Moebius: Empire Rising is a (relatively) new adventure game by Jane Jensen. If you've played Jensen's previous games (e.g. Gabriel Knight, Gray Matter), then you might have certain (high) expectations.

If you are a Jane Jensen fan, you probably won't be (too) disappointed. Her signature strengths are mostly here. The game has many flaws, but they will likely be tolerated by most.

Additionally, if you are a Sherlock Holmes fan, you are even more likely to appreciate this, as there are numerous similarities (e.g. likable antisocial lead with high intelligence and observational prowess, awkward bromance with sidekick).

If you are unfamiliar with Jane Jensen but like adventure games, then (assuming you even exist) this might not be the best place to start unless you can get it cheap. Also, you should be aware that this, like other Jensen stories, are, uh, somewhat "metaphysical" in nature. If you need a game to be squarely constrained by generally accepted physical laws of reality, then you might want to pass on this.

GOOD
* Good writing
* Clever blend of real and fake history and current events
* Great voice acting
* Good music (though seems a bit inappropriate at times to me)
* Great concept
* Good story
* (mostly) Good art (somewhat inconsistent)
* Interesting 'analysis' puzzle concepts (but, can be frustrating sometimes)

NEUTRAL
* Old school point system
* Mostly easy and straightforward, but some rough points
* Mostly unoriginal puzzles
* Hotkey to reveal interactive objects in scenes (except in the maze at the end) with intuitive radial interface
* Hint system exists, but I haven't tried it
* Low budget CG cutscenes, 3D models
* Many "missable" achievements

BAD
* Weak, inconsistent writing in places
* Some terrible animations (e.g. Malachi's walking)
* Needlessly frustrating maze puzzle at the end
* Glitchy scripting, including some game breaking bugs (save often!)
* Some interface glitches
* Aforementioned bugs have gone unresolved for over a year, new bugs were added with post-release updates
* At least one broken achievement

Parting thought - I can't help feel that this could have been a much better game. But, I enjoyed it. There is also hope for the future as this seems quite open for additional titles in a series (though this title is quite self-contained).

Disclosure: I received a copy of this game as a gift from a friend (thanks!)

Moebius is not as bad some of the reviews say but it’s not that good either, it’s a bog-standard adventure game that does very little to make itself memorable. It’s a real disappointment considering this is Jane Jensen’s newest game. Jensen’s previous games, the Gabriel Knight series and the more recent Gray Matter, were quality written games with likable characters that got you immersed in the games and their stories and are some of the best adventure games around. Moebius is not this, while the basic plot is interesting enough at first the main characters are really bland and the side characters are all horrible people but not in an interesting way. The puzzles are alright for the most part, but the last section of the game is a terrible slog of padding and occasional trial and error puzzles. The graphics aren’t good, but they were on a budget so I can easily forgive it. I didn’t run into any glitches so it’s solidly designed in that regard.

Ultimately I don’t really regret buying it, but I wouldn’t recommend it. There are more than enough recent adventure games that are far better that you could play instead. (Broken Age, the Blackwell Series, Kentucky Route Zero, Gone Home, Walking Dead, and Wolf Among Us just to name a few) Not to mention that you’re also better off playing the Gabriel Knights and Gray Matter, the former you can buy on GOG, the latter on both GOG and Steam. You can do a lot worse when it comes to adventure games so I would only suggest getting this game if you’re really hurting for adventure games and it’s on sale for cheap. Overall though Moebius is just really mediocre and easily forgettable; for the average person I’d say skip it.

A game where pretty much everything went wrong.

It's impossible to discuss Moebius without sounding cruel, but they say honesty is its own reward, so here we go.

First of all, the game is hideous. Not just "not very pretty", not "outdated", but positively hideous. The kitschy 2D art is sort of acceptable if you close one eye; the poor 3D models and inexplicably terrible animations, however, are not. Either the artists are aliens who never saw a real human being, or they are simply people stuck doing a job they have absolutely no talent for. The ugliness permeating the game is unbearable.

