A New Beginning tries to share a positive message about climate change, our future, and our resistance to change, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. The game is not terrible: it has its good points, and if you've ever wanted to play a dimwitted token female with a seemingly quite severe case of scoliosis who wears a sweater that covers only her boobs, then this definitely is your game.

Pros:
+Good message
+The art is quite nice
+The ruined future setting that occurs near the start of the game is very compelling
+The support team answered my emails quickly and were very helpful when I encountered a game-breaking bug

Cons:
-The English voice acting is atrocious. If you want to play the game, set the sound the German with English subtitles - the German voice acting isn't too bad.
-The English translation is not very good. There are a lot of grammatical errors and problems with colloquialisms that really should have been caught by a native English speaking proofreader before the game was published.
-There are a lot of bugs. Mainly I encountered translation bugs: various items popping up in Russian or Spanish. I also found a game-breaking bug, however, which required a replacement save file from the support team to get past.
-Everyone moves so slowly that I found myself screaming at the monitor a few times. Quickly, we must hit that switch before the facility explodes! Now, let me just take a leisurely stroll across the room. Wouldn't want to work up a sweat.
-The game is extremely resource-heavy, and I can't figure out why. My computer heats up while running this game as much as it does while playing a modern shooter.
-Many of the puzzles are absurd. Several of them require knowledge that the average person just wouldn't have. I needed a walkthrough to get through most of it, and many times I realized I would never in a million years have thought to try the thing that ended up being necessary. There's also a fair amount of pixel-hunting for tiny items that blend in.
-Between the slow movement speed of the characters and the seemingly never-ending cutscenes and dialog, by the time I was 1/3 of the way through the game I just wanted it to end.
-The ending isn't nearly as clever as it's trying to be, and felt rather anti-climactic after all those hours of listening to people talk and watching them crawl across the screen to the sound of suspenseful music.

If you can get the game cheap, enjoy ridiculous puzzles, and have a lot of patience for slow movement and long cutscenes, then feel free to give this one a try. If you're used a faster pace or just want something you feel you can solve without a walkthrough, I'd pass this one over.

Classic point & click game with an interesting thriller/sci-fi story. It's also a pretty big game, it took me around 9-10 hours to complete it. The problem-solving in the game can be solved with mostly logical thinking, but there might be some puzzles and problems that seem a bit out there - not Lucas Arts out there if you know what I mean.

The only thing that drags it down is the terrible English voice-acting (the voice-acting might be better in another language though). The lead female sounds like a robot from time to time. The story also gets a bit weird and "jumpy" at the end.

But still. I would recommend the game. It's a fun sci-fi thriller with a message.

Daedalic Entertainment is a German developer specialised in point-and-click video games. I started playing A New Beginning right after I finished Gemini Rue from Wadjet Eye Games. It was a nice transition since both are point-and-click games; Daedalic, however, employs hand-drawn graphics as opposed to Wadjet's pixelated approach.

We have two protagonists in this game. Bent is an inventor - he invented a new type of fuel. His blue algae can be used as a new alternative resource, however, he is not taken seriously. He enjoys his retirement (while his son continues his research) in a secluded area in Norway when a helicopter lands near his home. Fay, our 2nd playable character, claims to be a time traveller from the future who tells Bent how mankind destroyed its world by messing with the climate. In order to reverse the process his blue algae can be useful but they must act quickly otherwise mankind will be doomed by 2050.

We control either Bent or Fay (depending on where we are in the story) throughout 8 chapters (plus a prologue). The game looks great and regular cutscenes (in the form of comic book like storytelling) make the immersion better. I have to admit I really liked the game's soundtrack which often changes once you go to another screen. The journey also has an acceptable length as 10 hours or so will be needed to see our heroes' journey till the very end. Since the game is linear and there are no areas where choices are offered a walkthrough pretty much means no replayability here.

