DanielT
03-21-2011, 12:31 PM
Tl;dr version. Poetic story and beautiful visual art creates a moving and deeply engrossing story worth your time and attention. Ponderous game play and remaining bugs detract significantly from the immersion. Luciano Pavarotti supported by an orchestra of pots and pans. Overall score a 7/10 because I value creativity over execution.
The 'war inside your head' motif is not new. Whereas Planescape: Torment took a philosophical/spiritual approach and Psychonauts took a humorous/cartoon approach, Winter Voices goes for psychological penetration and emotional fidelity. It does so remarkably well. As a gamer old enough to have been an adult at the bedside of my father when he died this game brought tears to my eyes. Those people who think this game spews forth 'goth garbage' are simply not mature. When this game fires on all cylinders it must be avoided by anyone depressed or suicidal because it could trigger. Seriously. Where this game shines is on the artistic side: the story, the poems, the visual art work. The voice acting is uneven but not annoyingly so. It all works to create a mood and an ambiance that sucks you into the developer's world.
What makes this game misfire is the combat. The design vision behind it awesome. I loved the talent trees and their psychological fidelity. I loved the idea of combat being primarily defensive in nature. Personally, if I were going to do the war inside your head motif this is the way I would have done it. To see a group of developers take this vision and put it in a game made me want to stand up and cheer.
Instead, most of the time I wound up jeering because it's execution is so poor. First, while the titles of the various talents ring true for the setting too many of them are nothing but boring passive increases. By the time I was level ten I had only four additional talents on my screen bar because passive talents were just too good to pass up. Every battle essentially devolved into move/move/cast Consolation/ move x5 etc. Second, the AI is bad. It is frustrating to have my toon cast traps, target a square to move, then watch my toon walk through the traps even though there is an obvious path among them. The only way to deal with this was to make my toon walk square by square through the traps. Annoying. Third, the combat itself is way too slow. Not only does moving five or six mobs around the board take time during the AI turn, the mob sits there and shoots you three times. Every mob within range. It would be much better if the mobs just shot you once for 36 damage rather than three times for 12 damage each.
Yet it's not bad enough that the combat is slow, annoying, and boring the developers felt the need to make us do it every five minutes. The opening sequence of Nowhere is the epitome of combat for no apparent reason. The poor girl is staggering from hut to hut beset by demons constantly. Does she ever have a lucid movement? Not that I know of. Finally, there are the bugs. Sometimes you can lose the combat and still progress; sometimes you can't. I'm assuming this to be a bug because the tutorial says that you can still progress and most of the time that's true. But it's frustrating to go through 40 moves which takes you 20 minutes only to see that 0% progress complete without any warning and realize you have to do the whole thing all over again.
One web review called Winter Voices ambitious and it is. This terrain is somewhere even many experienced developers shy away from, especially those who seek commercial success. The good news about this game is that the developers actually have developed the artistic material to pull it off successfully. The bad news is that their game play design is poor. It's almost as if some executive sat in his chair, looked at the story, and said, "great...now we need to make it last 60 hours of game play." Gah! A book doesn't have to be a 1000 pages to be a good read and not all the best paintings are on a 100 foot by 100 foot canvas. As it stands I don't know whether to cheer or to jeer.
The 'war inside your head' motif is not new. Whereas Planescape: Torment took a philosophical/spiritual approach and Psychonauts took a humorous/cartoon approach, Winter Voices goes for psychological penetration and emotional fidelity. It does so remarkably well. As a gamer old enough to have been an adult at the bedside of my father when he died this game brought tears to my eyes. Those people who think this game spews forth 'goth garbage' are simply not mature. When this game fires on all cylinders it must be avoided by anyone depressed or suicidal because it could trigger. Seriously. Where this game shines is on the artistic side: the story, the poems, the visual art work. The voice acting is uneven but not annoyingly so. It all works to create a mood and an ambiance that sucks you into the developer's world.
What makes this game misfire is the combat. The design vision behind it awesome. I loved the talent trees and their psychological fidelity. I loved the idea of combat being primarily defensive in nature. Personally, if I were going to do the war inside your head motif this is the way I would have done it. To see a group of developers take this vision and put it in a game made me want to stand up and cheer.
Instead, most of the time I wound up jeering because it's execution is so poor. First, while the titles of the various talents ring true for the setting too many of them are nothing but boring passive increases. By the time I was level ten I had only four additional talents on my screen bar because passive talents were just too good to pass up. Every battle essentially devolved into move/move/cast Consolation/ move x5 etc. Second, the AI is bad. It is frustrating to have my toon cast traps, target a square to move, then watch my toon walk through the traps even though there is an obvious path among them. The only way to deal with this was to make my toon walk square by square through the traps. Annoying. Third, the combat itself is way too slow. Not only does moving five or six mobs around the board take time during the AI turn, the mob sits there and shoots you three times. Every mob within range. It would be much better if the mobs just shot you once for 36 damage rather than three times for 12 damage each.
Yet it's not bad enough that the combat is slow, annoying, and boring the developers felt the need to make us do it every five minutes. The opening sequence of Nowhere is the epitome of combat for no apparent reason. The poor girl is staggering from hut to hut beset by demons constantly. Does she ever have a lucid movement? Not that I know of. Finally, there are the bugs. Sometimes you can lose the combat and still progress; sometimes you can't. I'm assuming this to be a bug because the tutorial says that you can still progress and most of the time that's true. But it's frustrating to go through 40 moves which takes you 20 minutes only to see that 0% progress complete without any warning and realize you have to do the whole thing all over again.
One web review called Winter Voices ambitious and it is. This terrain is somewhere even many experienced developers shy away from, especially those who seek commercial success. The good news about this game is that the developers actually have developed the artistic material to pull it off successfully. The bad news is that their game play design is poor. It's almost as if some executive sat in his chair, looked at the story, and said, "great...now we need to make it last 60 hours of game play." Gah! A book doesn't have to be a 1000 pages to be a good read and not all the best paintings are on a 100 foot by 100 foot canvas. As it stands I don't know whether to cheer or to jeer.