But okay, looks aren't everything; let's be mature and look past that. How does it play? Well, badly. Everything is stilted, unresponsive and seems to be plodding through a thick layer of mud; even the simplest actions take half an eternity punctuated by random pauses. And speaking of actions, let's discuss puzzles. By and large, they are oversimplified to a point that's almost insulting, and yet still manage to make little to no sense:
1. There is an object lying in the corner of a dark alley. Malachi will happily come right next to it, but won't pick it up, because it's too dark, and you need to fix a streetlamp first. It's a brick.
2. A cut lanyard is fixed with superglue. Lanyard. Superglue. Seriously.
A bizarre addition to the traditional formula is that Malachi won’t pick up objects until he knows where he’d like to use them, with precisely one result: backtracking guaranteed, which really doesn’t play nice with the lumbering pace of it all. And dear lord, the whole thing ends with an honest to goodness maze. In an adventure game. I thought the nineties taught us never to do that again, but apparently I was mistaken. So. Dull.

But alright, alright, who cares about puzzles. Characters and story, that's what adventure games are all about! – Well, that is the worst thing. When I first learned what the overreaching plot was, I burst out laughing. Not because it is particularly funny, but because it is absolutely ludicrous. Sure, Gabriel Knight 3 and Gray Matter got sort of silly towards the end, but Moebius gets to that point about one third in and never stops going until it dissolves in a raging torrent of crazy (and painfully sexist to boot). And as far as characters are concerned, while I sort of want to appreciate the romance angle that’s going on in here, everyone in the game is so very wooden, whether it’s talking about the models, voice acting or writing, that it’s like watching two robots trying to learn what this “emotions” thing was all about. And failing, just like everything else in Moebius is wont to do.

Oh, well. I backed this on Kickstarter; clearly, nobody's perfect.

EDITED A FEW YEARS LATER: I was randomly rereading my old reviews and while I still mosty stand behind this one, the personal attack was mean and uncalled for. I considered editing it out, but then decided against it. But I do wish to say that I regret it and that I belatedly apologise.

Jane Jensen is a master not just with intelligent plotlines (which sadly is rare in adventure games) but is also the master of storytelling and editing. Giving succinct but a lot of valuable information in various ways as to never be boring and, if you are like me, learn a lot while having a heap of fun at the same time.

The storyline background was art history and the unfolding plot was about Moebius Theory (there are the same patterns throughout history, everything repeats itself)

Your character is an antiques dealer who becomes involved with an organisation that wants his insight into a few people. You investigate each character which have information points, once you collect all the points you solve a puzzle by comparing these character's facts with historical figures. Along the way, we see how the Moebius Theory unfolds through him personally and the people he is investigating.

Each chapter is usually in a different country, but with only about 2-3 places to visit in each country, you don't get lost and it is very easy to go back and forth via a map if you miss something, thus minimising or eliminating the need for hints (which this game does have) or a walkthrough. There are a few puzzles but even with the obligatory maze at the end there are logical clues.

Glitches in the achievements have been fixed, they all now work.

Now to the not so great:
- Artwork - sometimes is in the just OK range
- The multi-step inventory, I could have done without the 'envelope' icon and just use the interactive icon when I wanted to use an item.
- Main character is plain 'I want to bonk him in the head' annoying.

He does improve a bit as gameplay progresses but not quickly enough to care about what happens to him till near the end, where there is a redeemable characteristic. In Gabriel Knight the main character was a sexist pig at times but he also was a lovable rogue. Sherlock Holmes was very loyal and really nice to people he found interesting. House M.D over time, was very loyal and cared in his own way to people in his life. This game isn't long enough to develop a "House" type character.

Overall I loved it, preferring the storyline and plot over GK and Grey Matter. Maybe if Jensen had more unlimited funding it would have been a longer more involved game in every way than GK and even Contradiction. But, it's still a really good game, good puzzles, great plot, dialogue and well worth playing. I really recommend it.

Moebius is an entertaining and decently good point n' click game that lacks a lot of polish. Jane Jensen's story is bit silly but interesting. Robert Holme's music is fantastic but bit repeatitive. The gameplay is little bit disappointing because of the narrow amount of choises you can make. Moebius feels like a simplified and slightly modernized version of those 90s point n' click adventure games that we all grew up with. The length of the game is around 10 to 15 hours for an average player.

