"Steam. Not smoke."

A New Beginning is one of Daedalic Entertainments' "pretty good idea, done nonchalantly" games. Thus, it is a great potential story wrecked with many bugs, bad translation and a half-baked ending. I had really some major expectations from this game, with themes such as time travelling, environmental pollution and mass awareness but... No, it doesn't cut. This is not how it's done. This is not how it should be done. All this tension, all these ominous warnings, all this thrill and this action... and this ending? This is not a climax! Are you mocking me?

Sorry, my annoyance gets the best of me sometimes. It's storytelling time. Here, we have the elderly Norwegian bioengineer Bent Svensson who spent all his life working in the laboratory to produce energy from algae for the production of safe energy in hopes for a better future for the planet. After a breakdown that he suffers due to exhaustion, Bent is sent to retirement - the purgatory of a workaholic. He now lives in a small cabin in Norwegian Fjords, away from work, away from stress and away from responsibility. "Calm down, Bent" says his psychiatrist. "You are not responsible of saving the world".

Oh, she couldn't be more wrong! Bent Svensson's silent misery in retirement is suddenly interrupted by the visit of Fay, an odd young woman who claims that she time travelled from the future to find him. According to Fay, she comes from a future where the mother earth is at her limits and about to perish for good due to years of pollution, violent climate changes and toxicity. As part of an operation called 'the Phoenix Plan' she is sent to the past to prevent a disaster from happening to alter the course of time. "Only you, Bent" says Fay, "Only you can save the world!”

I know I was intrigued after the brief introduction to the game. The environmental theme, financial conspiracies, bioengineering, time travel, ecoterrorism... What else I can expect from a sci-fi environmental adventure? Right? Sadly there is a truckload of bugs and irritable mistakes within this game which will simmer down your enthusiasm. There is a common bug that makes your inventory unreachable, thus unable to complete an action to progress which triggers a couple of times, starting with the end of chapter 2. You should either ask Daedalic support for a save game where the bug isn't triggered, or pray you got plenty of your saves to try again.

The graphics are beautiful, this is already a trademark for Daedalic. Cinematic cut scenes are arranged in a comic-style manner where comic panels are presented with speech bubbles over characters, alongside voice acting. The comic style character artwork is a great idea of presentation, but my issue comes with the translation. As Daedalic being a German firm, I assume for original voice acting and script to be in German. So the English translation is... well, horrible. Word puns and scientific explanations are totally lost. There are many, many spelling errors within texts. The speaking animations do continue long after the voice acting is already stopped. With all these errors, it becomes really hard to get into mood and take either character or the story seriously.

About the gameplay itself, it is your basic point and click adventure. Item combinations do make sense, and nearly always they go along with an engineering view point. Lots of things to fix, physical reactions to mind, machines to manage and operate. Thus, it becomes obscure sometimes for you to be able to think of needed ways to progress. Puzzles themselves are very realistic, to a degree of - yet again, becoming obscure. I am usually very good at solving such puzzles without a walkthrough, but in the case of this specific game, I gave up. I personally think there is no one who would be able to solve all puzzles without the help of a walkthrough for this game.

I do not give up on games with good stories due to bugs, really. If I managed to play Anna to the end, and enjoyed every single moment of it, I'm positive bugs do not pull me down. My problem was the negligence in story persistency all together. Some characters made a shallow appearance and remain unvisited and unmentioned for the rest of the story, which prevents us from emphasizing with them altogether. Aside the character of Bent Svensson himself maybe, characters aren't more than some pictures with speech bubbles. There is no personality, no cause-effect relationship in their actions, no reasoning to their thoughts or dialogues. There were some character inconsistencies, like a trained radio operative like Fay being borderline clumsy, just to force the storyline in a predetermined course. Every disaster or twist in the storyline is foreseeable and determined, aside from a really anticlimactic ending.

All in all, this is a mediocre game with incredible potential wasted terribly. Am I sorry that I played this? No, not at all. Gave me some thinking to do on the theme itself of course. But nothing I wouldn't get from reading Greenpeace bulletin or National Geographic. On sci-fi terms, I'll keep reading H.G. Wells.

Please also check out Lady Storyteller's Curator page here - follow for regular updates on reviews for other games!

