One of the best decisions that Elsinore takes early on is to stray away from Hamlet (or Shakespeare in general) style and stay just with the setting; it knows that it would be quite a challenge to try and stand the comparison. What is left, however, is not that convincing.
The game makes a compromise to put its own system above the individual scenes. In consequence, most of the scenes will be planned out as short and less intrusive as possible, and most of the dialogue options will have a relatively light output, since not everything will be useful and, even when it is, there are usually alternative ways or the fact of repetition to not put a heavyweight behind any of these dialogues. As a result, even if the ideas carry interesting concepts behind them, there always seems to be a lack of thorough exploration, this is more visible at the most dramatic moments that fail (or directly avoid) to be emotional because of the game system compromise. The dead matter not because of death but because of their info.
Having said that, the compromise doesn't have to be bad, after all, the system can be just as powerful as the individual scene direction if, as anything, it is well handled. It also seems to weaken here too. Taken as a “detective” adventure, it will be underwhelming to realize that following any thread is quite an easy task to perform most of the time. Partially, this is due to the game giving you extra help to assure you don't get lost (keeping record of mostly everything important, telling you in the map whenever an event is going on and where) and partially this is due to the game not wanting to tell the story in a more conventional way (I suspect that this is influenced in knowing its lack of powerful enough writing).
Elsinore seems to be in a middle point between straight out telling everything conventionally with little of your input and building a bigger complex malleable plot threads world, failing to fully reach any of the interesting aspects of both. I think my most interesting discovery as a detective was noticing the multiple When They Cry references that I could not find mentioned online.
The game makes a compromise to put its own system above the individual scenes. In consequence, most of the scenes will be planned out as short and less intrusive as possible, and most of the dialogue options will have a relatively light output, since not everything will be useful and, even when it is, there are usually alternative ways or the fact of repetition to not put a heavyweight behind any of these dialogues. As a result, even if the ideas carry interesting concepts behind them, there always seems to be a lack of thorough exploration, this is more visible at the most dramatic moments that fail (or directly avoid) to be emotional because of the game system compromise. The dead matter not because of death but because of their info.
Having said that, the compromise doesn't have to be bad, after all, the system can be just as powerful as the individual scene direction if, as anything, it is well handled. It also seems to weaken here too. Taken as a “detective” adventure, it will be underwhelming to realize that following any thread is quite an easy task to perform most of the time. Partially, this is due to the game giving you extra help to assure you don't get lost (keeping record of mostly everything important, telling you in the map whenever an event is going on and where) and partially this is due to the game not wanting to tell the story in a more conventional way (I suspect that this is influenced in knowing its lack of powerful enough writing).
Elsinore seems to be in a middle point between straight out telling everything conventionally with little of your input and building a bigger complex malleable plot threads world, failing to fully reach any of the interesting aspects of both. I think my most interesting discovery as a detective was noticing the multiple When They Cry references that I could not find mentioned online.