Yesterday

Good graphics, great characters, story with plenty of twists, artful direction, this is a very promising start for an video game review. Yesterday is altogether excellent, the best adventure I´ve played for a long long time. It is classified as a horror adventure and I guess it is, but it does its job with tact, staying away from gore and scares, rather letting its grim premises to creep on you slowly.

The interface is striped down and innovative. Click on something and your character, rather than walking across the screen to reach it, phases next to it. This saves you lots of time and lots of double clicking. The approach taken for interaction with objects is also great: When you click on something important, a frame pops up with a zoomed-in view of it and a couple of buttons to examine and touch it. Elegant and functional at the same time, the interface seems to be crafted by a master architect.

The puzzles (with the possible exception of the snowy mountain area) are very well crafted and logical. The hint system is fully functional, making walkthroughs unnecessary. This is great in itself, since the use of internet help instantly degrades the players will to work on puzzles and as a result harms the gaming experience.

The sceneries are well crafted and functional, without the huge wow moment though. They are designed in an interesting art style, both clean and expressive. There is enough of them to avoid repetition while they are not that numerous so to confuse. Sub areas are small, consisting of 3 "rooms" on average with a maximum, I believe, of four. Thus the familiar "Crap, new area, ouch more rooms to search, its going to be impossible to spot ALL these objects!" panicky feeling is for once absent.

The game is not long, but it is long enough to do its thing without over expanding. I have a feeling that the aforementioned "snowy mountain area" was added as an afterthought to bring gaming duration to an acceptable minimum, it doesn't matter though, as it serves to break the storyline gloominess and it houses one of the most memorable characters in the game.

Overall, I fully recommend Yesterday to all point and click lovers. Ignore low scores, they are completely irrelevant, I can only think that they are granted by people who don't like adventure games.