The Descendant

The Descendant offers a fascinating sci-fi tale intertwined with interesting puzzles, breathing fresh air into a genre that can feel stagnant at times.

The Descendant is dubbed in English, but the interface and subtitles translation (in Italian) is excellent, and that's a very good start. The gameplay is rather original, different from what you can expect from an adventure game. It won't last too long (10 hours, give or take), but the experience is claustrophobic, cynical, disturbing and often surprising.

Overall, even though the controls sometimes made me swear in frustration and the hackneyed narration made me laugh out loud, I am still, on the whole, pleased to have played The Descendants. It is worth trying out in a sale, and if you can cope with the shortcomings in design, the story is an entertaining five-episode arc.

The Descendant has a compelling plot but a very short length and a gameplay full of ups and downs. 1h per episode doesn't feel enough.

The interesting and well crafted story of this sci-fi adventure can’t compensate for the awful camera, bad design and poor overall execution.

Quotation forthcoming.

The developers from Gaming Corps don’t even try to hide the fact that they are shamelessly copying from Telltale. What’s more, The Descendant is a highly imperfect counterfeit – poorly written, not engaging, sometimes unintentionally funny and technically flawed. [02/2017, p.43]

If you like Telltales games or Life is Strange then you’re going to love this! Right now they have just released the first episode so this will be a review of that, not the entire season. To start with the episode was quit short, just about an hour. That is my biggest concern this far. Humanity has destroyed earth ending it by nuking the whole surface. Luckily the governments built the “arks”. They held 4.000 of the most important people underground and made sure that there would be a tomorrow for mankind. You get to play the story throughout two separate timelines. First you play as Mia, a janitor, tasked with maintaining Ark 01. And you also play as Glen, two hundred years later. And Glen tries to find out why Ark 01 never opened when the other arks did. Its an intriguing story set in a wonderful apocalypse environment. The graphics isn’t amazing but I believe its better than both The walking dead and Life is strange. Gameplay is point and click puzzles mixed with a lot of dialog and dialog options just like expected. For me the puzzles was somewhat too easy but that could be just me. Something that I really like though was that in the end of the episode every failure I made in the puzzles during my gameplay resulted in one dead member of Ark 01. How many will be alive when I finished the season? To make it short. A great episodic game, perhaps a bit short but well worth the money!

I think this is already one of my favorite games of all time. I played for 5 hours straight without getting bored. I like it because it's grindy like the 2 Destiny games but the movement and overall gameplay is like warframe.

The Descendant is not a revolutionary game by any means. It's very much in the style of gameplay made famous by Telltale, and even the artistic style is in the same vein. But if that's what you like, then the Descendant is a pretty solid offering. It's quick, five episodes taking less than an hour each to play through. There's puzzles enough just to slow you down a little but they're not challenging (and in a few cases just annoying). The plot wasn't anything original (kind of felt like a pitch to do Tales of Fallout), and there were a few gaps in it (what ever happened to that crazy guy?). In fact, it all fell apart a bit toward the end, and there wasn't the payoff of an ending I was hoping for. As a story-focused game, I was expecting a bit more to it. But overall it's pretty much what you expect.

Five Word Review: TellTale-style post apocalyptic adventure. Favorite Thing: I rather like post-apocalyptic stuff. While not spectacular it was enjoyable. Least Favorite Thing: They heavily copied TellTale's style but it's no wheres near as polished. I particularly disliked the controls, especially during a camera switch. Date Completed: 2017-10-08 Playtime: ~ 4h Enjoyment: 7/10 Recommendation: If you like TellTale's style of point & click (just minus the TellTale) then yes.

I really enjoy Telltale games so I'm always on the lookout for similar games and The Descendant is about as close as it gets, albeit less refined. I've just finished the game and I enjoyed it for the most part, it looks and feels like a Telltale game, just not as polished, if you told me it was an early effort by Telltale I wouldn't question it, they're that similar. I found the story interesting and you were kept guessing all the way until the end, I was kept engaged throughout and I always wanted to start the next episode after finishing the previous one. The voice work was a little rough in parts, ranging from serviceable to good depending on the character and the visuals while nothing special did the job, they went for the cel shaded look ala The Walking Dead and co. Gameplay was what you'd expect, walk around finding clues, press the correct button at the correct time and select whichever story choice you prefer. The Descendant did have more puzzles though which I personally didn't like, episode 3 was especially bogged down with fiddly puzzles. Now for the bad though, it's technically not great (is this genre cursed?), it's a Unity engine game that's capped at 30fps, you have to edit the registry to fix this which is easy enough to do but you'll notice straight away the game is optimised for 30fps, even on medium settings I couldn't hit 60fps in all situations (although to be fair, I did most of the time). So my advice would be to uncap and switch to medium settings unless you're using something better than a GTX 970, there's high and very settings above medium for those of you rocking big boy GPUs. Overall though it was decent and it's dirt cheap on key sites (I paid £2.32), plus episode 1 is free to try on Steam so if you're a fan of the genre give it a go.