I liked the characters in the game and I liked the story. Althought I do have to write that Jane Jensen in past has written better material than this. There're issues with the narrative that feel stupid after you've played the game though. And even during the game you occasionally wonder why certain things had to be done in a particular way.

Moebius is a fairly basic point n' click game that doesn't do anything particularly well or bad. It's like it was made following a googled tutorial on how to make a point n' click adventure game. It doesn't add anything new or even try to challenge the existing concepts.

Most of the puzzles in Moebius are fairly easy to figure out. There's usually only one route to take to a puzzle and only one solution for that puzzle exists. Sometimes the solution is rather unrealistic. To avoid making Moebius a "hidden object" game and to add some realism into it the game doesn't allow you to pick up items or go to some places until the need to do so arises. That leads to an issue where you need to remember place of certain items you previously couldn't pick up. Occasionally there are more challenging puzzles that are well written. The main character also has infinite pockets to stuff things to which I thought was amusing.

Towards the ending of the Moebius started to fell apart. For example (without spoiling anything) the player needs to fly from Washington to New York to pick alcohol from a bar the main character has contantly refused to enter into any given point of time during the game. There's nothing indicating you need to do so. I don't even understand why there couldn't be alcohol store at Washington player could enter. This is done so because main character thought that the antique item in his shop he saw earlier would still be there and that he needed to pick that up for a certain character. This is done based upon observation of that character's tastes. And so upon exiting antique store main character thought that he would also need to bring alcohol seeing the bar on other side of the street. That is some truly horrible game writing and game design in my opinion.

Graphics in Moebius are decent and I like the art style. But this is probably a good point to start talking about the bugs. Moebius has lots of bugs. None of those bugs break the game and they're mostly just visual annoyances. Such as main character is able to stand on certain places he isn't supposed to be able to stand. Or certain water effects are places on surfaces where they shouldn't be. Occasionally the animations have timing problems. Sometimes there are texture related issues such as really low resolution textures. None of the visual issues are dramatically bad. It's just a sign of a lack of polish in Moebius.

Music and audio is good and there are lots of nice music. However sometimes the main theme just repeats itself so much that it's the only thing you'll remember after you've played the game. This is due the fact that the main theme is also present in various tracks in a suttle ways. So even if I do like the main theme quite a bit, it became an annoyance to hear so often during the game. Sometimes there were audio tracks where the mixing had failed. Voice acting in this game is decently played out.

User Interface of the Moebius is weird but it works. There are no "verbs" which makes the game easier to play since the game always offers only the actions you can do with various points of interest. Moebius is designed towards people who have little or no experience with point n' click adventure games. The way UI has been designed and the strong hint system in this game reflects that. I also thought it was weird that the game didn't have end results screen despite counting points in a similar manner to the classic Sierra adventure games all which have the end results screen.

Technically the game works fine most of the time. But being based on top of Unity Engine has all the good things and all the issues that come with the Unity Engine. For example the game has freezing issues on certain hardware. But those can be corrected with a launch parameter. And sometimes the rendering quality is pretty bad.

To sum things up, Moebius is entertaining game which is fun to play. The story is interesting but sometimes badly written. I liked the main characters and would like to see more of their adventures in the future. Moebius as a game also severely lacks polish and fine tuning. It's worth the cost but it's not outstanding game like Gabriel Knight or Gray Matter.

I consider myself a big fan of Jane Jensen's and classical adventure games in general (as you can probably tell by my choice of the Steam avatar), but I cannot in good conscience recommend this game. It rehashes all the adventure game tropes and clichés (not in a good way) and much of the puzzle design is flawed or illogical. Most crucially, though,I found myself getting bored with the plot and couldn't care enough to keep playing. I never got to finish the game as much as I wanted to because it felt like a waste of time. It simply wasn't fun or engaging enough. In a genre of games that specializes in storytelling, I'd say that's a big minus. The characters (especially the main character Malachi Rector) are unlikeable, the dialogues are uninspired, and the animation is stilted. For the longest time, I seriously wondered to myself if the main character was supposed to be a hunchback by design because of his very unnatrual-looking posture. It turned out it was just bad character modeling. You'd think they would invest some time and effort in designing him to at least NOT look like a disabled person. He's only the protagonist of the game. That you have to stare at for the ENTIRE duration of the game.
In the meantime, I will be eagerly awaiting the arrival of GK 20th Anniversary Edition.