I thoroughly enjoyed the game from start to finish. I only had 2 annoying bits with it - first, there are some typos here and there and sometimes for an action we would like to carry out only the French, Spanish or Russian name pops up (e.g. you'd like to "look at" a window and the action is described as "examina"). The other part adds to the difficulty - it is not always obvious what you need to do. But this was the case with LucasArts games, too. I still remember picking up a dog with Guybrush Threepwood in Monkey Island who casually noted how big his pockets were. Here the issue is with mainly not knowing how to combine and use some items which would probably be obvious for a scientist or an engineer. A "hint" option as an aid would have been useful.

I recommend this game to the fans of the point-and-click genre. It might add to the experience if you are someone who likes games where contemporary issues are dealt with such as global warming in this case.

"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.

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So, i read the reviews on here. Everyone is going on about bad voice acting. Blah, blah. Really ? Ok, so let me help you if you are interested in this. Buy it. Play and finish it. This game is worth your money and your time. That is the bottom line. I loved the subject matter, and the game made me feel a sense of loss when i finished playing it as i grew close to the characters. Thus, it has a great story and great characters. Could the voice acting have been better ? Sure. But i played this for the adventure. There is a message here in this game, and i feel it is a good and honest message. Look after our planet and our children will have a place to live. It creates a sense of loss and longing as it shows you what could happen if we dont change our ways. It was a really great thought provoking graphic novel. And it will stick in my head for a long time to come. The puzzles are good, i could solve some of them quite easy. They are challenging, but not impossible at all. This game has a lot of emotion in it, It made me think back to old adventure games in the 80s. It has some great level design and locations.I love the art style and the color palette because it fits the game perfectly, creating the right mood. Helping to create a world that pulls you in and keeps you there. Everything compliments each other well, and creates the Ambience tied together with a great musical score. I really would like a sequel to the game, and would buy it for sure.

It's a neat game that I would say. The message that game tries to convey is pretty great and so far this is one of the point and click adventure with a different genre - "eco triller". Let's take a look at the pros and cons of the game and my verdict

Pros
1. I really love the comic book style , it reminds me of XIII . Superb , something which was not done in this genre
2. The game's humour is great as pointed out by someone in the review , you'll have some good laughs every now and then
3. The length of game is long , it took me about 12 hours to complete it. It's not short , there are lots of things to explore
4. The ending is superb
5. Good price point (buy it during sales as it is worth it)
6. The ability to skip puzzles

Now there are some serious flaws in this game as well which sort of ruins the whole gameplay experience

Cons
1. Could not understand some puzzles at all . Some of it I was totally lost. It was nice to have the skip button but I am a kind of person that wants to finish puzzle.

2. The whle 4:3 resolution , it is very bad if you have a huge screen , this makes it annoying finding things. I did not know about the space bar feature to reveal all the clickable items , I had a hard time finding some of the pixels. I am guessing this is because of the hand-drawn graphics and such

3. Spelling errors and gramamatical errors - There is a lot of the game. Some of the options are in another language such as in Russian or Greek. I do hope that the developers did put some effort at least in ensuring that these are ironed out. English is not my primary language but even I could see the errors that they make.

4. Subpar voice acting , I felt the voice actors lacked of emotion especially in certain parts/events of the game. They just sounded bland , lacked of soul and depth

Verdict
Just grab this game if it goes on sale , and if you are an adventure fan who is into a totally new genre of story (not the typical ones you woul expect !). Despite the drawbacks , it is still a good game to play. You'll have to give credits to the details esepcially the backdrops and sch

One of my first computers games was Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and that game set me along life with a love of point 'n' click adventure games. I've played them all by now, but like a good addict, I am still trying to find the one that will give me an experience like playing Kings Quest VI, Day of the Tentacle, or Sam and Max: Hit the Road again for the first time. "A New Beginning" does not do the trick, but it is a good start for a genre that has seem some revitalization in the past few years.

The Good:

* Although it may be odd to say this, I really love the menu UIs in this game. They're unique and very fitting for a game that has comic-book style cutscenes.

* While many point 'n' click adventure games suffer from "find the pixel" syndrome, A New Beginning ends this frustration by letting the player highlight every point of interest on the screen by holding down the space bar. This might be a negative if you're a hardcore player, I suppose.

