Honestly, I didn't have high hopes for this game. Looking at screenshots before getting it, I found myself not getting overly excited. I started playing the game, and I actually enjoyed it at first. It was mysterious enough to keep me going, and had a good basis for a story. But, after a few hours on this game, I realized I'm not really playing an adventure game. I'm basically a part of the story, and all I do is press "next page" over and over, just to keep the story going. It is like those FMV games, when you just press something again and again to keep the plot going, for no apparent reason, other than to make you think you're in control.
As for the game itself, it starts off interesting enough. You get acquainted with the controls and the gameplay fairly quickly, and the whole progress of the story unfolds in a very neat way at first. Unfortunately, most of the game's progress is dialog driven. What does that mean? It means that you talk to someone, then you talk to someone else. Then, you go back to the first person and talk to them about what the other person said, and so forth and so forth. Quite frankly, that made the game almost too easy to be really considered a game. Every so often you actually have to use your head to avoid a death scene, but the rest of the game, about 90% of it, is as easy as cake, and requires very little of your brain power. After a while, it gets old. The "puzzles", if you can even call them that, are ridiculous in the reality of the game. I mean, you can talk to the nurse at the hospital, and ask her about stuff, then you can go back, put on a white coat, and suddenly she treats you like you're a doctor, even tho she just saw you a second ago. For me, that was the moment I lost hope in the game. Also, most of the characters act as plot devices, and nothing more. For example, you can steal the barman's towel, and then show it to him, and he'll be all "oh, you can have it". You break into a museum, and the police is acting like "oh, you rascal you", basically, and almost nothing you do have any consequences. For a so-called serious game, nothing is taken even remotely seriously.
Graphics wise, this game is mixed bag. On the one hand you've got beautifully detailed, hand drawn backgrounds, but on the other hand, they are overlapped by cartoonish, sorta amateurish, unfitting characters sprites that don't correspond neither with the background, nor the overall atmosphere of the game. All of the characters in the game looked ridiculous, in my opinion, and their walking animations is almost embarrassing. Characters design were bad (I still can't figure out what George sees in Nico, but .. to each their own...).
Sound is just okay, voice acting is just okay.Tho I did not like the fact that supposedly non-English speaking characters spoke English to each other for no apparent reason. And with an annoyingly bad accent. They could've made the extra effort and show some authenticity with the languages.
Music, although fitting, is, at the end - just okay. No apparent musical themes, and overall Generic "mystery" music to all locations. Though, I did like the fact that there are music cues to tell you you're going in the right direction, story wise. Near the end of the game, I hoped the music would become a bit more epic, to fit the story, but it just stayed this lukewarm, background-ish mystery music that actually killed some otherwise good moments.
Movie cut-scenes are kept to a minimum, and when they do appear, the were quite poorly executed. Also, some parts that would require such cutscenes (Like George and Nico's "moment" on the train) were blatantly missing.
The ending is sort of okay, but in this case, had the music been more epic, or the animation direction had been better, it would've made the ending a lot better. Overall, I found myself disappointed with the ending. The game seems long, but that's only due to the fact that you can't take ANY shortcuts in the gameplay. You can't double click an exit, you can't skip large portions of speech, and most of the time, when you start talking to a character, it would take a few seconds to get a reaction. Overall, the gameplay is the true killer of the game, imo, especially for this kind of dialog driven, slow walking animation, lots of locations type game, such as this one. Maybe if there was a way to get the main character to move faster, or for the other characters to react faster, or to do anything to make the game appear to have some sort of real urgency (and not just every now and again), this game might have been fun, but at the end, it was a valid effort that didn't quite land with me.