13 people found this review helpful
Not Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 10.8 hrs on record
Posted: 25 Apr, 2014 @ 4:46am
Updated: 25 Apr, 2014 @ 4:52am

TL;DR the story has potential, but suffers from mediocre dialog, and flat characters. The animations and character graphics are bad. The puzzles are varied with some interesting mechanics, but not necessarily hard. It has a solid length.

Recommended to people who really like adventures and people who can get past some bad dialog.

Well backed the game on kickstarter, played through it.. The graphics are rather bad (or the characters are), and the animations are awful.

That would be ok if the story was solid, but it really isn't. The idea is good, the premise is ok, but the execution and dialog is medicore. Well the dialog is at times really bad, corny and too predictable.

The characters are awkward but not in a good way, and they are rather two dimensional and uninteresting. I'm reminded of the scientist Joshua from the Runaway series, though perhaps not that irritating (really felt that it hurt runaway 2 that he had a more prominent role).

The protagonist Malachi is not very likable, but that is intentional. He suffer from bland/poorly executed character development. It is a bit like the classic windows progress bar, it comes in weird chunks and it is not entirely sure how far it has to go. The character development is a classic "Taming of the Shrew", but then again what isn't.

The interaction between characters are bland and lack depth. There is a weird chemistry between the main characters, which "left unexplained" but with rather heavy suggestions. I would have prefered if the story either had aimed at Watson/Holmes buddies relation, or a more serious approach with deeper meaning.

The FITA and the baddie seems like they have been slapped together in a hurry, as they do not offer much other than trying to frame the story.

The story is rather predictable once the scene is set, with a few twists here and there. The last chapter feels both rushed and drawn out, especially the last puzzle since the highlight feature is turned off and it suffers from the slow transitions between scenes.

I found the puzzles in general to be quite nice, with good variations. I did get stuck a couple of times which is nice enough, but for the most part they were pretty straight forward. Some of the puzzles does suffer a bit from "no that is not the right order" syndrome. Such as why do I need to climb an object in order to get to the object i'm interested in, especially as Malachi says "I need to climb box first", please just do it. It is however just minor inconveniences.

I really like the compare/analyze historical people mechanic, that is the guess who this person is puzzles, not the overly negative, shallow and nonsensical "look at that tramp" analysis of the characters in order to get the obvious clue for conversations.

The historical comparison is a nice mechanic, and there are a lot of interesting historical facts in them , well also some mythical "facts". It worked for me all the way up until the last part of the game, where the historical characters began to be too modern, and not enough "space" to support the idea behind the moebius pattern.

Some reviews on the net talks about game breaking glitches, I did not run into any, but the slow and glitchy animations were a nuisance at times.

The music is quite good and provide a nice ambiance.

All in all Moebius has a lot of interesting ideas and mechanics, but suffer from poor execution, shallow characters and not enough polish. As a point and click adventure game there are two areas you should focus on, the story, the characters and the puzzles, and both characters and story feel rough.

I do not regret having backed the game, but do hope that Pinkerton Road will listen to the critique and do better with their next game(s) because the potential is there. I know it was created on a tight budget, and for that I can forgive a lot of things and i would probably score it at 5/10 leaning at 6/10 due to the analysis puzzles.
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