Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Grows on you"

I used to really like the point and click adventure games. Myst and it's sequels kept me occupied for hours, same with 7th Guest. "The Agiliste" goes back to that era with the extra addition of 3d graphics and some clever thinking about the kind of payouts a more sophisticated gamer might like to see when they've reached the end goal.

Plusses:
Smooth graphics: A good "railsy" solution to the 3d movement problem on a touchscreen. They didn't bother with virtual joysticks, instead they went with a whole screen UI that makes you feel a bit more a part of the game than you do when you're fighting the controls.

Short Playtimes: The story is big. There's a full-blown e-book for this out on Amazon (I think it's in the top-ten for "free" high-tech fiction) and a website that's dropping new bits of story all the time. Despite that, it's all getting delivered in smaller bits that make this manageable on mobile.

Easy to play: The hard part about this is the thinking, once you get the controls down, you don't have to fight them. They didn't dumb the game down, its probably on a par with "Memento" (if you remember that one).

Pricing: FREE! According to the updates they're going to be going "freemium". I like free. Cool stuff for Free is a good way to experiment.

Minuses:
80's styling. Thank god the MC doesn't have Big Hair.

Ramp up: It takes a minute (or 5) to get the controls down. Read the instructions, they help a lot.

Cloud Video: The video is a cool bit of cloud streaming, but it doesn't always work right (which is annoying as he** when you hit an edge network). I like the big long story bits though, it's about 6 minutes long, I'm kinda hoping they string them all together into a YouTube movie when it's all done.

Episodic: Yeah. I like the idea. I'm eagerly awaiting Episode02. But so many of these things only release one episode, and there's clearly a ton of work in this, so I'm not sure we will ever see the second update.