Resonance

Click here and disable ads!

Oh, this is what I suspect about the endings, by the way:

THIRTY. FUCKING. MINUTES.
(two rage quits not included)

tell me about it.

Just finished the game. Didn't get the maximum amount of points though (9 missing). The game is excellent and well deserves a full-length review. Vince Twelve to you and your team!

Ending question:

Reply to evdk

Hey guys! Glad you're enjoying it for the most part! Regarding endings:

Thanks for your feedback! Let me know if I can answer any questions for you!

Vince Twelve

So, OK, I've completed Resonance. 319/340. Got all 3 endings.

Breezed through a game from the

to the very end without taking a single hint (as the Web was down at that moment; either the puzzles got significantly easier from that moment, either I finally "got" the ingame logic). And here are some of my thoughts about the game (WARNING! extreme amounts of tl;dr below!). It's not a balanced review, just so you know. Just some random thoughs I have about the game, that's all. Also, mind you, I am not that good at storyfag games and I really prefer "mechanical" adventure games with the accent on exploration (in the vein of Riven and RHEMs) to them.

Vince Twelve, if you happen to read this, be warned that there are some instances of really harsh critique in the spoiler below, which you'll probably be better not to read. Anyways, I still suggest you to read the "STORY" and "USABILITY" paragraphs, as they would probably contain some useful hints for you.

Final words.

Anyways, the game is quite good. 3,5/5, I'd say. But all those glowing "ZOMG 4,5/5! ADVENTURE GENRE REVIVAL" reviews? Sorry, but that's complete and utter nonsense.

I give your critique of my game 2.5 out of 5 stars. I would recommend USING LESS CAPS LOCK and making it more clear when you're criticizing Resonance or The Longest Journey.

I kid!

Thanks for the feedback iqZulk. I read through the whole thing and most of your complaints are valid and flaws that I am aware of so I won't try to defend the game on those points. In some cases the time cost to address them outweighed the benefit. There are thousands of possible STM combinations, and we did our best to fill in all the most important ones, for example. No way we could ever have filled in all the options every player will try (times four, since all four characters might talk about it!). And there are lots of STM and LTM combinations in there that are not used in puzzles, but instead to provide some extra character depth or story background. Having all that explanation and background dialog in the game made it even longer and more talk-y, so I moved a lot of it to optional STM/LTM conversations. They're not needed to understand the gist of the story, but always available for those who seek it out. Of course, whether or not my solution or implementation was any good is a different question and ripe for criticism!

A couple notes:

-You can skip the news report with the Esc key. Obviously, there's no documentation for that, so no way to know other than trying it.
-You shouldn't HAVE to rewatch the news report many times since if you fail the game rewinds. No need to go back to another save.

On the rest, I'll just say I'm glad you liked the parts you liked and sorry the flaws burned so brightly they outshone some of the better parts. I know the game isn't going to click with everyone so I'm not really hurt by your honest opinion. Everything is just a chance to do it better next time. Thank you!

Yeeeeeah, I really overdid that, didn't I?

True.

And thanks back to you for your sensible attitude.

And that's why anyone should probably be very careful when one adapts any new gameplay features. You and your team can make only so much content at any given period of time. You introduce the "description of the on-screen items" feature - you will need to be ready to write and script endless "It's a chair" descriptions. You introduce the ability to freely combine STMs with NPCs - you instantly get tons of spraying posibilities. The trick is, I think, to make every bit of that content and every bit of possibility available to player in the end as meaningful as possible - and to choose the features of your game accordingly (so you don't have "Oh. My God. There are 25426 possibilities and I need to somehow cover them all. God knows how much time THAT would require."). Interactivity for interactivity is nice, but only as long as it gets player somewhere (at least in terms of understanding of what's going on or getting the feel of the ingame world) and as long as the main content doesn't get awfully diluted by those of optional bits which are completely and utterly meaningless (like those "Nah, he would probably not be very interested in that topic").

I watched it three times (each time for each of the endings) and + 1 time because I accidentally skipped the credits one time and consequently redid that ending. Nice to know about Esc key though.

OK, points taken. Come to think about it, I just may want to replay the game in a year or so to find out who the

is.

