easymule

I really, really really wanted to like this game. I don't. (Reviewed version: 1.4.0) THE WAY REMASTERED is a badly made game. This must be the reason the game is constantly on sale. But don’t be fooled, even for 99 cents, it is a waste of your time and money! The game starts out slow, with lots of unnecessary long back tracking needed. The bland and plain boring look of the first section perfectly illustrates the repetitive and uninspired puzzles. This all might seem like something worth to endure to get to the more colourful locations promised by the marketing. (It isn’t.) So, what’s wrong with this game? The story, while generic, is not to blame. The art style isn’t either, even though it failed to deliver convincingly on the promised retro pixel art, thanks to the programmers not being able to resist to move said pixel art around. The sound effects are nice. The “music” is void of melodic content, it consists mainly of synthesizer pads and atmosphere. You might enjoy it when encountering a new area, but it gets old pretty fast. The voice acting is done well, even if it is annoying after a while. (If you still want to waste money on THE WAY REMASTERED, try it with the music turned down, and the voice acting turned off.) The gameplay is a bit of a problem. It often consists of solving an insultingly easy puzzle by acquiring a hint on one side of the level, telling you to back track dozens of screens, to find a hit area that was invisible if you had move to fast when encountering it before, only to have you traverse back to where you got the hint. This happens a lot. A LOT! Basically, that is the game. Where the game really drops the ball, is with the controls. One could forgive the back tracking and solving Professor Layton style puzzles scattered over several screens, but 99.9 % of your deaths are going to be because of the controls not taking your input. You will respawn instantly, often in close proximity of your demise (if you are lucky… ) only to die again, courtesy of sloppy controls. There are also still game breaking bugs in version 1.4.0 -- the game sometimes randomly decides it does not want to take any input, forcing a restart. It is rather interesting, how many reviewers mention that they played a patched version. One can only wonder how much worse this game must have been! I personally took note of the developers (Puzzling Dream), and will avoid their œuvre in the future. (I created an account just for this review, after YEARS of using metacritic, to warn other potential buyers how bad this game is.)