First of all, it's clearly a game made by a beginning gamedesigner and scriptwriter. And I mean no offence by that, the developer has certainly did the very best he could. The game has all those detailed backgrounds with parallax and loads of nicely animated stuff and obviously a lot of care was poured into all of that (like, the amounts of time I don't even want to think about). Also it has this STM system and loads and loads of optional dialogue. There is a lot of obvious care and loads of time in those things. Except this obsession with the insignificant details IS, in fact, typical for the beginners. Let's remember TLJ for a moment. It was also made by a team who had no prior experience with adventure genre whatsoever (though they clearly had the "WE ARE GOING TO MAKE THE BEST ADVENTURE GAME EVER" attitude). All the scenes were lush and had an overwhelming complexity (in terms of sheer quantity of various perceivable objects there) to them. Every book, every pipe, every nook and cranny was meticulously modelled, packed together with a gazillion of other objects (90 percent of which were non-interactable) and rendered. Except that abysmal ground/asphalt textures, ugly aliased character models and bothched "air perspective" (EXTREMELY blurry backgrounds which had contrasted quite distinctively with the other parts of the scenes) made all of that effort go straight to the... ahem... shitter. Or let's talk about animation. There were custom animations for the tic-tac-toe game and hopscotch (which were triggered by a completely optional dialogue), for Christ's sake! Only that all the animations were so unbelievably clunky and SLLLLLLOW that any good impression from their sheer variety was instantly nullified. Or there was like a 10 hours of voice acting in the game. Except the writing was cliched, the setting was made of "generic" and "boring" and half of TLJ's gameplay was, quite literally, just listening to that voice acted dialogue. Or look at the "Deadly Premonition". EVERY NPC in that game has a perfectly detailed schedule, you know. This obsession with the insignificant details IS one of the distinctive features of the beginner. An experienced developer knows he has a whole game to make and knows how to make various aspects of it JUST GOOD ENOUGH (as in "don't overdo anything") so that the player has a properly balanced experience. The beginner just can't see the wood for the trees, so to speak. He takes twice as much time to make an outline of sun behind the clouds and various cool parallax effect - and he has quite a short (in terms of significant storyline events), strangely paced game withough any distinctive style, that could totally use another 10 or 20 scenes, or, you know, have something like a "style" there. He obsesses himself with the STM idea - and in the end, player gets "Nah, don't need to talk with him about that" in 90 percent of combinations, and the fact that almost any STM is situated on the same screen as the NPC which has something useful to say about it, so that it's just simpler to drag'n'drop the respective STM on him instaed of using a fancy menu.
APPEARANCE
The backgrounds, while being nicely drawn (and with lots of meticulously animated backgrounds, wonder how much time was poured into those) totally fail to convey any unique artistic style. Everything looks pretty much generic - and that's about it, really. To worsen the matters, the music is pretty generic too, with the sole exception of main menu screen tune being quite memorable... Which is negated by the fact that the "main menu screen tune" is in fact a 16 SECOND LOOP FOR GOD'S SAKE. I honestly can't remember a single game where the main theme was just 16 second long, not even one. Anyways, what the whole generic-ness of soundtrack and graphical style actually achieves - is that graphics and music become a mere ILLUSTRATION to the story in the case of this particular game, and nothing more. Oh, and by the way, that picture of crying Anna in main menu - it could have totally been drawn better.
STORY
As for the story, it's really strangely constructed too. First, we have a linear set of levels to progress in the beginning of the game in a pretty much set order. This is like 1/3 of a game. Then, after the baseball field scene, the game transforms into the traditional Tex_Murphy-style adventure. You have places to visit, people to talk, goals to pursue in (seemingly) any order and the need to meaningfully combine characters' actions in order to achieve those goals. This would actually be the best part of the game gameplay-wise, BUT it's just not long enough so that after it ends (quite in a spectacular fashion, but I'm getting ahead of myself now) there is an annoying feeling that the potential there was much higher, and that twice that part's longevity would serve it just right. As it is, though, it's a pretty uninspiring "Okay, there are goals, you are free to go; acoomplished those exact goals? - back on rails for you" with JUST NOT ENOUGH STUFF in between. It just feels weird and tacked on. Anyways, it's 1/2 of the game. And then we have a quick easy linear hack after the TEH TWIST till the very end of the game which is like ~1/6 of the game.
