it turns out it's manageable in summer, and the corpse-splattered liminal space between Midgard and Helheim that the story takes place in just makes me marvel at its cool surrealism. Indeed I would cite the visual language of the game as its biggest plus. I love the idea that the game does not, for the most part, play IN Helheim, but in the no-man's-land that you would get to if you went so far to the East that you reach the borderlands of the world of Death. Rotting, deserted human-built structures mix with fresh corpses, magical illusions and Senua's increasingly embodied memories of the dead. How can there be corpses if no one is around to have put them where they are? The game boldly refuses to explain, and it helps the dreamlike mood. It's art! I also loved the horror parts of the game - they never once resort to cheap jumpscares and yet manage to be frightening if you can truly put yourself in Senua's position. Similarly, the game has a way to visually express emotions, to approximate Senua's intuitions (or delusions?) by subtle and not-so-subtle changes in the environment. There's a specific way the colours of a structure can change if a threat is about to emerge (the "cow skin effect" I called it), looking at a scene through a stone arch can reveal hidden details. That last one's borrowed from folk magic traditions - look at a person through a window formed by your fingers to see if they're a fairy in disguise. You often have to find hidden shapes in the world, which may also be a nod to the tendencies of psychosis to make you see patterns where none exist, or to make you think you changed reality by willing it. All very clever! Is this an effect of Senua's mental illness though or does reality just work differently in the borderlands of Hel? It's impossible to know. I found the battle system quite fun. It was surprisingly challenging for a relatively recent game. Though the system is simple, it takes a while to get good at it. I wish the game explained in some way that you can use the "Focus" function in battle, because it took me until the second boss fight to notice it on my own. It's true that the fights are repetitive though, and I appreciated that the middle third of the game is entirely without fighting. There are other challenges. The biggest downside of the game is, unfortunately, the writing. Which is really a pity. The emotional core of the story is very touching to me: a mentally ill, abused, psychologically damaged woman tries to rescue the man who was the only good thing in her life. She is willing to endure extreme amounts of fear and pain, even to sacrifice her own life, to get him back. Senua's face animations and voice acting express her anguish, her desperation, her vulnerability and sincerity beautifully. Senua has nothing to go back to. Her lover Dillion was her sun. Death is preferable to being alone in the misery and isolation that was her life before she met him. I also quite like how this inverts gender stereotypes: Senua is the troubled warrior with a dark past, Dillion is the lovely dancer whose main attractive qualities are his gentleness and empathy. I take one look into Senua's heartbreakingly innocent and pained face and her quest needs no further explanation. But unfortunately it gets a further explanation, and not a good one. I did NOT like the writing. I found myself wishing the plot points could somehow be communicated wordlessly. The characters speak like modern Americans, using platitudes like in a crowd-pleasing Hollywood movies. The voices in Senua's head made me picture three middle-aged American women who discuss a teenager's failing grades at parent-teacher-night. This is particularly strange since the game tells us that Senua's schizophrenia is part of her special talent to communicate with supernatural entities. (Or is that just what Senua believes..?) Yet the voices in her head are as trivial as they are irritating. I'm sure it's devastating to a person's self-esteem to have what sounds like someone's meanest co-workers or relatives permanently stuck in their head, but it's not a particularly supernatural situation. I could not take their neverending gossiping and Captain Obvious comments seriously and even found them funny. Worse still was the narrator, who inflicted more fake-deep lines on my ears than Taylor Swift ever could. (A particularly memorable one was when she "philosophized" that we bury our dead because "we have no answer to death." Are you sure there aren't any more practical reasons for that..?) I eventually learned to just half-listen to the dialogue, roll my eyes and forget, and my appreciation of the game greatly improved. I also found the treatment of religion in the game a little questionable. The Norse stories the runestones tell are accurate. But the way the characters relate to the gods is Christian rather than Heathen - constant references to heaven and hell, heresy, the cleansing power of suffering. Accusing someone of "defying the will of the gods" doesn't make much sense in a polytheistic framework - the gods don't all have the same will. But this review is getting long and I don't want to write another 1000 words, so I'll spare you. I'll also not comment on the end, except to say that I found it drawn-out, unsatisfying, and anti-climactic. Not very good. I guess they wanted to set up the sequel. In conclusion: For the first third of the game, I would have given it 2-3 stars because I found the spoken words so irritating and ridiculous. But after I had learned to not pay much attention to them, I could focus on the many positives in the game, like the cool surrealism and emotional impact of Senua's pain. In the end, I can appreciate the game for what it is, though with better writing this would have been a truly spectacular work.

My version of a cozy game. With murder.

