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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.
I like Moebius: Empire Rising. I really do. But I'd like it a lot more if I didn't get the "getthreadcontext failed" crash so often.
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 16, 2014It seems to be a rather common problem with Unity engine games. Something to do with conflicts with antivirus or some such.
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 16, 2014I'm not disabling avast just to play a game, though (since setting it to ignore the Moebius directory apparently isn't sufficient).
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 16, 2014Anyway, I've made it up to Chapter 6, despite the crashes, and I like what I've played so far.
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 16, 2014Moebius: Empire Rising is certainly no Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, but it's still pretty damn cool.
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 16, 2014But I'm going to stop for tonight, because it crashed just now right as I brought up the menu and clicked the goddamned save button.
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 16, 2014Luckily, I'd just saved it earlier at the Intermission before starting Chapter 6, so haven't lost much progress at all.
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 16, 2014Still, it annoyed me enough that I don't want to go back into it now, though.
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 16, 2014I'll say this though: It's getting to the point where I can safely say that if John Walker hates a game, then it must be pretty good.
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 16, 2014I refer to this http://t.co/UuzE7K9THc in which Mr. Walker tore the game a new asshole.
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 16, 2014I've long since reached that point with guys like Jim Sterling, but then, Jim Sterling is a colossal prat anyway and has been for years now.
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 16, 2014I don't think that John Walker is a prat, though. I just don't think his taste in games aligns much at all with mine, I guess.
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 16, 2014To compare anything in Moebius with that godawful cat hair mustache puzzle in GK3 is an insult to Moebius, because Moebius isn't that bad.
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 16, 2014I will agree that some of the animations in Moebius are quite janky, though. Same was true of Cognition (of which I've only played ep1).
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 16, 2014What sucks about the RPS WIT, though, is the the comments are filled with "There goes Jane Jensen killing adventure games again" asininity.
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 16, 2014Everyone blames Jane Jensen for that goddamn cat hair puzzle in GK3 ever since Old Man Murray wrote about it in 2000. http://t.co/9fDZS9aQYj
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 16, 2014Thing is, though, Jane Jensen had jack and shit to do with that puzzle which supposedly "killed adventure games." http://t.co/CQ6F4662gC
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 16, 2014So, anyway, to reiterate, the *only* problem I've had with Moebius so far has been the "getthreadcontext failed" Unity crash bullshit.
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 16, 2014The actual game itself, when it works, is mostly fine, aside from maybe some ugly animations.
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 16, 2014It's nowhere near as hyperbolically bad as some people are trying to make it out to be.
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 16, 2014It's not the best thing since sliced bread or the savior of adventure gaming or anything like that, but it's not ungodly terrible, either.
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 16, 2014I just wish game reviewers could write their review (either good or bad) without turning it into an overblown, melodramatic farce, for once.
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 16, 2014And now, I'm going to bed.
