Continuing on my journey of playing every House of Tales pc game with an English release, I played this game shortly after finishing The Moment of Silence (between the two games they released Verliebt in Berlin, but that game does not have an English release). In contrast to The Moment of Silence, which I found to be worse than The Mystery of the Druids in nearly every way, Overclocked undoubtedly improves upon its predecessors in some key ways, although there are still some shortcomings that left me disappointed.
In terms of improvements, the big ones are movement and the highlight system. The movement in The Moment of Silence felt awful, as if the game was fighting you with every click. In contrast, Overclocked handles screen transitions with easy to click hotspots that change the camera instantaneously, meaning that precisely moving your character within a given screen is completely unnecessary and its easy to find all of the possible views. The highlight system, meanwhile, now works as it always should have, highlighting every camera view change, interactable object, and room exit. This is in comparison to The Moment of Silence, where the highlight system was essentially useless due to only highlighting room exits.
Still, I took issue with many aspects of this game. First and foremost, the dialogue feels like a massive step down from The Moment of Silence. I can only assume it was translated from German, but I would also assume that was true for the previous games and yet the dialogue in those games was perfectly acceptable, maybe even good. Here, however, so many conversations feature completely nonsense lines, with characters responding or even opening conversations with complete non sequiturs. Additionally, Manfred Lehmann, who voiced the protagonist in English for The Moment of Silence, also returns to voice the protagonist in this game. This can be sort of funny if you imagine that the protagonists of the two games are somehow the same person, but otherwise I feel that his performance here is somewhat worse than his prior performance. I am not sure, however, on how much of that can be blamed on the translation being poor.
The puzzles in this game felt worse than in the prior games. If one were to divide puzzles into three categories (Too Easy, Just Right, and Too Hard) and plot them on a graph, this game's graph would be roughly a bowl shape. The narrative structure of this game means that there are significantly more Too Easy puzzles compared to earlier games, but there are still a few puzzles that feel incredibly unfair or contrived. Meanwhile, there is a massive drought of puzzles that feel Just Right, even compared to previous games. Overall, very unsatisfying.
Finally, I didn't find the story to be very engaging. I will admit that, like with many other players, a huge part of what makes The Mystery of the Druids such a good game to me is its insane story, and so I've kind of been hoping for similar levels of insanity out of later games. The Moment of Silence partially delivered on that front (but to a lesser extent), but here I just felt rather uninvested. It's possible I would have liked it more had the dialogue been better translated.
Overall, I think I actually enjoyed this game less than The Moment of Silence. I can absolutely see why so many people like it more, however: if you find the concept behind the narrative structure and the story engaging then you may actually get some enjoyment out of this game.
