The Bradwell Conspiracy Reviews

~4-hour walking and building a bridge sim with some timed sections, because that's what people playing these games want. when the first sentence and 'feature' on the store page is 'created by an international, award-winning team', you gotta be skeptical as hell. or expect much greatness if you're naive, believe marketing bullshit or are impressed by excessive name-dropping. I was prepared for the usual 'all style, no substance, nor functionality' situation, but it's done almost well enough and works on win7 despite the stated win10 minimum. except [b]no manual saving, nor saving on exit, only checkpoints here and there, an instant dealbreaker[/b]. why can't you let me stop playing whenever I want without taking away progress? chapter selection fills up as you play, but 'chapter 2' without a description or screenshot is as useless as it gets. settings are available anytime. resolutions, windowed mode, overall gfx setting, v-sync, anti-aliasing, motion blur, texture and shadow quality, brightness, field of view slider, separate volumes, rebindable controls, head bob toggle, camera [i]senstivty[/i] (sic!), vertical/horizontal flip and vibration toggle. [b]subtitles are the only thing under accessibility, why would you offer something for the timed sections?[/b] the silent (or rather silenced) protagonist has to communicate via pictures. [b]each snap takes a few seconds to send instead of being instant[/b], putting a damper on getting a reaction out of your partner by sending them random images. still fun though, but I don't think [b]firewatch[/b] will ever be topped in the 'dialog in walking sims' department. [b]sometimes subtitles appear before the lady starts talking, then audio cuts out because the next line is starting, triggered by who knows what in some cases[/b]. again, damper. walking speed is not too bad, running is better but not good enough for large open spaces. there's a run toggle, only for activation, so it has to be pressed again every time you stop for more than a millisecond. [b]an always run option would've been necessary.[/b] no map but current location is shown in the corner. reading emails and the activity feed is a pain, the mouse wheel barely does any scrolling, gotta click the scroll bars. the other mechanic is 3d printing with bradwellium, adult play-doh. grab items for materials and blueprints, then make whatever's necessary to solve trivial puzzles. [b]only allowing scrolling through all the blueprints one by one makes things even more tedious than rotating and placing platforms already is, what with finding that one pixel the game deems valid and no jumping[/b]. some hotkeys or other convenience options would've been nice. or fewer instances of 'build a bridge here'. it's not a puzzle, it's a chore. I also ran into a [b]game-breaking bug[/b] near the end. sent the pic of a code while amber was still talking and even though it was delivered and should've triggered the next thing, like always before, it didn't. back to menu, continue from last checkpoint. as if dialog skipping randomly ahead wasn't annoying enough, and from what I've read it can happen elsewhere too. [b]the endgame was pretty bad anyway with all the timers[/b] (not making the elevator leave automatically would've made a world of difference), then an [b]incredibly tedious laser-redirecting puzzle[/b], still hindered further by shitty item placement, on top of all the running around slowly in a big fucking cave. to sum it up: subpar save system, iffy controls, bugs and glitches, mediocre story with a disappointing ending, even worse gameplay with an even-even worse final section, sold at way too high a price (I picked it up at 85% off, still a waste, and it used to be on apple arcade for 5 bucks or something). good amount of settings (though music is either non-existant, too soft or too loud without ever touching the slider), cool sidekick, excellent voicovers, even jonathan woss makes an appearance, but these are nowhere near enough to save it. as an aside, bossa studios used to be the publisher and they have a horrible reputation (great choice, devs), but since 2021, after an unannounced change, the devs are shown as publisher on the store page (not in the game), so there's that.