* I see people complaining about the game's length on the internet (they think it's too short). This game is long! I felt the game was about to end while I played chapter 6, and compared its length to Day of the Tentacle. Little did I realize the game was far from over and there were actually 8 chapters!

* Puzzles are straight-forward - there are no ridiculous puzzles and I only resorted to the "try every item on every item" strategy once or twice. That being said, this game is slightly easier than every other point and click adventure game I have played in recent memory. The easiness is due largely to the generous verbal clues. A guy says "I can't hear?" Try the megaphone. Your character says "not with my bare hands?" Try using an item. If you play the first three chapters thinking the game is a walk in the park, though, just wait until the later chapters - it gets much more difficult!

* Although it is now pretty much standard for the genre, I do appreciate the fact that there is no way to "screw up" and ruin your game by using the wrong item somewhere, or by dying.

* The game's humor, although used much too infrequently, is top-notch and intelligent.

* The ending is really, really, really good. I won't spoil it for you, but if you didn't enjoy the game, the ending might make it pay off for you.

* Goes for as little as $2.49 during Steam sales.

The Bad:

* Some puzzles are a bit weird. I thought I had assembled an antenna, but could not figure out why the game would not let me progress further despite having used all parts in all possible configurations. I used the handy "solve puzzle" feature and learned that I had only built about half of the antenna, somehow. With no way to go back and solve the puzzle legitimately, I shrugged and moved on.

* Because of its hand-drawn graphics, the game only runs in a 4:3 aspect ratio.

* No pause feature that I could find - I missed two semi-important cutscenes because I accidentally pressed escape, thinking it might pause the dialogue.

* There are a large number of bug reports on the Steam Forums. The only bug I encountered was an item (a valve on an oil rig) that was not highlighted when I pressed space, and would not let me interact with it until I got very close to it. I encountered the same bug later with a receptionist at the power plant.

The Ugly:

* Frequent grammar and spelling errors, and most of the dialogue is quite awkward. Although the voice-acting is remarkably bad, the voice artists honestly didn't have much to work with: awkward sentence constructions, phrases that should have been abbreviated, etc. At one infuriating point in the game, there is a puzzle having to do with language in Chapter 4, but the solution makes little to no sense in English. I stumbled upon the correct solution by accident. Some words in the game were never translated to English at all, or were incorrectly translated to Russian or Spanish. The developers could certainly have done a bit better with localization for the English version.

The Verdict:

Give this one a play if you are into point 'n' click adventure games. It is not as good as Daedelic's other big game, "Deponia," but still a solid game and avoids some of the mistakes that Deponia made. I would definitely recommend anyone to at least give it a try if you see it on sale for $5 or less.

It kills me to have to write a negative review on a point n click game as they are so rare but here I have no choice. The list of cons is so long I have to.

CONS
- Only made 7 years ago but it feels and looks like it was made in the early 90s.
- No widescreen, black bars down the side of my screen
- Dreadful voice acting. Not just bad inclination but somehow actual bad acting. ie actor 1 stops half way through sentence waiting to be interrupted but actor 2 waits a significant time before supposedly interrupting.
- Fay one of two playable characters just looks permanently grumpy I actually wanted her to be killed off along with most other characters.
-And the biggest con was HOW the story was done. It took an interesting idea; time travel to prevent a catastrophe due to climate change but because of the heavyhanded approach to the story I felt I was being thumped on the head by an extreme environmentalist at the same time listening to a boring lecture on the subject instead of playing a game. The problem with crusaders of any kind is that they have zero humour and manage to not only suck any joy of anything they touch but actively put you off any interest you had in the subject.

Usually daedalic games aren't written by people like that and have multi subject threads in a story to keep it interesting. Even games that are dark or serious, if they are good have either fun gameplay or characters done in a way to keep your interest or humour in certain parts of a game. If only they hadn't been so heavy-handed or had more than one subject that the conversation revolved around this could and should have been easily an interesting gripping story.

Although I felt all joy being sucked out of everything including gameplay, most gameplay was technically good it just felt leaden. It was this devs usual gameplay, not obvious in parts a lot of exploration more old fashioned point n click gameplay. They had some mini games which were either not easy or not quick.