Anyways, the game has a sole really good (like, a killer one) moment in it (meaning of course a certain vault scene) - and even this moment is dragged down by a somewhat shoddy execution. But I'll start by explicitly stating what was done right. 1. The masking of Ed's intentions was done just right (with the downside of that being almost complete lack of Ed's characterization [well, some of it was in demo segment] prior to the key moment - he is easily the blandest of the bunch right till the vault). 2. The method of unravelling his true intentions was spectacularly out of the box. The metro map was before my eyes during the entirety of the game - and not even once did I have a slightest idea about analyzing it critically. Really good job out there. But, you know, the method did have a flaw. Ed COULD'VE been just a stalker, after all. 3. It was completely and utterly unpredicted. 4. I really liked "Te Promete" bit. If my guess is correct (I currently have no Web access to ascertain that via online translator) then it ties to the Prometheus myth which, in the case of this particular game and in the context of that particular scene, adds some real depth to the story in a manner similar to Grim_Fandango's "With bony hands I hold my partner" poem. {Looked it up. I was wrong. It was just "Promise". Oh well.}
Now - to the things that were done quite a bit worse. 1. The whole scene relies heavily on inability to walk away from the console which subsequenly results in Anna's death. Yes, it would have been a heavy story branching there IF the player had such an option, BUT, nevertheless, it's a really crude way of assuring that the player follows the story. Seeing that the vault scene is the apex of the story, it could've and should've been done better in that account. 2. Ed kills Anna RIGHT AFTER the player (who controls Anna) presses the button. There isn't any contextual menu "Anna, do you really want to destroy the vault? Yes, I do./ No, I don't.". You press the button - you are dead. Even if Anna pressed the button ("destroy the contents" for example) split second before she was murdered, the contents of the vault would still be destroyed. You could say that you pressing the button only meant the Anna HAD THE INTENTION of pressing the button. But that's not true. There isn't a single other instance in the game where that shtick is played upon. The in-game convention (ESPECIALLY for the first-person scenes, as the third-person scenes do indeed require some reaction time from the characters) is: You press the button - character presses the button. In the vault scene the game breaks that convention. Again, this could be easily circumvented by adding another "Are you really sure?" menu with the idea that Anna presses the button in the first menu but has no chance whatsoever to press the second one before Ed kills her. 3. Anna didn't have enough charactarization in the first two flashback scenes and the best charactarization bits came, like, 5 minutes before her death. The player just doesn't have enough time to develop the emotional bond (so to speak) with the character. If Anna was more thoroughly fleshed out right from the start of the game, this particular scene would probably have a lot more powerful effect. To worsen the matters, dream scenes really did seem out of place in this game from the stylistical point of view. They had too much of typical "ZOMG PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR SILENT HILL SO DEEP" to it, which just seemed quite out of place there.
My biggest complaint about the story is the Eleven Foundation theme. Being that the only two people directly tied to EF whom the player actually meets, are Batra and the Japanese woman (and, by the way, who the hell was the burglar?), they necesserily bear the burden of symbolical representation of the whole Eleven Foundation, Antevorta and the whole Orwellian society theme that one of the ending leads to. And who exactly are those symbolycal figures? Well, a hobo and an inane spritual_meduim-like chick who doesn't even speak English (how the hell does she analyze massive threads of information WRITTEN IN ENGLISH? via Google Translate or Babelfish? and don't get me started on the chick either, let's just say that I totally don't see her as someone with genius pattern recognition skills). That's just laughable. Moreover, the problem is severely worsened by the fact that not even once any other members are even metioned. Was it that hard to slip up 3-4 more names at least in ending newspapers?
Anyway, what I did like in the end is the really nice characterization of Ed which ACTUALLY made him quite a believable and complex character (the nerd who just snaps under the pressure? yeah, makes sense).
Anyways, the story is strangely constructed in the following sense. Every one of the main characters has lots of dialogue, but suprisingly they are still pretty bland and get properly charactarized only in 2 or 3 places IN THE WHOLE GAME each. Moreover, there is quite a lot of stuff happening in the game, but on a closer look everything actually appears to be suprisingly thin. The whole setting can easily be described in 10 sentences. EACH of the characters can be exhaustively described in 10 sentences or even less. The whole "free roaming" half of the game can be described just like that: "OK, so we get the plans. And we get the credit card information. And we speak to Tortoise. And we go to gaveyard. And we go to the Vault." This game could be EASILY made into 2-3 hour experience story-wise. It's just bloated with all the insignificant mundane details, so that it's 8-10 hours now.
