REVIEW : ENCODYA (PC)
Nicola Piovesan, an Italian filmmaker, directed a short animated film called ” Robot Will Protect You ” about two years ago. This specific film has won several prizes, which is not unusual for Mr Piovesan (his CV would attest to this), who has recently opted to pursue a career in video game development. The strange thing isn’t that he opted to join new fields; after all, he isn’t the first or the last to do so; it’s the species he chose to put his thoughts into action.
Point-and-click adventures, regardless of how they are presented, may not have the largest audience today. Still, they are probably the best way to tell a tale without falling into the trap of “interactive storytelling,” often known as walking simulators.
The Encodya, Chaosmonger Studio’s first endeavour, will undoubtedly be successful. Encodya presents a tragic story set in the future, cyberpunk, and a fairly dreary version of Berlin, with the help of a stunning presentation reminiscent of Studio Ghibli’s work.
Terrace and patris are located here.
In such a dismal environment, the game’s two protagonists: Tina, a nine-year-old orphaned and homeless girl, whose every day is a hard and unequal battle for survival, far beyond what any child her age should live, and SAM -53, a massive robot-“nanny.” The two are inextricably linked; after all, abandoned children accompanied by robots are prevalent in 2062, but the reasons for this are unknown.
On the one hand, Tina is too young to remember much from her past; on the other hand, SAM-53 discovers that its software has certain “gaps,” as a result of which it is unable to recollect any memories of what occurred.
You would not call him exactly a “scary enemy,” but he does his damage.
Encodya’s case is intriguing, and it progresses satisfactorily until he confesses his major secrets. It undoubtedly manages to “tickle” the player’s curiosity, even if it is slow-burning and does not exactly grab the player “by the face” in the early stages. Of course, he isn’t going to shock anyone with his disclosures. Still, he strikes a decent mix between humour, tears, and serious problems like overexposure to technology’s “beauties” and questions about the value of human life. In summary, the sign is encouraging, even if it isn’t revolutionary.
Encodya follows the conventions of a traditional point-and-click adventure in the main game, allowing you to control everything with your mouse and cursor. The game includes two difficulty levels, Easy and Hard. The only difference is that the hotspot indicator and hints are switched off in the latter scenario, which is unusual for the genre. However, the hotspot indication does not work as expected because pressing Space only highlights the objects we can get, not all the places we may act on. As a result, pixel-hunting is not absent from Easy mode, and given that the hint system… just the hint system is absent, there may be little need to choose Easy.
Neo-Berlin by night…
Leaving aside the issue with the indicator, the game has no other issues with its operation. The two protagonists switch control at the touch of a button, and while they share an inventory, their interactions with the other characters and the surroundings are vastly different. Tina, for example, is better at conversing with others and children, but SAM, in addition to being more tech-savvy, is capable of lifting large objects.
Encodya uses the common denominator of the two characters’ major differences to generate a series of hundreds of puzzles based on this association. Which character will we use to communicate, and which objects will we need to mix (thankfully nothing complicated), all while paying close attention to the environment and what our interlocutors say?
If we get stuck or forget what we’re supposed to do, there’s always the exclamation point on the upper right, which reminds us of our key objectives. According to the game’s authors, some riddles are not planned but rather generated randomly and require a different answer if we start from the beginning. We didn’t see any significant differences; thus, “randomization” is merely a pleasant bonus.
Influence the Influencer.
The complexity level would be moderate to low, with possibly only two or three riddles capable of making the player scratch their heads. The action, which is separated into five chapters, could last up to eight hours. It’s worth noting that we were stuck a lot of the time, not because we didn’t know what to do, but because we couldn’t detect any object in the dense background design in time. Maybe the lack of a proper indicator isn’t as random as we imagined in the end.
Furthermore, there are numerous ” red herring ” things, some of which we carry from the beginning to the end of the game, whose evident purpose is to confuse us (which it does occasionally), but we do not discover the reason to be numerous. A greater balance of helpful and worthless objects could be obtained by introducing more difficult puzzles than regular ones. The final characterization may sound “heavy,” but playing Encodya does not give the impression that this is an adventure from the top shelf, even though there is interest in the story’s conclusion. It is a product developed with a lot of effort and love.
Hm, weird stuff…
We’d say it simply “ticks” the right boxes for a point-and-click adventure (even in its easter eggs) without providing anything more. Of course, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but Encodya falls far behind in recent films like Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Dry Twice and The Hand of Glory.
In terms of the visual field, it is without a doubt the game’s trump card, since it is incredibly beautiful and atmospheric (there are over a hundred locales, some of which are true pieces of art), with equally precise animation, particularly in its cut-scenes, which are evocative of a movie game.
The soundtrack is largely ambient music themes, with a dispatcher as the voice-over. The only criticism is Tina’s voice, which at times sounds more like someone who has previously sucked sun than a nine-year-old child.
Search well in this location. I stuck to this point for an hour.
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