Before fully diving into the latest (and most impressive) title published by the Wadjet Eye Games, I wanted to finally catch up with the two games they’ve published that I’ve never checked. The main reason to ignore them was the reviews I’ve read – both Primordia and especially A Golden Wake seemed to be met with less praise than other Adventure Game Studio made point and click adventures Wadjet Eye helped see the light of day. Let’s see, if playing these games was worth the detour.
Primordia is a project by Wormwood Studios and might be one of the most stylish and animated AGS games that appeared under Wadjet Eye name. Which is probably the main draw of the title – its beautiful looking retro-futuristic surrealist post-apocalyptic landscape, the curious post-human world with humanity turned into some mythical beings of ancient times, great animation work and one of the best voice acting jobs done for the Wadjet Eye game to this day. It also tries to be really nicely paced and designed, with many puzzles having multiple solutions and approaches and story dynamically adjusting itself to some little variables that can happen due to player choice.
That said, it does feel like by the time second half of the game starts, the game starts losing its focus. Some scenes, even with the different approaches to solving them, devolve into the usual trappings of “try to use each item on the thing/other item” and trying to figure out if there are any important things/exits on the scene that aren’t obvious. I’ve also encountered the common for most AGS games issues with resolution being way too low if you have a 4K screen (especially if you use DPI scaling) is also not particularly pleasant. Though, the developers mentioned that they’re already preparing the update to the game, that will update the engine build and make the game better compatible with modern high resolutions. The game is nice, it tells a compelling enough story and tells it well. So I’m glad that I’ve decided to check it out.
Now, A Golden Wake, though… This game tries to do a lot of very interesting things. It’s a game set in the 1920s in US, based around the character trying to make it big in the ongoing real estate bubble, and it does use dramatized versions of real historic people in that. It also attempts to introduce the more involved dialogue and persuasion mechanics (highly reminiscent of Deus Ex: Human Revolution). And its story covers over a decade, something that I still wish more games would do. And it starts pretty well – the story is a bit mundane and might not be particularly exciting for those not interested in sales or history of that era, but it does the job and can be reminiscent of some good biopics done in a similar style. Some of the most curious and best mechanics are introduced and things seem to be going well.
But then the game takes a huge nosedive (no pun intended, but it does start with a bad sequence with a plane) from which it never recovers. Mechanics and puzzles become more tedious or badly designed, rather than exciting. Sequences of events become more and more disjointed and feeling more like a “collection of adventure game tropes”, rather than a story. And then the story just stops making any sense whatsoever. Characters do things without any meaningful context, events happen without any real flow or reason and then the game simply ends on something that by all means should be dramatic, but feels silly and falls flat. Given that Shardlight was a later Grundislav Games and Wadjet Eye collaboration, and it had a lot of the exact same issues, I guess I should’ve seen it coming (though that game is an improvement).