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(EDIT, 4:30pm the next day)
Having just finished the game, I stand by what I said below. Since I wasn't finished with it when I made those tweets, though, I kept fearing that I would later arrive at some nebulous point where "the full extent of how brain-punchingly stupid it is," as John Walker claimed, would set in... but no, I never reached such a point. That's because there is no such point. Without spoiling anything, I'll just say that there is nothing in the plot of Moebius: Empire Rising that is any more "brain-punchingly stupid" than, let's say, a voodoo cult (Gabriel Knight 1), werewolves (Gabriel Knight 2) or vampires meet The Da Vinci Code (Gabriel Knight 3), and those things were things that I had little to no problem with when I played those games, so I equally had no problem with Moebius in that regard. If you think those things sound "brain-punchingly stupid" then, yeah, you might also think that the plot of Moebius is kind of schlocky. If, however, you liked the Gabriel Knight games, you'll likely find Moebius to be a decent spiritual successor. It's not a perfect game, don't get me wrong, and I don't think that it is as good as the Gabriel Knight games (at least not the first two, anyway), but it's nowhere near as horrid as that RPS article tried to make it out to be.
Anyway, it was a pretty good game overall, at least as good as Gray Matter (which, as I said before, I found to be about on par with Gabriel Knight 3). There were no cat hair mustache puzzles in Moebius or anything even remotely approaching that in terms of sheer terribleness, though. In fact, I made it through the whole game without even needing to use the hint feature or look things up in a walkthrough or whatever, so there was nothing that was so illogical as to be game-breaking. The only thing I'll agree with Mr. Walker about regarding the puzzles was the tediousness of the game not letting you pick up some of the obvious inventory items or enter some locations until it decided that you finally needed to do so.
In conclusion, as I already said, my only real problems with the game were with the janky animations and with the irritating Unity engine "getthreadcontext failed" crashes, which continued to happen even after I completely disabled avast altogether (along with disconnecting from the Internet entirely, just to be safe). In other words, to restate: John Walker, quite simply, is full of shit when he says this game is "astonishingly terrible" or "an utter disaster." It isn't either of those things. The only thing that is astonishingly terrible about this is the fact that quite a lot of people are probably going to just avoid the game altogether now based solely on Mr. Walker's overblown say so. It sucks, too, because John Walker used to be one of my favorite writers on RPS, but is now quickly becoming my least favorite of the bunch (and, no, it's not only because he hates this one game that I like, either, as there are other, more significant reasons that I'm starting to dislike him, which I will not go into here, as it is irrelevant to and beyond the scope of this post).
And now, on with the Twitter rant.
(/EDIT)
And also a(nother) rant about the state of video game "journalism" thrown in for good measure.
( A bunch of embedded tweets behind cut to spare my f-list )
And now, I'm going to bed.
Having just finished the game, I stand by what I said below. Since I wasn't finished with it when I made those tweets, though, I kept fearing that I would later arrive at some nebulous point where "the full extent of how brain-punchingly stupid it is," as John Walker claimed, would set in... but no, I never reached such a point. That's because there is no such point. Without spoiling anything, I'll just say that there is nothing in the plot of Moebius: Empire Rising that is any more "brain-punchingly stupid" than, let's say, a voodoo cult (Gabriel Knight 1), werewolves (Gabriel Knight 2) or vampires meet The Da Vinci Code (Gabriel Knight 3), and those things were things that I had little to no problem with when I played those games, so I equally had no problem with Moebius in that regard. If you think those things sound "brain-punchingly stupid" then, yeah, you might also think that the plot of Moebius is kind of schlocky. If, however, you liked the Gabriel Knight games, you'll likely find Moebius to be a decent spiritual successor. It's not a perfect game, don't get me wrong, and I don't think that it is as good as the Gabriel Knight games (at least not the first two, anyway), but it's nowhere near as horrid as that RPS article tried to make it out to be.
Anyway, it was a pretty good game overall, at least as good as Gray Matter (which, as I said before, I found to be about on par with Gabriel Knight 3). There were no cat hair mustache puzzles in Moebius or anything even remotely approaching that in terms of sheer terribleness, though. In fact, I made it through the whole game without even needing to use the hint feature or look things up in a walkthrough or whatever, so there was nothing that was so illogical as to be game-breaking. The only thing I'll agree with Mr. Walker about regarding the puzzles was the tediousness of the game not letting you pick up some of the obvious inventory items or enter some locations until it decided that you finally needed to do so.
In conclusion, as I already said, my only real problems with the game were with the janky animations and with the irritating Unity engine "getthreadcontext failed" crashes, which continued to happen even after I completely disabled avast altogether (along with disconnecting from the Internet entirely, just to be safe). In other words, to restate: John Walker, quite simply, is full of shit when he says this game is "astonishingly terrible" or "an utter disaster." It isn't either of those things. The only thing that is astonishingly terrible about this is the fact that quite a lot of people are probably going to just avoid the game altogether now based solely on Mr. Walker's overblown say so. It sucks, too, because John Walker used to be one of my favorite writers on RPS, but is now quickly becoming my least favorite of the bunch (and, no, it's not only because he hates this one game that I like, either, as there are other, more significant reasons that I'm starting to dislike him, which I will not go into here, as it is irrelevant to and beyond the scope of this post).
And now, on with the Twitter rant.
(/EDIT)
And also a(nother) rant about the state of video game "journalism" thrown in for good measure.
( A bunch of embedded tweets behind cut to spare my f-list )
And now, I'm going to bed.
