Review of Moebius: Empire Rising by giom

In term of graphics, the background art ranges from good enough to great. I was running under the best settings at my computer’s native resolution fo 2880x1800. With those settings, I didn’t see any issue with pixelization of backgrounds. When I first played it on my Mac using the mac build, it was a bit slow but then switched to Parallels and it ran smoothly. So there might be optimization issues with the mac build.

The character models and animation are strange and I think it might bother some. A lot of the character’s proportion’s don’t really look human and together with the poor animation, it sometimes feels creepy and alien. I think the biggest issue was during the first three chapters (with the meeting between Walker and Gretchen being the most unintentionally creepy).

I don’t mind cheaper and simpler animations but in this case it’s the combination of weird shoulder position, teeth that are strange and weird animation that makes it feel a bit creepy and in the uncanny valley. There’s an improvement as the game progress and I was not bothered by this in the later chapters

One other criticism I had in term of art assets, is the lack of attention to linguistic details. The letter in French that is shown in paris is wrong (it looks like it was machine translation). MoP mentioned a similar issue with the Arabic script and some of the history snippets in the mini games are not completely accurate (for example Cleopatra marrying Julius Caesar). I feel that one of the strength of the kickstarter model is the community and maybe it would be a good idea to try and take advantage of that. They could give part of the text of those assets to the fans and have them look for and correct inaccuracies like this. It would make fans happy to contribute and result in a better game.

The music, as expected, ranged from good to great. I’ve noticed the music much more than in BS5 or Broken Age, and I really enjoyed it.

The story was gripping but did need a bit of suspension of disbelief, at least more so than Gabriel Knight. A lot of the original premises (the moebius theory) is a bit silly, but, once you go along with it, it’s a nice ride and I wanted to know how it would end. I do wish that there would have been more development on the theory explaining it with examples and how it manifests itself in more details. I would have also liked the villain to be a bit more defined, but, at least compared to a lot of stories, he’s got rational reasons to do what he’s doing.

The puzzles were mostly on the easy side, I didn’t mind having to go back to pick up items, since I feel that it’s reasonable not to start carrying an empty bottle of oil without a reason to do so. The fact that there was a map and that double clicking teleports malachi to a location made this not too frustrating.

I also liked the deduction mini games but feel that something could have been done to make them more interactive… Maybe with the probabilities that are shown when Malachi make deductions during the cut scenes.

The game was a bit buggy, it crashed every time I saved a game (but the save game went through) and I had the bug with Dominique

Overall, I’d give it a 3.5, I might actually have given it more if it were not for my original expectations coming into the game. I was expecting a lot from Jane Jensen and was a little disappointed.

I will anyway back a second kickstarter from Pinkerton Road and I hope it sells well so that she can get back into the game. Moebius is not the masterpiece I expected but it’s a step along the path.