Apocalipsis - Andy Plays Indies
Don't buy this game.
Sorry guys. I guess that's giving it away. But I just barely got through playing Apocalipsis, and even at its $6.00 price tag, it's hard to recommend this game.
Let's set it up first. Apocalipsis is a point-and-click adventure by way of flash arcade game, with two sales gimmicks: That it's narrated by the lead vocalist of Polish comedy metal band Behemoth, and that the art style is taking conscience influence from medieval woodcuts, like those of Albrecht Dürer or Hans Holbein. Obviously I don't care about the former, but the latter was intriguing enough for me to pick it up.
On paper, the game looks good, but the execution relentlessly lets it down. There's basically three elements at play here, the story, the puzzles, and the artwork. Of the three, the art is probably the strongest, but none of them are likely to carry the game for you.
The plot is that we are Harry, a bog-standard adventure game adolescent boy hero, whose girlfriend was executed as a witch, and who goes off to try and resurrect her using black magic. So far, so generic. We're playing as a depressed guy, out on a hopeless quest to retrieve his dead love. This is only the eleventy-first game to pull that old chestnut. I'm not saying that no one is allowed to do a depressed widower horror story after Silent Hill 2, but if the broad strokes of the plot are going to be that obvious, the details have to carry it. In Apocalipsis, the details just aren't there.
The plot basically has two beats: Girlfriend dead at the beginning; girlfriend possibly alive at the end. On the way from point A to point B, there aren't any significant revelations or character development. And aside from a a general tendency towards getting more supernatural as the game goes on, the puzzles and locations are barely connected to one another. The player just finds themselves stumbling from one largely disconnected set-piece to another.
I'm sure that some people will argue there's some kind of deep symbolism here, but the plot just isn't interesting enough for me to want to go looking for it. I saw some reviews making the claim that this game has a fatalistic gallows-humor to it, but I'm a pretty damn unpleasant person, and I can't say I cracked a smile once.
The game does make some use of occult and alchemical imagery, and you can clearly see the attempt to borrow some of the style from 15th century art, particularly of the type produced after the Black Death, but I have to say that the game is sorely lacking in the kind of detail and imagination that appears in the real McCoy.
In fact, I suspect that some of the tongue-baths this game has been getting from mainstream reviewers stem from those reviewers not actually being very familiar with medieval art. All of the reviews I read seemed to imply that everyone in 15th century Europe must have been manically depressed. A view of history commonly espoused by Gen-X cretins who can't imagine how anyone could be happy living a different life from theirs. Yes, medieval art does sometimes treat with some pretty dark themes. --war and disease were persistent realities of these people's lives, after all-- But their artwork is whimsical and inventive, not dour and depressing.
The gameplay's a big zero in my book, too. The puzzles seem to oscillate between blitheringly obvious and frustratingly obscure, without ever hitting the happy medium in between. Far too many of them fall back on the old point-and-click bugbear of just figuring out what order you need to click on the items in. There's a couple of cool ideas, such as configuring the gears in a locking mechanism, but the solutions aren't all that clever.
The really bad puzzles mostly involve lining up alchemical symbols according to a variety of criteria. They're always irritating, and are typical of the general problem with the way this game is constructed. You see, in a good puzzle, you immediately understand both the goal and the essential mechanics, but you still have to work to get to the solution. In Apocalipsis, the only difficulty to any of the puzzles is in figuring out what the rules are. From there, the solutions are easy. So instead of a satisfying challenge, all you get is a series of irritating roadblocks.
Still, if I was invested in the story, I might have muscled through the more annoying puzzles, or just gone to check a walkthrough, but I wasn't, and the puzzles are interspersed with timing-based arcade sections, mostly involving dodging one or another type of incoming object. These are all terrible, but a section towards the middle of the game, involving dodging monster tentacles and floating debris, and which might as well be a much worse version of Space Invaders, was a particular monkey in my wrench.
Look, I'll freely admit to not being the world's biggest adventure game fan, but I don't think Apocalipsis is going to offer much for enthusiasts of the genre.
I don't know. Apocalipsis is nice and cheap, at least. Without all the gameplay frustrations, I might recommend this game for people who just like weird old timey-art, but if you're a real devotee of medieval woodcuts, you probably won't find this a suitable tribute. The bottom line, for me, is that if I hadn't been planning on reviewing this game, I doubt I would have made it past the first hour.
Even if you consider the cost of this game negligible, I'm pretty sure there's more valuable things you could be doing with your time. So if you'll take my advice, this is one to miss.