Everything from the basic premise to the way it unravels and becomes bigger than it initially seems, is very elegant. The story, which I don’t want to go too much into, is also quite clever. As you learn more about him, the various aspects of his personality and behaviour seem better informed than a lot of his TV brethren, even. The influences are fairly obvious from the start, but Malachi’s discerning between art pieces of worth and those without is a clever, novel way of setting the character up as an off-puttingly intelligent and elitist know-it-all. Malachi Rector very much inhabits the role of the eccentric a-hole, popularised by the likes of Gregory House, Cal Lightman and BBC’s Sherlock. It’s telling when you can’t quite say when the main character goes from being a prick to somehow carving out a snug little place in your heart. The writing is pretty much impeccable, however. That aside, it isn’t a hugely stimulating game, mechanically. The strongest illusion of achieving something comes from successfully analysing people, which usually takes a little bit of thinking before you figure out what the different traits of a person point towards. It’s all a bit of a fetch quest, quite frankly, and there’s barely ever a true eureka moment in here. Then you go about talking to people and what have you, and as situations present themselves where you can’t proceed for one reason or another, it becomes a rather simple exercise in remembering which of the aforementioned items are likely to help you, and running after those. You identify which ones you can pick up, and Malachi even says “I don’t have a use for that yet” in many cases. The typical gameplay loop consists of the following: You reach a new area that establishes different items in your surroundings. There’s very little in the way of traditional adventure game puzzles. When you are on special assignments, there is an overarching element of this where you gather information about a person, and chapters usually end with a conclusion in regards to that specific character. When you get all of them right you have a finished analysis, which comes into different degrees of play in the game. You’re asked to look at different aspects of it and select from a few likely deductions. You sometimes have the option to analyse items and people further by clicking a little brain icon in the pop up menu. Sometimes you add things to your inventory, where they may be combined, inspected, or used on other elements in the environment. You point and click on objects to pop up a menu with icons for various interactions. Moebius: Empire Rising plays like a mostly-typical adventure game. As a huge fan of her previous work, and of Gabriel Knight in particular (I spent 90% of my Cognition review yapping about it), I was thrilled to throw myself into this game.įirst things first. Jane Jensen, most known for the Gabriel Knight series back in the Sierra Online days, penned this latest adventure game developed by Cognition’s Phoenix Online Studios. This talent catches the eye of a secretive organisation that hires him to track down and assess certain individuals – an assignment that quickly embroils him in shady assassination plots and global conspiracy. He also has an uncanny ability to analyse people and deduce who they truly are. There are far better, less compromising places to look for this kind of experience.Malachi Rector has a knack for pegging the origin of antiques, but it’s a skill that extends beyond that. As it turns out, games like Double Fine's Broken Age as well as lower-profile titles like Machinarium and Gemini Rue are just a few of the well-executed entries available in the genre’s recent resurgence. But the gameplay is too mundane, and the story too disappointing for it to be given a pass today. There’s an elegance and a purity to clicking around the game’s numerous locales, and it moves at a good pace. If Moebius: Empire Rising were to come out a couple of years ago, it might feel like a welcome throwback to the days of classic point-and-click adventures in spite of its very pronounced issues. The comic book-styled cutscenes look blurry and outdated, and graphical hiccups occasionally make characters’ heads sink into their body cavities, or cause objects they’re holding to levitate in front of them sure, these issues never get in the way of the gameplay, but they don't exactly help the experience either. The game’s cartoony mix of 2D and 3D art is on limited occasions charming but usually a bit archaic-looking, particularly when focusing on character models and their stilted movements. The so-so puzzles go hand-in-hand with Moebius’s technical performance, which is acceptable and nothing more.
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