I really enjoyed this game. It's rather short and basically only has two locations (and a third that is just an abandoned outdoor workstation), but I had a lot of fun and wished it would be longer. The ending was a bit abrupt and weighed down by an unnecessarily timed sequence (that I got through with the power of reloading), but the twist and resolution to the murder mystery was something I found rather satisfying. The riddles mostly make sense and I didn't have to consult a walkthrough very often. Astrology plays a big role in them though and you'll figure them out faster if you know a thing or two about it or at least have the symbols of the signs and planets memorized. There's also one riddle that will be very hard to solve unless you speak French or can read runes, since it wasn't localized to other languages. I don't think the voice acting is as bad as some reviewers have said. Madeleine and Nostradamus are gentle, patient people who try to live a calm life, and Madeleine, being young and good and willing to think the best of everyone, is profoundly shocked and outraged by the murders. Despite the fact that she looks like Kirsten Dunst in the Marie Antoinette movie that came out a year earlier, she is a sheltered young girl from a harmonious family who relies heavily on her beloved father for guidance and who is thrust into a very nasty situation where she has to stand on her own for the first time. Her voice acting reflects that. Can it seem annoying? Maybe. But to me it transports her personality as well as her affectionate and mutually supportive dynamic with Nostradamus. Mostly I thought the game was charming and had a lot of atmosphere. I just enjoyed existing in it. You can bake limitless amounts of bread during an infectious disease lockdown in this game, in case you haven't had the chance in the past. (Seriously, always keep bread with you in this game, it helps in unexpected ways.) And, making jam, then going to your kindly, elderly father's observatory and discussing the prophetic murder visions you both have had - isn't that everyone's fantasy? No? Ok. But if it is yours, you should get this game.

Cute, but not my type of puzzle game

The concept of the game is really promising - navigate a small number of detailed garden environments to maneuver a cat through them and back to its home. But the puzzles offered too vague instructions, leading to me coming up with 5 different interpretations of the hints I was given that would all technically fit them but just happened to not be what the devs were thinking. In the end that means you have to trial-and-error a lot until you happen upon the correct solution. Personally, I find that frustrating. I don't need puzzles to be easy, but the solution should follow from the hints. I realize though that this is a personal preference. I like logic and math puzzles and for example also find Mahjong frustrating when it's supposed to be relaxing (and is for a lot of people), and I guess this is a similar situation. I would also have wished to know more about the people in the houses. The format offers a lot of potential for visual story-telling, but apart from the last house we only get a small amount of information about the inhabitants. The gardens and their inhabitants look too similar. It's not like this is unrealistic for a suburban environment though. It would just have interested me more if they had had more distinct personalities. The game is short, but for the price it's not too short. The artwork is good-looking and the soundtrack was very nice too. I enjoyed identifying the bird species, which are well-drawn. Felt bad for the sparrowhawk though.

