Encodya Review
In a city known as Neo Berlin in the year 2062 a young girl named Tina and her companion robot, SAM-53, are just trying to stay alive by staying off police radar and making use of whatever they can get their hands on. Then what was supposed to be just an average day everything changes, and this is where the game truly starts. Encodya is a point click adventure game created by Chaosmonger Studio.
You will have to solve a truly unexpected mystery utilizing both characters. There are objectives, objects, and characters that only one of the characters can interact with. Most of the game will have you moving around Neo Berlin slowly opening new areas as the game progresses. You will find that one of the most difficult parts of the game isn’t the puzzles that present themselves throughout the game, but actually finding items that you’ll need to use. Through most of the game I was left slowly moving my cursor, sweeping an entire area to make sure I wasn’t missing an object that could help move the story along. Speaking of items there are some intuitive leaps you’re going to have to take when it comes to combining objects to get past a puzzle. These two pieces made some of the game very tedious as I was left clueless as to what I needed to do next.
Don’t get me wrong this game has a great story, and I’m not going to lie, I got a little choked up in the end, it was the ending I was secretly hoping for. I enjoyed the characters I got to interact throughout the game. The art was gorgeous. It took me just over 9 hours to complete the game, I have a feeling that if I didn’t have to randomly walk through areas over and over again to try to figure out what to do next, this game is probably 4 hours in length. That’s still a good length for this type of game, it’s just frustrating that I spent over 4 hours being lost.
I’m going to be brutally honest, I don’t know if I can recommend this game, it feels like it could have really benefited from the ability to hit a button to reveal all the interactive objects in an area, an indicator of if there was more to the area than what was currently on the screen (and in what direction that was), and a more fleshed out hint system (you get one hint and even if that still keeps you completely in the dark then your just SOL).