[b]magnus failure[/b] is the first in a series of short (about 1 hour) point & click adventures. language select on startup is like those scene demos, scrolling text, great music, all it's missing is the greetz section. one way to make a great first impression and one of the very few occasions where I didn't want the game to shut up after alt+tab.
and to balance things, the main menu was already a disappointment. settings include a couple of languages. the end. well, you can delete your progress or check the credits, but [b]no audio settings whatsoever, let alone separate volume sliders, no windowed mode either[/b]. alt+enter only makes a non-resizable window, have to edit the registry to change something.
the story's about a guy who likes to listen to radio signals. one day a coded message arrives and he decides to find the sender. it's a pretty gloomy world out there, no people, just some bees and run-down buildings. puzzles are not too taxing, pick up items to use elsewhere, open doors, that sort of thing. there's a lockpicking puzzle, trial & error but not too bad, a bit of sliding action, and [b]no satisfying ending, it's basically chapter 1, only involves getting out of your home[/b].
[b]the ui is very mobiley[/b], even though the game is not on mobile based on a quick search. everything's too big to the detriment of usability, especially the inventory, which only shows 3 items at a time, have to scroll up/down all the time, but mouse wheel does nothing, of course. zooming is possible but even setting it to 1x (and resetting it every time the game is started) to get rid of constant and annoying zooming in/out, you don't see much of your surroundings, which is further blocked by black borders around the screen. there's an orthographic camera setting too, no zooming there. seems like a frivolous addition anyway, if only they put half the effort into adding audio settings... at least [b]manual saving is available anytime over a single slot[/b]. not great, could be worse, and in some ways it is because esc doesn't bring up the menu, why would it?
the rest of the controls are also clunky because [b]the devs decided to reinvent the wheel and turned it into a square[/b]. instead of simple point & click controls with a hotspot indicator and tooltips over interactable things, you move around with wasd/arrows (nothing wrong with that except [b]movement is very slow[/b]) and if you happen to face an item of interest, it lights up and you have to press the big red action button to look at it or whatever. they managed to come up with something [b]worse than pixel-hunting[/b], congrats. [b]it's supposed to be a game of exploration and adventure, but both aspects are a lot more tedious than they should be.[/b]
4 eur would be way too much for something this brief and unsatisfying even if it had all the basics, but as it is, [b]it's not even something to recommend[/b]. yet another dev that puts style over functionality, but [b]the music is excellent[/b] and I appreciated the c64 reference. the second game, [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/1856550/]magnus imago[/url], can be played on its own because nothing happened in this one, and it works much better as a 1st-person point & click (not saying it's great, only better).