A bland sequel to a masterpiece

After I finished Syberia 1, I couldn't wait to start its sequel. After all, the two games were initially supposed to be only one, so I expected it to be less like a second installment and more like a second half of the masterpiece that is the original Syberia game. However, after my first one or two playing sessions I found myself poring over the credits of both games, comparing every single name. My suspicion was now that someone clueless must have bought the IP after the first game to cash in on its good name, as has happened so many times in more recent years. But, no! Amazingly, it turned out to be the same team. Even more strangely, the second game was released only two years after the first, so they must have jumped right into the production of the second or even produced large parts of them at the same time. To be honest, even more than a month after playing both games I still don't understand how things could have gone so wrong. All I know is that Syberia 2 is a very different game than Syberia 1. First, a quick word about the game mechanics. They weren't really great in the first game, and the second one doesn't change them much. Kate walks a bit faster now, but that's the only improvement. The pixel hunting is even worse this time around because the items you need are smaller. The dialogue system has been overhauled and made more irritating: the options you have already picked now remain available, and if you pick them again, then three out of four times Kate will just say the same thing again, or maybe rephrase it, while one out of four times you HAVE to click the same option multiple times in order to reveal really important information. Some of the riddles are good, most aren't. Keep a walkthrough handy, because moon logic abounds. (Spoilers from here on out) Next, the plot. It can be summed up in a few words: Kate, Oscar and Hans make their way to Syberia and run into a few problems along the way. I could talk for a long time about the holes in said plot, but I'll just mention the two most important examples - Firstly, in S1 finding Syberia is presented as Hans's lifelong dream, and in S2 we find out that he actually knew where it was, lived pretty close to the island for a long time and could have gone there at any time, in fact he built a train station in a village from which you can reach it, and yet he just didn't go and instead waited in a hotel far away until he was so old he nearly died and he couldn't go with his beloved sister? And secondly, the entire New York subplot leads nowhere and seems to exist for no reason other than to create a feeble sense of "being hunted". Why does Kate's mother pressure her boss to "find Kate" when she is in fact on the phone with her all the time and knows she isn't "missing"? Why does the boss get so nervous because his (ex?-)employee's mom is mad at him for something that isn't his problem? I kept thinking there was some hidden reason why everyone in NY took this so seriously, some important plot that would be revealed, but then the private detective sent to find Kate gives up and leaves the country, at which point the boss and the mom just stop caring..? These are just the two biggest gripes I have with the plot, I could rant about smaller points (like the pilot clearly freezing to death in the wilderness, Hans' health wildly fluctuating, or the Patriarch having no reason to be so invested in what Hans does), but it would just be beside the point. Because the biggest problem with the game isn't the clunky controls or the plot holes. The thing that matters to me is, like in the first installment, not "Syberia the game" but "Syberia the experience". S2 is completely devoid of the charm and originality of the first game. It is, in a word, ordinary. The indigenous village at the end of the game annoyed me so much with its identical-looking, boring locations and zero-personality characters that I watched the last quarter of the game on YT. But even before that I consulted the walkthrough constantly, firstly because the riddles made no sense but even more so because I just couldn't be bothered to invest any time into the game. Syberia 1 often frustrated me with its large amounts of walking, backtracking, pixel-hunting, but I still felt it was worth it. The second game lacked the capability to fascinate me that made me put up with the annoying sides of its predecessor. It feels like the team just ran out of ideas, so they had to opt for basic, interchangeable places and characters. The strangeness of the locations we visit in S1, and of its inhabitants, reflect the strangeness of Hans' life and inventions. But the places we visit in S2 are ordinary (if sometimes pretty - I liked the monastery), their inhabitants are forgettable, the technology we see is identical to that we have in the real world. Hans seems to not be capable of new inventions anymore either (even the mechanical horses were apparently, according to the concept art, meant to be in S1 originally), which could lead to a meditation on the tragedy of aging and mortality, but it doesn't. This man who had been built up throughout S1 as a genius but childlike inventor and eccentric who can build marvelous things, who leaves a deep impression on everyone he meets, and is on a lifelong quest for his personal chimera... we meet him and he's a normal sickly old man with no special personality traits, no uncommon worldview, no new inventions. We reach Syberia, this place of dreamlike, highly improbable legends, and it's a pretty ordinary place, except there are mammoths there. And penguins, for some reason, even though we're in the Arctic. Even so, S2 could have kept the melancholic atmosphere of the first game and focused on dream vs. disillusionment, myth vs. reality, but such depth seems entirely alien to the second game. It's all so... banal. If Syberia 2 were just a normal P&C adventure, I would probably have stopped playing after an hour or two and forgotten about it. It's the comparison with Syberia 1 that really makes this bother me. I will simply adopt the approach that fans of masterpieces with bad sequels have taken so many times and pretend that Syberia has no sequel. An open end fits the first game just fine. But a sequel that gives it the ending it deserved would have been even better.

Gorgeous, somber, artistic, unique

Syberia is one of the games I would cite if I were asked to make the case that video games should be seen as an art form - along, perhaps, with titles like Thief or Death Stranding. In fact Syberia is an example of the kind of art I could live for, if only there were more of it in the world. But, alas, there isn't - across all art forms - enough that moves me the way Syberia does to fill a single year of my life. Which makes the examples that do exist all the more precious. This game has you travel through a dilapidated, dirty, bizarre, and utterly gorgeous world full of surreal sights, clockpunk automatons, strange ancient myths, but mostly full of... ruins. Ruins and has-beens. Kate Walker is a young woman who, driven by obligation, goes to places that used to be glamorous, trendy, cutting edge, and have now been abandoned by everyone except for the people who are in some way inextricably tied to the place. They are invariably stuck in memories of their glory days and unwilling or unable to fit themselves into the present. Kate easily gains access to formerly exclusive or secret places simply because no one cares about them anymore. There is a solemn melancholy about these locations, and about the stories that took place in them, that sometimes moved me to tears. You will hear about opera, and the Soviet space program, and the paleolithic, as you retrace the steps of a remarkable old man who left a deep impression on the people he met throughout his life. This game has the longest "old diary you find in an abandoned house" I have ever seen in a game. It is magnificent storytelling, poetic, darkly romantic, concerned with human frailty and the tragedy of mortality. Syberia claims to take place in real countries, in the present, and yet the locations we visit are highly stylized alternate versions of these countries. The game gave me a feeling of embarking on a magnificent journey to a parallel world, like in those children's books where a fantasy world can be reached through the back of a wardrobe. The game does not take place in ordinary reality, but in an artistic abstraction thereof. When I say that the game is "dreamlike", I mean that quite literally - it is like a vivid lucid dream in which you visit familiar places but find that they look warped, that things work differently, or they have perhaps reverted to how they used to look a long time ago, an appearance you may not even have consciously remembered. Another reviewer differentiated, quite astutely, between "Syberia the game" and "Syberia the experience". I have so far talked about the latter, and indeed there are many negative things one could say about the more banal aspects of this game. The user interface is clunky. You have to walk twenty times across the same maps - Kate WALKER indeed! The name is cruel sarcasm. (Hint: She's not quite as slow if you double-click on the destination.) The humor is sometimes cartoonish. The "riddle solving" is mostly pixel hunting, and there are compulsory items that are easy to miss and will require a lot of backtracking if you do. Sometimes the solution to a riddle is "Do the thing again that didn't work earlier, even though nothing has changed." The stair climbing animations take forever. The game was buggy when I played it (but the GOG forum helped me). Near the end something happens that seems to be jarringly unfitting to the tone of the game. There is a grand total of one (1) female NPC in each town, and one of them is a silent half-finished robot whom I only count as female because it seems to have a bulge in the chest area. Why do I still give it 5 stars? Because this game has thoroughly charmed me. "Syberia the experience" so far outweighs "Syberia the game" in my mind that all these flaws taken together can't make me subtract a single star from my rating. I waited a month to write my review so I wouldn't speak out of some short-lived sentimentality, but this is a 10/10 game that I will probably remember for the rest of my life. Now it is clear both from the reviews and the fact that Syberia isn't a famous classic that 10th graders analyze in school that it will not appeal to everyone the way it appeals to me. That's okay, worthwhile art is often controversial. If you are not sure if you should buy it - try watching the intro on YT. It's less than 2 minutes long, and if it appeals to you, consider giving the game a chance.

