Beautiful, But Bland

Contains minor spoilers:

This studio makes gorgeous games with stellar visual style and strong VoiceOver performances, but every one of their games that I have played has left me feeling cold because they simply lack any of the charisma that this genre needs to be great. They simply dont have the magic that the old LucasFilm greats like "Monkey Island", "Day of the Tentacle," "Sam & Max" or even "Full Throttle" had. The humor, story and overall writing prowess just isnt present at Pendulo Studios. What is present is incredible artistry and animation, which they have in spades!!!

But no amount of great visual style can make up for the fact that their characters have no character. And to make matters worse, this game has tons of branching dialogue that goes nowhere, is rarely funny and winds up simply making the gameplay experience longer only for the sake of making it longer. And if you play this genre often, you will know that one of the most common conceits is that you need to activate new challenges or clues through the dialogue between characters, and this game is no different.

But what is different is that the dialogue is essentially tedious and pointless, revealing very little relevant information while also simply being uninteresting and/or unfunny. This forces you to either suffer through literally hours of recorded dialogue to finally get one nugget of information that allows the game to proceed, or if you are like me you will start speed reading the text, skipping all of the dialogue (despite it being well performed). And what fun are either of those two options? Especially on mobile.

Not to mention the entirely non-sensical solutions to the "puzzles" in the game. Sorry guys, but using snow shoes to cross a rope bridge would solve nothing. Hence another reason why their "clues" system (in which they only provide 1 single clue for even the most complicatedly inane "challenges") should probably have been less esoteric and actually help your gamers with a series of escalating clues instead of spitting out gibberish from yet another un-amusing yet well performed (and racist) character. Often times theses clues shed light on nothing.

Pendulo deserves major respect for the quality of presentation. Their games are maybe the best looking games in the entire point and click genre, but when the game literally requires over 5gb of empty space on your iPad in order to install despite only clocking in at 2.8gb when all is said and done and (as documented in the other reviews) freezes, crashes and resets progress constantly, one has to wonder if it is really worth the cost. Even at $0.99.

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