Elanor begins her review:
A NEW BEGINNING: FINAL CUT is a point and click game with a sci-fi plot where you have to save humanity from extinction after climate change in the past made the Earth’s surface uninhabitable.
The game starts with a video showing the year 2500, where the situation is critical and Earth has two more days to extinction. A team of nine people decide to time travel in order to save the human world.
You start playing as Bent Svensson, ex-scientist from our time (who has to save the world later). He meets a girl, Fay, who is one of the nine time-travellers, and she starts telling him the story of the future and her journey in order to convince him to help. In the game you switch your hero, playing with Bent or Fay for the eight chapters of New Beginning.
The very opening of the game starts with an optional tutorial which, even if you decide to complete, is super short and does not tell you everything, even about the controls you have to use. On other hand, the dialogue in the game over-compensates for the lack of explanation and the conversations (and monologues) and the videos in the game are endless. In fact, there is far more talking than actual puzzles.
There are so many unnecessary things in this game – options which do not matter, screens overflowing with things to click on, all of which give you so much information that you would never need, decisions to make during dialogues, which lead you nowhere… the list goes on and on. From all this options, the game becomes dreadfully slow and its easy to get bored while waiting to play more of the actual game.
What makes it even more frustrating is the fact you have to be absolutely precise with your pointing and clicking. For example, if you have to build something and you point at the correct thing your hero says ‘this is useless’ and after ten minutes of trying everything else, you go back to it and it works, because it had to be few millimetres to the left or the right. This gives the impression of the puzzles being really hard, when they are actually just very precise.
The game has a nice overall plot, with the story progressing from each chapter to the next. It has a lovely idea behind it (although not that original) and the graphics are great. But there are things to be overcome in order to get to the enjoyable bits.
5 time-traveling points out of 10