A New Beginning

Cartoony graphics contrast with a mature story that deals with a serious subject of climate changes caused by human carelessness and is devoid of humor. Instead of puns and wordplays we get well written, intriguing dialogues between believable characters with vivid personalities. [August 2011, p.66]

Featuring a highly interesting story, a tremendous setting, great characters and an overwhelming soundtrack, A New Beginning easily can be regarded as the adventure of the year.

A New Beginning leaves a mixed feeling: While it is a great adventure game, it lacks in the technical department and the speakers could be better than they are.

A few technical failings aside, A New Beginning comes highly recommended. It's not often that I consider a game hard to put down, but I found myself getting deeply invested in the plot as it unravelled thanks to its convincing characterisation and an increasingly gripping storyline. Although there's an obvious environmental focus, there's also a strong heart to the story and it's this that powers your desire to play on. Any minor problems that arise are quickly overshadowed by the stunning artwork and the inventive, well-integrated puzzles, so whatever your view on global warming, do yourself a favour and shell out the green for A New Beginning.

Overall, A New Beginning is a good game that will appeal to fans of "old school" adventure games.

A New Beginning's fantastic visuals and enjoyable story offset its glaring translation and voice-over flaws.

A game that tries present itself as a serious "eco thriller" but fails completely due to stupid, illogical puzzles, moronic characters and poor dialogues. Fans of puzzle-heavy Euro-adventures might find something to enjoy here, but most gamers should steer clear.

A New Beginning is a beautiful adventure game. It is not perfect, but the low ratings do the game by far not justice. The puzzles are challenging without being frustrating. But the main reason to play this game is its story and the atmosphere. Especially outstanding is the narrative technique that is used. It is told like a graphic novel and has two main characters and storylines that unfold in parallel. The game does also have its bad sides, like low resolution graphics and over complicated controls. But luckily these issues fade away as one gets used to it and **** in by the story.

A decent story with great artstyle and animation ruined by bad translation, atrocious dialog and subpar ending.

Huge potential reduced by a below average implemention is the best way to describe this game. This point and click adventure has an interesting story, and the visual aesthetic of delivering it is well executed. The puzzles are pretty entertaining and of casual difficulty most of the time, with a few exceptions of totally illogical sequences. Where this game fails itself is the sound. The voice acting is the worst I've encountred in a really long time- all characters have colourless, almost robotic voices that instantly kill any latent character development. The rest of the audio is also very weak- no memorable musical theme, zero ambience, no effort to create any atmosphere whatsoever. Last but not least, there's an annoying amount of bugs to be found, from delayed sounds to repeating cutscenes and events. All in all, A New Beginning is a game that an adventure fan will surely enjoy, at least with a bit of patience. It does however do surprisingly well at overemphasizing its' own weak points than promoting the good ones, thus failing to be noticeable near the genre's good games that tend to get ever rarer nowadays.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

A New Beginning is an adventure game that is an incoherent mess thanks to abysmal translations and voice acting. One of the most important points of an adventure game, besides the puzzles, is the dialogue. So if the dialogue is difficult to follow, illogical, or plainly incomprehensible, no matter how well put together the puzzles and how interesting the art style, the game will not be enjoyable. This is what A New Beginning suffers from, an incomprehensible dialogue that tries to tell what could have been an interesting story, while providing contradictory insight into how to solve puzzles (telling you to do one thing but you actually having to do the complete opposite), and developing unlikable characters, leaving you to wonder how such a game won the German game of the year award in 2011 (...lost in translation?).