When I was preparing my final meal and I accidentally spilled all the ingredients on the floor like a goober, I had to wonder what the developers thought interactivity would add to the story. After all, Adios stars a protagonist who has made his choice before the game even boots up for the first time, so all that's left for the player to do is adopt the role of a stage performer going through the motions. Normally, I think that this is a creative decision with a lot of merit, but I found that the presentation alienated me from the protagonist more than it helped me inhabit him. It's a shame because there is a good story here about the cost of doing the right thing, but it needed to adopt a more limited format to get around the budgetary limitations that a project of this scale has. As it stands, the player is forced to spend the entire game staring at the eerily under animated facial expression of the lanky, ill-proportioned antagonist. Adios is often compared to a Coen Brothers movie but if they made a film with visual storytelling so flat and uninteresting it would easily be their worst, and this game has little to offer in its presentation to make up for that.

Reviewed on Feb 06, 2022


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