Ceville

[Erkki]

Has anyone played the Ceville demo?

I don't know, it looks kind of fun to me. Sure, it's not visually top quality, and they seem to have made do with minimal animations, but it looks good enough. The humor might be somewhat lame at times and it's definitely not laugh-out-loud funny (at least so far), but I kind of like the tone.

[brkl]

Games like these always suffer from translation. Looks interesting.

[Erkki]

There are a couple of really annoying things though: clicking the left mouse will always either skip any playing animation, dialogue line or cut scene. And sometimes you don't know whether a cut-scene is playing so you might accidentally skip it when wanting to walk, for example.

And I don't like the amount of hints in the mouse hover texts.

[Marek]

If you want to buy a downloadable version of this game then click this link to the download page at Adventure Shop.

This is an affiliate of my site AdventureGamers.com, so if you get it through there it'll... benefit me. WOO!

[Erkki]

So I'm more than half-way though (bought it on Steam some time ago, sorry Marek) and I don't really know what to think.

There are makings of a good game here. You play with two characters most of the time, with the other following around, like Sam & Max. The characters supposedly have quite a conflicting nature, Ceville being "bad" and Lilly being "good". But the dynamic between them is not exploited well enough. When Ceville does or says something that Lilly finds really obnoxious, she just utters a chiding "that was not very nice" or something like that, but even if the action can be reversed, she never does it, nor does she ever change her attitude towards Ceville.

The game throws bad puns and inappropriate pop culture references left and right. Games referenced include: Half-Life 2, Portal, Dungeon Keeper, Diablo, Sam & Max, Monkey Island, ... and so on. I can't even keep track. The humour is very much in your face, rarely does it manage to be subtle.

Puzzles are maybe better than average, but there are some cliches, including the inescapable paper under the door and push the key out of the lockhole (BTW. I've actually used this in real life when I locked myself out once). There is some horrible 3D pixel hunting, too. I got really stuck early on and went to the walkthrough, discovered an item I had missed. After that I used the walkthrough several times because I wanted to get through the game quickly (and loading times can be quite bad when moving back & forth between areas).

So the game has many flaws, but I still like it somewhat.

[edit] actually, forgot to mention: there's a solution for the pixel hunting: holding space will show the hover titles for all hotspots. I didn't notice this feature at first. There's also a kind of a hint system that shows you all acceptable combinations by highlighting them in orange, but I turned that off.

Edited September 18, 2009 by Erkki

[Erkki]

Finished it. One of the worst endings ever. No effort was spent on it. Credits started rolling practically mid-sentence. And there was a brief sequence after that, hinting at a sequel, then the worlds "to be continued!?" appeared. Also, there was a second reference to "the cake is a lie". The devs must really love Portal.

[Erkki]

Ok, now I got my disappointments out of the way, here's what I liked about it:

The characters are pretty good, especially the playable ones: Ceville, Lilly, Ambrosius. As I already mentioned, their relationship could have used more work, but they look good, are well animated (although a few special one-time actions could have used more animation maybe) and have witty things to say, even as the jokes and references are mostly too obvious and often unfitting (I'm just not that fond of taking an older time period and putting lots of modern things in it in a non-subtle way).

The translation is good, most of the time it felt like it was meant to be in English from the start. Voice acting is also spot on. I especially liked Ceville and the two idiot guards that keep popping up everywhere. Also, all the characters have more to say than I expected. There are special responses for the majority of situations and combinations, as far as I could tell, with quite a lot of them resulting in a short dialogue between Ceville & Lilly. "That doesn't work" type responses are rare.

Some of the puzzles are quite clever, occasionally making use of multiple characters in the style of Day of the Tentacle, but without the time machine component.

It looks pretty good. Occasionally better than Telltale games, but not in all areas, and some backgrounds are ugly & low res.

The story is not bad either, but the game could have used more in-engine cutscenes or at least some kind of transitions better than loading screens when the story moves forward.

Music is good, most of the time I didn't even notice it.

[gdf]

It really could have done with some AA. I never finished it, but liked it enough. It was sort of lovably lame, even if it did like to think it was Shrek from time to time. Ceville the character was awesome.

[Tanukitsune]

I hate when people compare Ceville to Shrek, I'm pretty sure wasn't the first story to take place in Fairy Tale Land...

Erkki, you thought the reference weren't sublte? What would be a subtle reference to you? The Day of the Tentacle one was pretty subtle, I had to think about it to get it...

To me it would be not subtle if it was like Family Guy and they had Mario kick Peter in the jewel box shouting "THIS IS MUSHROOM KINGDOM!", while Ceville would simply make a joke about plumbers being addicted to mushrooms?

But yeah, the ending did cheese me off a bit....