Monolith

First 2/3 of the game: Good Last 1/3of the game: NO! GOD! PLEASE NO! First: the voice acting in this game is bad. 90s Playstation bad. Pretty surprising that in 2023 a game still can't find decent VO talent. But whatever, it's a low budget adventure game, I can forgive ♥♥♥♥♥♥ VO. It was almost endearing, in a way. Graphics are fine, nothing amazing and the game should run on a potato which is a plus. Gameplay is where this game shines. The puzzles are excellent. They're logical but not blindingly easy or obvious. I only had to consult the walkthrough once or twice and that was mostly my own impatience. There was one notable puzzle in the latter half of the game where you basically have do the same mini game like 4 or 5 times which was completely stupid because there was no reason for this, but that was probably the most odious puzzle in the game and the rest were..very good, even great. I was really enjoying solving the puzzles and discovering the world. It was compelling. My advice? Buy this on sale and when you get inside the titular Monolith, SHUT OFF THE GAME and make up your own ending instead. I guarantee it's better than the actual game. Because the actual last part of the game is complete ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Major spoilers incoming but trust me, I'm doing you a favor here: it's all in your head. You were in a coma after a car crash and the entire sci fi story was not real. It's the plot of the novel your character was writing in the "real" world. 🤮🤮🤮🤮 First off: "it was all a dream" is THE WEAKEST story ever. IDK why anyone ever uses it. It's awful. Absolutely awful. Completely killed this game. Went from a solid 8/10 to a 2/10 in an instant. ALSO they're completely ripping off a game from 1998 called Sanitarium which at least did a halfway decent job with the same plotline. In Sanitarium it made a lot more sense in the context of that world. It was thematically appropriate. In Monolith...it's just plain dumb. It's embarrassing. You're in a coma after a car crash...which is LITERALLY the plot of Sanitarium as well. It's bad. Really really bad. I wanted to like this game so badly but they just ruined the last 1/3 of the game. The last hour and a half of the game has almost no real puzzles and is just cringe character "I should have been there for my family instead of working late all the time" stuff and it's just an awful mess. The writing in the game was already weak before this point but after this it just nosedives into the toilet. So yeah, buy the game on sale and shut it off when you reach the inside of the Monolith. The end! Nothing else to see, what's next in the backlog?

I would've loved to leave a positive review, because the art direction is wonderful and story could've been good and quite resonant with a different execution, but unfortunately I simply cannot recommend Monolith. It has severe and fundamental pacing issues. To be specific; for a start it is quite over-written and all that dialogue is also performed at a very deliberate, consistently slow pace, with pauses between most sentences that will sooner or later likely start to agitate you. That's the first part that makes the game feel very long. It's also a point-and-click game that really rather old-fashionedly involves an excruciating amount of going back-and-forth between a handful of locations. Even if you don't typically mind or perhaps even enjoy this type of thing (like me), you will also almost certainly find yourself frequently checking the in-game walkthrough, and using the 'skip' function for at least some of the handful of meticulous, ultimately quite tedious mini-games. It takes away any enjoyment or possible excitement, and most importantly the emotional resonance of the story and your investment in it, which is the biggest shame here because (although familiar) the story is not bad at all. With regards to that last part, the nail in the coffin that made me write this review is that even if you've stuck with it to the end like me, it really does not stick the landing. The final chapter feels in a way the longest of all because it starts with the big reveal, let's say. But then you still easily have about another hour or two to click through, and the very final scene is - again, I hate to say this - almost laughable.

Лично моё мнение таково. Начинается как увлекательная научно-фантастическая книга. Нарисовано прекрасно, но ещё прекраснее - юмор и загадки, решение которых становится всё сложнее, и притом очень логичное и техническое. По мере продвижения действительно испытываешь радость... Пока не зависаешь на однообразии и слишком высокой сложности на большой базе. Дальше всё переламывается , и научно-фантастическая история обрывается, хотя могло бы быть совершенно удивительное приключение. Включение психоанализа и глубина , занудные хождения туда-сюда и унылые бытовые моменты здесь оказываются внезапны и не желательны, как снег на голову. И пусть разрешение ситуации приносит покой, это не то, чего я ждала от концовки. Очень не хватает русификации, хотя и без неё мне было понятно. Над русификацией тут работают в обсуждениях. Спасибо за игру, подаренную другом. 🤝❤

clunky interface and can't skip seen cutscenes. I managed to cause a game breaking bug. I use leap frogging saves to protect me from stuff like this, but in this case the I left a crane in the wrong spot and then discovered about a hour later that it caused an issue in the next part of the game. I will have to go back to the start to fix the issue... and I didn't enjoy the experience enough to do that.

I feel bad about advising against it, because it does have its good points, until you reach the end, where the game turns into something different – frustrating, ridiculous… I don’t know if this was the original script or something else, because something just doesn’t feel right [spoiler] from the moment you enter the Monolith[/spoiler]. What begins as a sci-fi adventure with good graphics, a great atmosphere, good music, decent dialogue, interesting puzzles, and so on, turns, in the final stretch, into something truly ridiculous, to the point where I’ve decided to give up on it and uninstall it. As I’ve decided to give up on it, I don’t know exactly how it ends, but from what I’ve seen so far, I haven’t liked it… it seems the underlying message is that a woman should devote herself to looking after her family rather than wasting time on adventures or personal projects. I wish the developers had simply followed the game as a point-and-click sci-fi adventure rather than [spoiler] taking that twist where it all turned out to be a dream… what an overused and inappropriate trope here.[/spoiler] On the other hand, given how cheap it is at the moment, I’d recommend that fans of the genre do go ahead and buy it, but stop playing [spoiler] once the main character enters the Monolith.[/spoiler]

The translation was probably monologue not monolith, the first part was a SCi-Fi adventure game which was fun with logical puzzles, couldn't wait to find out more. The last part was hilarious it just went on and on, as it told the end of the story. We were just laughing it was very funny, but not in a good way!

Unfortunately, the dialogue in this game is so extremely immersion-breaking that it made the game unplayable for me. The voice acting itself is sub-par, but I feel this is likely the fault of the script rather than the inherent talent of the actor. The way in which the protagonist narrates every little thing she does is extremely unrealistic and took me out of the came completely. It also slows down gameplay. I think this point-and-click adventure could actually be enjoyable if there were a script overhaul that cut about 70% of the dialogue, moved most insights to the character's logbook, and replaced voiceover with subtitles and text prompts. In its current iteration, I do not recommend this game.

The problem is inconsistency. Graphics, puzzles, writing, gameplay. The quality of everything goes up and down throughout.

Oof. I forced my way through 80% of the game and then tried a walkthrough to power through the rest and it was just so bad that I couldn't even manage that. Storyline, writing, translation, jank, variable quality, etc etc etc -- it's not a diamond in the rough, it feels more like something the devs realised was unsalvageable halfway through and then just did the bare minimum to finish off what they had and get it out the door I think the "mostly positive" reviews are being way too generous here, play at your own risk