My verdict: 2/5

7/10
Although the puzzles were all rather easy, the story was intriguing enough to play to the end. It’s not as bad as many of the reviewers make it sound.
I want to address a few point I’ve seen in some reviews:
-This is not as good as Gabriel Knight.
Yes, we all love the GK series, but let’s not forget you had to put tape on a fence to get cat hairs to make into a moustache. Moebius is not GK, it’s different. Both have good and bad points, but it’s unfair to compare a current game with your memory of how good another game was.
-Malachi is not likeable.
He’s human. If you stopped to consider his character and what he has been through and seen, it’s easy to see how he became “not likeable.” I didn’t find this a hindrance to the game at all. More importantly, his character evolves over the course of the game, which is lacking in many games.
-Animations/graphics/character models suck.
They aren’t Final Fantasy graphics, but they serve their purpose. They’re obviously much better than GK3 graphics, and everyone loved that game. Yes, smoother graphics would’ve been nice, but it’s not game-breaking.
-The game is buggy.
There were some bugs. They recently released a patch which was supposed to fix many of them. The bugs I encountered weren’t game breaking; just skipped animations. But personally, I feel that bugs in an adventure game are less forgiving than other genres. You don’t want to feel like “maybe I can’t solve this puzzle because there’s a bug.” So minus points on this lack of polish.
Now on to the positives:
+ The story was interesting, and I liked how you had to make connections with historical people. The game (like all of Jensen’s) was well researched and I felt that I came out of the game with new ideas or thoughts, which is more than can be said of many games.
+ The puzzles were a bit on the easy side, and some were illogical (or just time wasters) but for the most part, they made sense.
I know I spent more time addressing negatives than adding positives, but overall, I thought the game was good. Not superb, but not half as bad as a lot of the reviews made it sound. There was nothing really ground-breaking with the game, but the story was strong enough to make it worth playing.

I enjoyed this game despite it's failings. For me I want an adventure to make me feel like I'm living through the interesting detailed story it's telling me and Moebius does this quite well.

Now the plot itself is a tad bit laughable but I expect adventures to have B Movie plots. The plots of the much loved Gabriel Knight 1 and 2 were also laughable and somewhat offensive. IE in GB1 the fear of a large black murderous voodoo cult where every black person in the story is involved taps into racist fears that the American population have had and yet again portrays black people in a negative light.

MILD SPOILER ALERTS: So the plot that reincarnated people of the past are 'chosen ones' and supior aristocratic blood lines wasn't one I warmed to but it worked in a B movie kind of way much like GB1 worked similarly. The way you investigate who is a re-incarnation of who is a kind of cool innovation to.

The relationship was based on BBCs Sherlock as were the 'analyse' feature where Malachi like Sherlock analyses people at first glance. The relationship between the 2 men and Malachi being a savant is clearly based on this to. The bit were our genius rewires an electrical circuit without first turning the power off wasn't thought through.

You can see it steals bits from Assassin's Creed in the way it deals with 'destiny'.

There are strong themes of sexism and mysoginy in the way women are judged throughout the story. Yes I know the writer is a woman, but sometimes women judge other women more harshly. I was also a little uneasy with the middled aged men marrying teenage girls.

The puzzles are generally logical and nowhere near as nigh on impossible as the puzzles in Gabriel Knight puzzles. I prefer this, some people prefer HARD puzzles though so if this is you maybe this isn't the game for you.

Graphically I've seen negative comments. For me I think it's a beautiful looking game but I don't play the latest games so it probably is dated, that doesn't bother me but it may bother others.

So for me it's not far off Gabriel Knight 1 in terms of quality.

So this game was developed by the same studio that worked on the excellent Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller. If you played that game, chances are you really liked it and are looking forward to this one. That's why I have to warn you that if you expect Moebius to be Erica Reed's spiritual successor, you'll be incredibly disappointed.

It pains me to see that the amazing Jane Jensen worked on Moebius. Nothing about it works. The graphics are terrible, the animations are atrocious, the conversation options are there just for the sake of you having to talk to people, and the puzzles are downright boring. There's even constant backtracking involved, which in this genre is unforgivable.