[b]"Steam. Not smoke."[/b] [i]A New Beginning[/i] is one of Daedalic Entertainments' "pretty good idea, done nonchalantly" games. Thus, it is a great potential story wrecked with many bugs, bad translation and a half-baked ending. I had really some major expectations from this game, with themes such as time travelling, environmental pollution and mass awareness but... No, it doesn't cut. This is not how it's done. This is not how it should be done. All this tension, all these ominous warnings, all this thrill and this action... and this ending? This is not a climax! Are you mocking me? Sorry, my annoyance gets the best of me sometimes. It's storytelling time. Here, we have the elderly Norwegian bioengineer Bent Svensson who spent all his life working in the laboratory to produce energy from algae for the production of safe energy in hopes for a better future for the planet. After a breakdown that he suffers due to exhaustion, Bent is sent to retirement - the purgatory of a workaholic. He now lives in a small cabin in Norwegian Fjords, away from work, away from stress and away from responsibility. "Calm down, Bent" says his psychiatrist. "You are not responsible of saving the world". Oh, she couldn't be more wrong! Bent Svensson's silent misery in retirement is suddenly interrupted by the visit of Fay, an odd young woman who claims that she time travelled from the future to find him. According to Fay, she comes from a future where the mother earth is at her limits and about to perish for good due to years of pollution, violent climate changes and toxicity. As part of an operation called 'the Phoenix Plan' she is sent to the past to prevent a disaster from happening to alter the course of time. "Only you, Bent" says Fay, "Only you can save the world!” I know I was intrigued after the brief introduction to the game. The environmental theme, financial conspiracies, bioengineering, time travel, ecoterrorism... What else I can expect from a sci-fi environmental adventure? Right? Sadly there is a truckload of bugs and irritable mistakes within this game which will simmer down your enthusiasm. There is a common bug that makes your inventory unreachable, thus unable to complete an action to progress which triggers a couple of times, starting with the end of chapter 2. You should either ask Daedalic support for a save game where the bug isn't triggered, or pray you got plenty of your saves to try again. The graphics are beautiful, this is already a trademark for Daedalic. Cinematic cut scenes are arranged in a comic-style manner where comic panels are presented with speech bubbles over characters, alongside voice acting. The comic style character artwork is a great idea of presentation, but my issue comes with the translation. As Daedalic being a German firm, I assume for original voice acting and script to be in German. So the English translation is... well, horrible. Word puns and scientific explanations are totally lost. There are many, many spelling errors within texts. The speaking animations do continue long after the voice acting is already stopped. With all these errors, it becomes really hard to get into mood and take either character or the story seriously. About the gameplay itself, it is your basic point and click adventure. Item combinations do make sense, and nearly always they go along with an engineering view point. Lots of things to fix, physical reactions to mind, machines to manage and operate. Thus, it becomes obscure sometimes for you to be able to think of needed ways to progress. Puzzles themselves are very realistic, to a degree of - yet again, becoming obscure. I am usually very good at solving such puzzles without a walkthrough, but in the case of this specific game, I gave up. I personally think there is no one who would be able to solve all puzzles without the help of a walkthrough for this game. I do not give up on games with good stories due to bugs, really. If I managed to play [i]Anna[/i] to the end, and enjoyed every single moment of it, I'm positive bugs do not pull me down. My problem was the negligence in story persistency all together. Some characters made a shallow appearance and remain unvisited and unmentioned for the rest of the story, which prevents us from emphasizing with them altogether. Aside the character of Bent Svensson himself maybe, characters aren't more than some pictures with speech bubbles. There is no personality, no cause-effect relationship in their actions, no reasoning to their thoughts or dialogues. There were some character inconsistencies, like a trained radio operative like Fay being borderline clumsy, just to force the storyline in a predetermined course. Every disaster or twist in the storyline is foreseeable and determined, aside from a really anticlimactic ending. All in all, this is a mediocre game with incredible potential wasted terribly. Am I sorry that I played this? No, not at all. Gave me some thinking to do on the theme itself of course. But nothing I wouldn't get from reading Greenpeace bulletin or National Geographic. On sci-fi terms, I'll keep reading H.G. Wells. Please also check out Lady Storyteller's Curator page [url=http://steamcommunity.com/groups/ladystoryteller#curation]here[/url] - follow for regular updates on reviews for other games!