I had played most of this before at GOG (hence short time here) but couldn't finish it due to cons so picked this up in steam sale as it had achs and it was only that that kept me playing this time. But at least this time I knew to mute sound, and just FF speed reading all the lectures. I wanted to see if it got better and it did about 3/4 way through, the lectures mostly stopped. I don't do real spoilers ever on plot or story but if you don't want to know anything about the end then don't read the following spoiler although it is more my general feeling on the writing. I did feel the writer wanted you to feel some sympathy towards the bad person at end for you to get the point, I did get the impression that the writer was that extreme or had sympathies towards those that do.

It was so close to being good and could easily have been if above points were addressed, that is what is frustrating about this game. More storylines, better more balanced writer and editor it could have been good. If you don't mind being lectured at, can FF the dialogue, play on mute and like harder games to work out then I think you could enjoy this (if you also are tolerant at what people come up re science in games) if not then I'd pass on this one. Just lacked the fun/enjoyment factor for me.

Ginger’s Games Curator page

Overall - lacking.
The graphics are pleasing enough, and the music is nice. That said, the English voice acting is simply atrocious. A reader program is better to listen to, the intonation has nothing to do with the emotional content of the dialogue, and sometimes it's just plain wrong for English.
Oh, and the character design. Why does Fay have a uniform including a sweater that ends under her boobs? And does she have a back problem? She stands and walks with her spine bent in a highly unnatural shape, which is just painful to look at.
The characters themselves are also shallow, and even though in some reviews I've read about 'character development', that mostly means that they grow from one-dimensional to maybe two. And that's for the protagonists. About one of the main supporting characters, Duve, all I got to know was that a: he's upset with his father (understandably) for sacrificing their family for his work, yet b: he continues his father's work out of some sort of duty perhaps, though he claims to hate it, and c: he's gay. The latter had nothing whatsoever to do with anything, apart from mentioning that Bent "would have been okay with it", and providing a clue for solving a puzzle. Talk about token minority.
The plot seemed forced sometimes, and after the final plot twist, had motivation issues at some points in retrospect. All-in-all, it felt rather forced and didactic, and the conclusion really didn't make much sense to me.
Certainly not a game I will ever play again, and not one I could recommend, as much as I'd like to promote eco-conscious games. Only reason I played it through was that I hoped for satisfactory ending. I didn't get it.

A New Beginning is a time-travel Point & Click Adventure game. While it opens in the distant future, most of the game is played in the more recent past. The game has a heavy political focus on climate change and conservation, but I think it fits it well into its narrative while maintaining a fun game environment.

The story is another post-apocalyptic disaster, this time, focusing on humanity’s inability or unwillingness to stop climate change, which leaves the future with a devastated planet that is about to be wiped out by a solar flare. In the future a team team is sent back to the past to bring about change to save the planet. You play alternately as two protagonists, Dr. Bent Svenson and Fay. Bent is a retired scientist who had been working on a sustainable energy source. He’s bitter and disillusioned over the slow progress of his life’s work and the sacrifices he made for his research. Our other protagonist Fay is optimistic and a bit naïve, but truly believes they can save the world. Overall, the story does sometimes feel a little preachy about the environment and climate change, but it is a pretty big element of the story and the motivation for the characters, so it makes sense in the context of the story.

I did enjoy seeing that there was some character development throughout the story even if they way they developed seemed pretty predictable. Like the characters themselves, the story too had a lot of predictability and it was of course filled with some pretty common time travel tropes. That didn’t mean it wasn’t still enjoyable, though, and it was interesting to see the characters as they developed some of the realizations of their roles in those tropes. Unfortunately, they only come to those realizations towards the end of the game.

Visually, I really enjoyed the game. The characters are done in a 2D hand-drawn style that looks like an animated graphic novel. They carry the graphic novel theme though to all of the menus, intro, and cutscenes featuring comic layouts, speech bubbles, and minimal animation. All of the sprites are well-drawn and remain consistent throughout the game, and they all have been really well animated except perhaps a running scene towards the end. The characters' walk paths are smooth and logical and they don’t seem to get stuck anywhere. The backgrounds were all done really well and quite detailed.

