Jane Jensen's Pinkerton Road CSG Kickstarter

[lobotomy42]

Having now played Chapter 1...

 

So far, the game is exactly what I expected it to be, which is great. The story feels very similar to Jensen's work in the past on Gray Matter and Gabriel Knight. I would expect people who enjoyed those games would enjoy, this, too.  They seem to be in a similar genre of real-word fantasy/sci-fi.  Actually, it seems like genre is driving some of the games problems. Having a "real world" low-fantasy plot drives expectations of realism (we know what New York looks like) which gives certain expectations for what the graphics should look like and what is a "reasonable" plot.  (Whereas if this were a typical video game high-fantasy setting, you could just make the plot as absurd as you wanted.)  It's kind of an uncanny valley problem, in a way.  (But also: what is up with people's arms and hands? They are all sort slender-man-ish, yeah?)

 

I find myself enjoying the dialogue and descriptions.  I'm okay (so far) with the main character being a jackass; it hasn't felt overstated to me.  There's a fun contrast between Malachi's mostly polite dialogue with other characters and his constant disgust with the objects around him.

[juv3nal]

So I finished it. The maze was bullshit, but in this day of easily accessible walkthroughs, not too huge of an inconvenience. It wasn't terrible, but I certainly enjoyed Broken Sword 5 more. It's just lacking all sorts of visual presentation polish.

On the story front, the premise is of course ludicrous, but I was willing to go along with it.

 

As to the graphics part of this:

 

Having a "real world" low-fantasy plot drives expectations of realism (we know what New York looks like) which gives certain expectations for what the graphics should look like and what is a "reasonable" plot.  (Whereas if this were a typical video game high-fantasy setting, you could just make the plot as absurd as you wanted.)

 

I feel it's also games like Broken Sword 5 and even Gray Matter that up the stakes for my personal expectations in terms of how it should look, not just considerations of setting/genre.