Moreover, there was also a feeling, that the WHOLE GAME BEFORE THE VAULT SCENE was just a gloried extensive prologue - and now THE REAL "Resonance" will begin. But seeng as the final segment of the game is so extremely short... It's just weird, really.
Everything else I liked. Especially the proper implementation of hard sci-fi theme. But then again, it wasn't anything that special, it just was pretty good. The only bits that really got to me were the vault scene and, maybe the dialogue on the crane (during which Ed - FINALLY! - came out to be quite a complex and well-thought character).
GAMEPLAY.
Quite good. Dragged down by extremely low perfomance index (percentage for meaningful interations using that method) for STM-NPC interaction and extensive red herrings. The potential both for multicharacter combination and STMs is not fully implemented either. First of all, the game is too short for proper and extensive implemetation of both of those mechanics. Second, I would really like it to have much more complex multicharacter puzzles (there are 4 characters! why isn't there a single instance when all 4 are needed simultanelously for the puzzle completion?) with the need to think 5-6 moves ahead (in the vein of "waterpipe" puzzle, but more complex). Third, the free-roaming half could really have more locations to it and be quite a bit longer.
USABILITY
I had the following problems with the game.
1. No way to pause except to play windowed and click outside the window? Not sure about that, though. 2. No journal with logging of conversations. Which is crucial in the light of subsequential complaints. 3. There are some places in dialogues where custom animations are played and no phrases are spoken. Now, at those moments I tend to think the conversation is over and press either Esc to save or LMB to move my character - and BAM! - I've skipped the next phrase. This Crap Was Driving Me Bonkers. Because, given inability to save during scripted/conversation scenes (which can be quite long), the skip would mean that I need to reload (when the game LETS ME to reload i.e. AFTER the end of conversation or sequence) and play through THE WHOLE SEQUENCE AGAIN (just because of my stupid desire not to miss anything potentially crucial to the story). The conversation logging would instantly resolve that problem. 4. The automatic STM rolling menu appearing when I just try do drag hotspot STM image on an NPC in the left part of screen. Very annoying. 5. Extensive amount of absolutely GIGANTIC red herrings. For instance, thermal scanner in the beginning of the game. I have ACTUALLY FOUND the vault on that scene, you know. I pressed scan. And the computer have printed "You know, I don't see any anomalies here" (yeah, right, there is a BRIGHT RED SPOT RIGHT THERE). Why did it say about "No anomalies"? Well, because the developer didn't want players to find the vault (which the characteres aren't supposed to know about ATM). Except he could just make Ed say "WTF? Something strange out there. Oh well, no time to investigate that, I need to rescue professor." Or even better, SINCE THE WHOLE SCANNER IS A F@#$ING RED HERRING HE COUD JUST MAKE ED SAY "I NEED TO F@#$%NG RESCUE THE PROFESSOR. I DON'T NEED TO OR HAVE ANY INTENTION TO OPERATE A F@#$ING USELESS COMPUTER WITH F@#$ING USELESS CORRUPTED SECURITY LOGS AND F@#$ING USELESS THERMAL SCANNER, YOU KNOW". Another instance. Security code on the archive computer. I have gone through a lot of preparation to get Ray with the right equipment to the archive mainframe, you know. I've hacked the computer and learned that the needed document lies in the Q19 box. Now just to recalibrate the arm. How do I do that? OK, let's make a new search. Security code? What security code? I don't understand. Am I suposed to have a freaking thing as of this moment? Maybe I wasn't snooping around well enough. Maybe I was supposed to learn that code through a fancy STM-based puzzle? I dunno. Security code, security code, security code... OK, we need to find a freaking security code, all of that preparation for nothing. L-L-L-Loadgame. Was it that fucking hard to ascertain that the security code is a red herring? Because I DID play through that sequence again at least 2-3 times to make sure I didn't miss something. 6. The STM system, while been cool on a concept level, has an extremely low perfomance index. Actually 90 percent of useful STMs are situated ON THE SAME SCREEN as the NPC you are supposed to talk about them. And the most of STM-NPC combinations give you the "Nah, he doesn't want to hear about that" reaction. 7. The hints were really obscure and not that helpful at all. Having different "hint levels" would help.