The story might seem promising at first, and sure, the deductive powers of Malachi are an interesting element, but that's about it. The more you progress, the more you realize this game is not going to take you for a fun ride. It's boring, it's painfully slow, and it ends on an anticlimactic note. Oh, Erica Reed, how I miss you!

I didn't even get a chance to finish Moebius, due to a very annoying game-breaking bug I ran into during one of the final chapters (Dominique's condo, for the record). I really wasn't motivated enough to go back to a previous save, as the mere thought of having to go through what felt like a very long, uninteresting, muddy slog all over again wasn't exactly appealing. The main issue with this game is not the ugly graphics (I really don't care much about how a game looks in terms of prettiness), nor the wooden animations (again, I couldn't care less), but the awful combination of both a poor array of very shallow puzzles and a core game mechanic which appears to be totally disrespectful of the player's time - and intelligence, if not already offended by the extreme dullness of said 'puzzles'.


Malachi is not a likeable character by any means: he's a self-centred, delicate snowflake addicted to Xanax who somehow tries to buy his way through pretty much everything, from relationships to personal health. In his twisted and convoluted world, it makes sense not being interested in politics while deliberately working for a major secretive government agency, while dealing with politicians of all sorts (but hey, he just does it for the money!), while it also makes sense jumping to odd and sometimes sexist conclusions about women, who are all depicted as either shameless gold-diggers or vain, men-hungry sluts. She's wearing a bright pink cardigan and orange lipstick? She must be desperate for a man! She's wearing thrift store clothes and listening to music from an outdated cd-player? She must be willing to flirt with some sleazy politician in exchange for a brand new ipod! Or maybe she's a retired old woman who had to sell everything to make ends meet? Well no problema signora, let's buy you an expensive necklace which looks exactly like the one you had to sell, so you'll just wear it and keep on indulging in your past memories while thinking of me as a true gentleman. The not-so-covert attempt to sneak some gay story into all of this comes out as awkward, as the numerous innuendos about Malachi's dubious sexuality when paired with his sudden attachment to the 'Warrior' David and compared with his low opinion of the rest of the human genre.

I must admit that Malachi's snark and cynical remarks, together with his funny compartmentalization of the world, are worth the occasional laugh, but most of the time he stands out as a plain hypocrite. The fact he often appears to lack any kind of basic logic to solve basic puzzles (lanyard and glue - as mentioned by someone - seriously?), while pretending to be such a brilliant Savant expert on almost everything, is not really his fault tho, isn't it?

And here's where probably the main criticism for such a badly written story must be credited to Jensen, who somehow tried to present a universe populated by horrible people (or just an America populated by snotty Newyorkers and the rest of the elitarian world filled with poncy ♥♥♥♥♥), all justified in their awfulness by this 'Moebius theory', which links all of these ♥♥♥♥♥ together in some mystical pre-destined magical chain of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, bound to repeat forever and ever.

However, plot and characters aside, the worst part is the above mentioned core mechanic: the game expects you to move (very slowly) back and forth through locations in order to retrieve items which are essential for the progress of the story; too bad these are often objects you already noticed somewhere but were prevented from picking up (Malachi will say he doesn't need them 'now'). This translates into a lot of backtracking, and into a lot of not-fun time. In some cases, items that weren't there previously will appear out of thin air after you exhausted all of the possible locations where they could possibly be found (like when Malachi needs 'something to illuminate the Catacombs', and suddenly a lantern appears in Le Chateau Campagne). Not to mention that very annoying instance where you have to climb a rope in Malachi's apartment to reach a balcony, and you're greeted by a very tedious mini pseudo-QTE thing, which was totally out of character and unpleasantly unexpected, for how the game instructed you on game interactions thus far. Puzzles are generally very simple and don't require this fantastic amount of thinking, some other times they're just absurd. The bug I encountered toward the end of the game occured becuase I failed to complete some actions (read: provide Dominique with all the goodies she wanted from me) in a very specific order - and I wonder what could have happened had I inadvertently chosen to follow a similar 'wrong order' in the previous chapters.

As much as I appreciated Jensen's previous works, I cannot really recommend this one, as it's definitively sub-par.