Esoterica America - Indie Game Review

PROS 

• Alright Story
• Has Voice Acting
• Fun Mini-Game

CONS 

• Bad Movement
• Repetative Gameplay
• Pointless "Meditation" Game
• No Actual Story
• Short

Esoterica America is…well I’m not exactly sure how to describe it.  I’m going to go with story based puzzle game.  The game starts out alright by simply giving you a gist of the story with voice acting and still pictures, not the best way to introduce the story, though not the worst.  Then it throws you into the game on the characters 21^st birthday.  But from the start I noticed some problems.

First, the movement is very clunky and can be a pain sometimes.  The moving animation looks bad and navigation is a pain and the angled viewpoint doesn’t help.  Now it would be okay if that was the game’s only problem, but it’s not.  The game is very, very linear.  It allows you to examine items in the world, but there are only about 4 items that you can actually examine.  Beyond that the game just plays out in a very linear way of “Talk to this person, go do that puzzle, go somewhere else, repeat”.  Honestly, the whole game plays out like that.

The game tries to mix it up by adding this meditation mini game which is just flying around and hitting the right controller button color to match any flying objects around you, yes, it is as boring as it sounds.  Frankly it is pretty pointless, I’m assuming they either wanted to try and mix things up (if so, they failed) or try to make their very short game seem slightly longer.  Also, did I mention the game is about 30 minutes or less of “Talk to this person, do that puzzle, etc. etc. etc.” and apparently that was just episode 1.  It probably would have worked much more in their favor to take more time to make the whole story one game, and make the game better in aspects of presentation, gameplay, and polish.

As far as “fun” is concerned, you probably won’t have any.  I was so bored I played through the game while surfing the internet, there is pretty much no actual gameplay, and it is a pretty boring game.  I had more fun playing their mini-game in which you are a stoned hippy shooting at planes and helicopters with dual pistols.

Now, I have to give the game credit, it does have voice acting which I wouldn’t say is good, but it’s not bad, which is usually hard to find in Indie Games.  But, only certain parts of the game are voiced, and it seems completely random which conversations are actually voiced, which is an annoyance.  Also, another annoyance I found was that when watching a voiced conversation/cut scene, you can’t skip that line of dialog, if you, say, read the subtitles, you can only skip the whole conversation.  As far as the story goes, it holds up but the game just doesn’t do a good job of explaining it, ultimately, stay away from this game.