This game almost smell Norwegian! No, not salmon.
April Ryan is an art student in the future in a city called Venice. Suddenly she finds herself in another world, dream-like, yet very real. She wakes up to reality and is still puzzled about her weird dreams. Then she meets this weird old man who seems to know something. April learns about two worlds, paralell to eachother, Stark and Arcadia, which she is able to travel back and forth to with her special ability to "shift".
Why is she able to "shift"? Howcome the old man know a little too much about April and seems to be almost too caring and concerned about her? So her click'n point journey begins...
The beginning is indeed quite slow, it's quite the daily life routine, meet your friends, get your job done, go home and sleep. At the beginning the language is quite vulgar and their conversations didn't interst me at all, but that's not really important. The start is focusing a little too much on April's life details.
The bad language was a little too much, I know that there are alot of people out there expressing themselves like they do in the game. It's quite adult and somewhat immature, both in Norwegian and English. The language itself in the game almost managed to put me off the whole thing.
Since the game is getting old, I don't have too much to say about the graphics, but to be quite decent for the time it came. Though some of the FMVs, sorry to say, plain sucked. They could've done it better.
The story didn't impress me, suddenly it was only about April and her personal problems. I didn't like the sudden "skip of stories", it didn't mix well with eachother.
The world of Arcadia is quite interesting and fun to explore. Most of the designs are quite unique and the characters quite appealing. You'll learn about everything you need through the game, which is intersting! There's alot of stuff to read and pay attention to, it can get pretty heavy with all the informations. You'll learn alot of details about the worlds with the puzzles.
The riddles are fair enough, it might be some IQ-blockage at the beggining if one's not used to point and click games. Later on the puzzles will get more clear and easier to understand.
My personal opinion is that the game is a tad overrated, but it's still worth playing. I was suprised that the game didn't really last long, it only seemed long because of all the dialogues and reading. At least the game had it cute moments and I enjoyed those moments alot!
Not too much of a game, but decent.