A New Beginning - Final Cut

I played about 2 of the 8 chapters 12 years ago, and for some reason stopped. I somehow remembered this game whilst browsing my library, and noticed that it had been left unfinished - so I restarted it. I think what ultimately drove me to do this was a screenshot from the prologue of the game, from a cabin by a forest somewhere in the Norwegian wilderness. This is, well, a environmentalist sci-fi story that involves a climate disaster, and a time-travelling adventure to the 80s in order to prevent said disaster from happening. It's a nice enough premise that unfolds at times more convincingly than at other times, and without overtly lecturing you about environmentalist agendas. It does repeat certain things a tad much, but otherwise jokes around and pokes fun at both sides, so it certainly doesn't become obnoxious. There are some questionable character development decisions at times, whereas both Dr Svensson and Fay, the two playable protagonists, are decent enough. Fay both showcases the most potential as a character, but in the same time is the more inconsistent of the two - as a girl from the future, she treats most things that she encounters in the past as normal and mundane. The gameplay is pretty classic point & click style. Most puzzles are the right mix of fun and challenging, with a bunch of exceptions. At times, you'll just have to resort to combining random items in your inventory in order to figure out a solution, but some degree of that is to be expected. I did just fine without consulting a walkthrough, especially since chapters are limited to a bunch of locations at most, so even trial and error will eventually lead you to the solution. But for one of the actual puzzles (which you can actually skip, but I didn't want to), one involving binoculars, I had to look up the answer online. It's such a dumb puzzle, that follows a clear logic up to the point, and then completely goes off the rails. But otherwise, it was fun, engaging and some of the hand-drawn environments were absolutely gorgeous. Sure, some of the animations were a bit on the stiff side, but comic book style cutscenes aside, the game looks very good even today. Unfortunately, especially for a 'final cut', it's very rough around the edges. I experienced several crashes in-between chapters, spotted many misspellings of items and dialogue lines, random text in German or Russian in the case of some objects, and a bunch of design choices that were so infuriating (the fact that you could not move away more than 1 metre from a location if you still had a bunch of keys with a bottle opener in your inventory, but without being told so). Even with its problems, I think it's a pretty enjoyable ride, but only for fans of the genre. I had my reasons for playing it, but would definitely not recommend it as a classic of the genre.