The soundtrack for the game fits the moods and tones of the game very well. I liked that it gives the option to adjust voice, music, and sound FX separately. You can also choose to have captions on or off. The voices were all professionally recorded and there were no noticeable pops or breaths, the sound was even and consistent. However, the voice acting is a little odd and sounds too artificial. Fay often sounds as if she’s being voiced by Amazon’s Alexa. Bent isn’t much better, though he sounds like an actual human being more often than Fay. It’s not that the voice acting is terrible and it certainly isn’t unbearable to play through, but it does strike me as odd every time I hear them talking in this artificial sounding way. There were one or two times I noticed the voice was correctly done in English but the text on the screen was not and was probably German.

I did encounter a sound issue where mid-game, all of the sudden, I had no sound of any sort. I had not done anything unusual and had just left clicked a dialogue to advance it. I checked the game's menu and all the sliders were at zero so I brought them back up. Nothing had changed so I saved and exited the game and restarted but there was still no sound. I checked my computer and the sound was fine so I opened up the Visionaire Configuration Tool (you can choose it at startup instead of opening the game) and somehow the master volume had been set to 0. I put it back up at 100 and it solved the problem. I still have no idea why mid-game it suddenly got set to zero.

The UI is pretty standard, especially among Daedalic’s earlier Point & Click adventure games. It’s one of my least favorite styles, though. You left-click to move, right-click to bring up your inventory, and have to hold the left button down for a moment to pop up your available interactions at a given hotspot. The interactions will usually be pretty standard, like look, pick-up, move, touch but sometimes involve an interaction like connect where you then pick up part of the object and have the option to use it with something else nearby in the environment. You can combine items in your inventory as well as look at them and open/search them among a few other occasional options. I did notice that in the latter half of the game there were several times where the menu options had not been translated to English and appeared in what I assume is German or maybe Russian. It’s not hard to figure out those basic options are still something like “look,” but it might throw some for a loop.

Personally, I found the system difficult to use well and often found the options tricky to pop up, or they would disappear before I could select something. I also had times where the menu would seem to get stuck and you couldn’t quite get the mouse to move over an option. Most of the time hitting the escape button would free me from the frozen option or dialogue menu, but sometimes I only got out of it because I could utilize my touchscreen interface to select the option.

The game does, unfortunately, have quite a bit of pixel hunting involved. You can press the spacebar to highlight all available interactive hotspots, but they can be hard to notice if you are standing in front of the hotspot. Additionally, you often need to revisit hotspots as they may not have all their available interactions enabled yet. Many of the ways in which you use the objects or combine them are fairly logical, but there are a fair number of times when you will encounter “moon logic” in this game. Some of the answers to solutions or even some of the mini-games are pretty frustrating in that sense. Most of the game plays through pretty well without the need for a walkthrough, but I found myself needing one twice for difficult to find items that I didn’t pixel hunt well enough for, and once for one of the mini-games that I just could not figure out what I was supposed to be doing.

I appreciated the variety and quantity of achievements in this game. There are 28 total and 12 are story unlocked. 6 are related to minigames and the remaining 10 are achieved either through various optional interactions or by trying all the available options. 4 of the achievements are related to a choice, so you cannot get all of the achievements in one playthrough unless you use strategic saving. All of the achievements are reasonably easy to get though.

Overall, I enjoyed the game despite its flaws and would recommend it to other experienced Point & Click aficionados. I would caution those who are new to the genre to try other Point & Click games before trying this one as some of the more negative aspects of this game may turn them off from the entire genre. I did experience an odd thing where even though I exited the game and couldn’t find it in my processes list steam wouldn’t recognize that the game had closed. This caused my playtime to be quite a bit higher than it actually was. Based on when achievements unlocked for me and on the times which I recall being active, I believe this game probably has a playtime of 10-12 hours for more experienced players and probably 15+ for those with less experience. At the full price that makes this $1 or less per hour of gameplay which I think is a good deal for what you get out of it.