I really like the games that Wadjet develop more than the games they publish. This one sort of mixes up Blackwell with Maniac Mansion. At the start of the game you get to pick which character to play as (from a police officer, a barista and a DJ). I picked the police officer and during the game there were specific interactions which were for that character.
The game takes a lot of the spooky elements from the Blackwell series (and there are a few call backs to it), though isn't just limited to the dead this time.
Instead you end up joining the secret supernatural police (not affiliated with the police though) who have been protecting New York. I've been enjoying the Peter Grant series of books of late, so this fit nicely into that.
The game is split into episodes, each episode being dealing with a specific person or group of people but tying into an overarching story (hmmm.... also very Blackwell). And during each episode you decide which two partners will accompany you. How you solve the episode is dependent on this and some characters seem to open up about their lives depending on what's going on the episode. There seems to be at least one episode where the game seems to need three partners though and so it does a little awkward thing where one of the partners says "oh I have an appointment that I need to go to, I'll get so-and-so to come" but generally all of the episodes seem to be able to be done with any two.
The issue though is that you get to see the bits of the puzzle that can be solved with other characters and it can sometimes throw you "if only I had so-and-so, I'd be able to get past this easier". The partners you're with are in your inventory (as well as physically walking around) which is a bit strange.
Sometimes getting your partners to do things that you want isn't always obvious. Normally you select them from the inventory and click on the thing you want them to interact with. At one point I wanted one of the characters to give an item to an npc. To do so need to give the item to my partner and they just knew what I wanted.
That said there's often very few items to deal with so the puzzles aren't overly complicated. There's quite a few password/keypad puzzles. There's nothing that is going to have you pulling your hair out.
The partners also occasionally talk to each other unprompted. Annoyingly though if you change screens or interact with anything they'll stop their conversation and not pick it up again. So you're often waiting for them to finish before doing anything.
At the end of each episode your faced with a choice of how to deal with the supernatural entity. The final episode seems to rely on what choices you made, but it seems to have some flexibility if you choose wrong a couple of times. I'm not sure if you can end up not being able to finish the game though. And there's a couple of different endings depending on how you deal with the final entity. Had a few reloads on that one before I figured out the best way of dealing with it.
The story is quite good and there's a nice twist near the end.
The game takes a lot of the spooky elements from the Blackwell series (and there are a few call backs to it), though isn't just limited to the dead this time.
Instead you end up joining the secret supernatural police (not affiliated with the police though) who have been protecting New York. I've been enjoying the Peter Grant series of books of late, so this fit nicely into that.
The game is split into episodes, each episode being dealing with a specific person or group of people but tying into an overarching story (hmmm.... also very Blackwell). And during each episode you decide which two partners will accompany you. How you solve the episode is dependent on this and some characters seem to open up about their lives depending on what's going on the episode. There seems to be at least one episode where the game seems to need three partners though and so it does a little awkward thing where one of the partners says "oh I have an appointment that I need to go to, I'll get so-and-so to come" but generally all of the episodes seem to be able to be done with any two.
The issue though is that you get to see the bits of the puzzle that can be solved with other characters and it can sometimes throw you "if only I had so-and-so, I'd be able to get past this easier". The partners you're with are in your inventory (as well as physically walking around) which is a bit strange.
Sometimes getting your partners to do things that you want isn't always obvious. Normally you select them from the inventory and click on the thing you want them to interact with. At one point I wanted one of the characters to give an item to an npc. To do so need to give the item to my partner and they just knew what I wanted.
That said there's often very few items to deal with so the puzzles aren't overly complicated. There's quite a few password/keypad puzzles. There's nothing that is going to have you pulling your hair out.
The partners also occasionally talk to each other unprompted. Annoyingly though if you change screens or interact with anything they'll stop their conversation and not pick it up again. So you're often waiting for them to finish before doing anything.
At the end of each episode your faced with a choice of how to deal with the supernatural entity. The final episode seems to rely on what choices you made, but it seems to have some flexibility if you choose wrong a couple of times. I'm not sure if you can end up not being able to finish the game though. And there's a couple of different endings depending on how you deal with the final entity. Had a few reloads on that one before I figured out the best way of dealing with it.
The story is quite good and there's a nice twist near the end.