Fun but frustrating

I would give this game a solid 6/10 for the nice atmosphere and good-looking backgrounds. At no point did I consider not finishing the game, and I looked forward to returning to it, so it succeeds at the most important task of a game - it was fun. (Spoilers ahead) Many of the riddles make no sense though - and worse, the game doesn't tell you what the protag wants to do, so you just pointlessly combine items hoping to figure out where you're even going with this. One of many examples: At one point you see a penguin. Nina remarks that the penguin seems to be incubating something. Is there any reason to change that? Not in the real world, but since you're genre savvy you can infer that you probably want that penguin egg for some reason. So you figure out how to lure the penguin away from the egg and, lo and behold! It's actually a strange egg-shaped device. You then have to figure out that you have to insert it into the broken water pump control, which fixes the latter. Is there any water pump control in the world that is fixed by inserting an artificial penguin egg? Nope. Does the machine look in any way unusual and lead you to think it might be constructed in a very alternative way? Nope. Do you find any documentation about the machine that tells you it is fake-egg-powered? Nope. You just combine items until something works. You also use a lot of effort to get a replacement egg from a nearby incubator so the penguin won't be sad, only for the penguin to totally ignore the egg for the rest of the game. So you did that for nothing? And whatever was in that egg is now frozen to death for no reason? I also have to remark on how chauvinist the NPCs in this game are - something that shows its age but also just decreased my enjoyment of it. There's exactly ONE woman in every country you go to and the men constantly harass you about your looks and sexual availability. From one of the villains remarking, just before attempting to murder you, "shame about that cute butt" to the male hero musing on how if you have a fancy-looking bed, you can sleep with every woman. (Though considering the strained relationship with reality this game has, maybe that's even true in its world.) But even apart from those more grotesque examples it's just a constant theme, and usually in a completely tone-deaf out-of-nowhere way. It's like playing a game where for some reason everyone suddenly starts commenting on your choice of footwear. I have no problem with flirting in a game, but this just comes across to me as a team of male devs going "Look!! We made such a hot protagonist for you, the male player, to ogle!! Our characters have to constantly point that out so you don't miss it!!" It's just forced and annoying. Also the plot seems fine in the moment but when you actually think about it after you finished the game it makes less and less sense. I won't spoiler you with details. I'll forgive the clownish humor, it's from Germany, we're not known for our subtlety. I did like some of the humor (the Deutsche Bahn roast in the epilogue made me laugh. I'm not proud of it but it did.), but usually it just beats you over the head with some lame pun. German vs. English: I accidentally downloaded the English version first, but Nina sounded like she was the most squeaky-voiced 14 year old in existence (I was surprised to find out she's supposed to be an adult), so I switched to the German original. I also noticed that at least one character - the lady with an umbrella in front of the pub in Ireland - is completely missing in the English version (making the Irish population 100% male). I really wanted to see how they had translated her lines, checked my English install and even a playthrough on YT and didn't find her. There may be more missing content. So if you speak it - get the German version. The German voice actors are pretty high profile and you will probably recognize their voices if you're familiar with what's on German TV or in cinemas. This may be a good or a bad thing for you. It felt like a nice journey, and when the riddles did make sense, it was a good experience. The first half of the game was way more coherent than the second. I'll probably give the second game a try too, considering that it's often on offer. I wouldn't really pay full price for it, but you can get these old adventures almost for free nowadays if you're willing to wait a few weeks. Thank you for that, GOG!