My first impression with KGB Unleashed was rough. I couldn't see shit and struggled with the interface for several minutes before realizing my cursor lighted up when I was on a hotspot (sounds obvious, but I swear it didn't look that obvious to me first). At that point I was convinced I would be in for some Microïds-tier first-person point & click garbage... And it went better than expected, but not that much.
The game's greatest quality is its setting and atmosphere. You're a soviet electrician trapped in a claustrophobic bunker where the KGB did weird experiments to please the great leader, until (surprise) things went horribly wrong. You find a bunch of documents during your escape, learning more about the story and getting clues for various puzzles. Of course the farther you go, the creepier it gets. It's quite neat to have a game in a "realistic" USSR setting, without too much cold war schlock.
Puzzles are adequate: not too easy, or too hard. Setting up machines and contraptions can get old in the end, and don't expect nice puzzle feedback (it won't tell you if you're right immediately, you need to go out of your way to open doors and pull levers to see if you got it right). It's not an issue if you're not an idiot like me, I guess. Seasoned adventure players will enjoy the challenge.
There's a part where you get poisoned and it's annoying as hell. You start coughing and your vision gets troubled until you leave the section or find an antidote. There's also a part in the complete dark where you need to use the cursor as a lamp torch, and you'd better look very slowly if you don't want to miss an important object. It's obvious the devs tried to spice their game with that stuff, and it was a complete mistake! What a pain in the ass.
I didn't hate 1953 - KGB Unleashed but it clearly is a b-tier adventure game. It also ends on a sour note with a lackluster and anticlimactic ending. But thinking about it, the experience wasn't that bad. I've played worse. The quintessential meh/10 game.
The game's greatest quality is its setting and atmosphere. You're a soviet electrician trapped in a claustrophobic bunker where the KGB did weird experiments to please the great leader, until (surprise) things went horribly wrong. You find a bunch of documents during your escape, learning more about the story and getting clues for various puzzles. Of course the farther you go, the creepier it gets. It's quite neat to have a game in a "realistic" USSR setting, without too much cold war schlock.
Puzzles are adequate: not too easy, or too hard. Setting up machines and contraptions can get old in the end, and don't expect nice puzzle feedback (it won't tell you if you're right immediately, you need to go out of your way to open doors and pull levers to see if you got it right). It's not an issue if you're not an idiot like me, I guess. Seasoned adventure players will enjoy the challenge.
There's a part where you get poisoned and it's annoying as hell. You start coughing and your vision gets troubled until you leave the section or find an antidote. There's also a part in the complete dark where you need to use the cursor as a lamp torch, and you'd better look very slowly if you don't want to miss an important object. It's obvious the devs tried to spice their game with that stuff, and it was a complete mistake! What a pain in the ass.
I didn't hate 1953 - KGB Unleashed but it clearly is a b-tier adventure game. It also ends on a sour note with a lackluster and anticlimactic ending. But thinking about it, the experience wasn't that bad. I've played worse. The quintessential meh/10 game.