Asagos Reviews

I give a positive review as an encouragement but this adventure sure has its problems. I don't care about the graphics, anyway they're passable during the gameplay and bad in the cutscenes. Music is much better. The scenario is very original: canadian parliament and an intrigue between politicians and lovecraftian divinities. Lovecraft is everywhere nowadays, but you can see the effort to write something different here. You progress talking to people. You need to move to various locations analyzing everything and talking with everyone, eventually you'll end the chapter you're playing. Since there's people you can trust and people you can't trust, you should be careful about your topics. Talking about the wrong thing with the wrong people lowers the "subtlety", which was never a problem in my game, but maybe could lead to a game over? I don't know. It felt like this feature was underdeveloped, probably for the good. Even though the gameplay is not brilliant, it's ok. The pacing is slow, which sometimes I appreciate, and this works to build the tension for the waiting of the darkness. There's this feeling and certainty that something terrible is about to happen that is probably the best thing in the game. The rest of the writing is so so. There are many characters and they're ok, but the events are for the majority hardly emphasized and sometimes a bit naive. The final resolution seems shallow to me. But let's talk about the biggest problem of the game: you can't save whenever you want, only in the library. Ok, the library is a special place in the game so it makes sense storywise, but it's really painful gameplay-wise. You'll need to take long walks just to get to the library and save before you can quit the game. Library's location is peripheral so you need to head there specifically. This would be bad but not be terrible if... you couldn't die. But you can. Even worse, the final act is literally an action game where you have to shoot and run. If you die, you need to restart from the damn library, and according to your ability, you may die a few times. Generally, I am in favour of action elements (or else) in an adventure game if that is appropriate with the events. But historically the action parts were almost always terrible in adventure games because those were poorly made, poorly implemented. So what developer should do? If they can't do those properly, at least they should avoid them to be painful. Don't torture the player, consider that adventure players may be not very keen on arcade sequences, so put the action if you want but think about the player, don't make it suffer with something which is not the reason of the experience. Asagos has bad action sequences and if you die you need to start from the library in any case [spoiler] and if you die in the small maze you start from the library, and if you pass the maze and die to the final boss you start from the library and you need to solve the maze once again [/spoiler]. I still recommend the game if you are into lovecraftian things, you'll appreciate the setting and the atmosphere. I hope the developers think about the possibility to save the game in any moment (when you quit the game for example) because I suppose this simple thing could attract negative reviews.