Naaaah, don't take that rambling style of my previous message (including extensive use of CAPSLOCK) into the account all that much. I wasn't raging out there or anything like that (although the message kinda got out of control on "USABILITY" section). I guess, it's just the way I tend to have my internet discussions, maybe I kind of need some work on that. Ahem... Anyways, thank you very much for the game. Despite all I've said previously, overall, it's a good one.

P.S. By the way, what is the worst case scenario for the in-game score (?/340)? Did you estimate what was that absolute minimum the player could possibly achieve if he just, like, speedran through the whole game?

What I see (and despise) in most modern adventures is an utter lack of interactivity. Left click only, <5 interactable items in each room, five or six dialog options with each character, a handful of uninspired inventory combination puzzles, and that's it. I wanted to turn that 360. Alas, my ambition overshot my ability! That being said, I felt it better to have 25426 possibilities with 90% "That won't work here" responses than to have 6 possibilities each with unique responses. Thought>brute force. Just my impression.

That's a very good question. I'm not sure what the lowest score could be. That would have been an interesting achievement to add!

Started playing the game today, and as much as I like everything else so far, the interface is something I can barely stomach. The drag'n'drop is clumsy and serves no purpose that couldn't be replaced by either hotkeys or simple right/left click combinations, both of which would be much, much better. This whole 'adding to short term memory' business is also annoying, there's way too much moving back and forth with 'go to place x, add to stm, return to place y, use stm in conversation'. It was especially bothersome at the burning laboratory, where you had to converse with Bennett about the broken window each time you wanted to get inside.

Bad interface aside, it's all p. cool so far. Liked Anna's dream sequences, reminded me of Sanitarium.

Finished it. Good game, does interesting things with the AGS engine and involving all four main characters in many of the puzzles was a fun throwback to multiple-character adventure games of yore like Maniac Mansion or DOTT. Unfortunately, with 4 characters, you lose a lot of bonding with each individual player character, making them appear a lot less developed than they could have been.

I was not overly fond of the presentation. Coming from the devs who made the Blackwell series, I expected better music, and the overall graphical style, while well drawn and animated, just wasn't all that stylish to me and my overall enjoyment of the game suffered.

Puzzles were good. Very few of them were stupid or illogical to me, a great improvement over 90% of other adventure games. The only puzzle that pissed me off was the "retrieve blueprints" one. Why couldn't I just tell the desk clerk that I wanted some random non-classified file so I could work from there to grab the blueprints I needed? I didn't even find out about the will until much later. I also did not care for the "magnets and giant crates" puzzle, mainly due to the interface.

The "drag and drop" idea was intriguing, but could have been implemented better in the interface. I kept trying to drag things onto characters on the left side of the screen only to put them in my STM instead. The best parts of the game were thus the sneaky-investigative ones starring Ray, despite Ed probably being the best character in the game. The drag-and-drop thing made it important to take note of your surroundings to a greater extent than other games in the genre. I also liked the little non-item puzzles, with my favourites being the magnetic pickpocketing, the puzzle box and the journal decoding.

The OMG PLOT TWIST and ending got me down - I liked those characters

Overall, 7.5/10. Would definitely buy more from the same developer.

Because.

One, people that request documents dont EVER just go in and get then themselves as in EVER.
Two, you are told how to do it.

Drakron

Well I admit there is no real reason but you actually need that document anyway so it kinda works for intended purpose, its more of a question of intended progression.

Excellent game so far.
Very good mechanism with the short-term-memory slots which really inflate the combinatorics of what to try.
Coupled with good and fair (so far) puzzles, it removes the try-everything way of solving the problems.

Despite the occasionally melodramatic story/characters, the game is excellent. I like how it experiments with new mechanics; sometimes it doesn't pan out too well - tedious click 'n dragging, but that is what experiments are for. It's also amazingly polished and fleshed out (rope-cutting, looking in the mirror, etc). Great effort, worth much more than the $10 price on GoG!

Gemini Rue, Blackwell Series, now this..

and in the future: a new Larry, SpaceVenture, Jensen's Moebius, Double Fine...

Could this be the renaissance?

If you mean a renaissance from the public's point of view, maybe, but adventure games with modern graphics have been very good for over a decade.

I find most modern titles to be simplified comparing to the 90-ies. Which game you consider to be very good made in the last decade? I'd say Gray Matter is a good example of modern games, and just compare that to the classics. The SCUMM bar had almost as many interactable npc's as a whole game nowadays.