Adventure Gamers - Forums

Hello everyone,

We want to share important information about our current release, Tintin Reporter - Cigars of the Pharaoh.

Despite our best efforts, those who play the game at launch won’t be able to enjoy the experience as we intended it to be.

We are committed to fixing this situation in a promptly manner: we will deliver the necessary patches in the coming weeks while keeping our channels at your disposal for any issue you want to report to us directly.

This is our most ambitious project ever, and we’re putting our heart into it. We are devoted to paying the best tribute to the famous reporter and delighting you as a player, and we won’t stop until we reach our goal.

Thank you for your support and patience.

PENDULO STUDIOS

It’s going to be rubbish.
But please buy anyway.

Shameless developers #5344 ...

walas74 - 07 November 2023 10:10 AM

It hurts me because Pendulo was the first Spanish developer of an adventure game, and they managed to survive all these years. But it seems to me that working with Microids wasn’t such a good idea. Or maybe they weren’t ready for new technologies of games programming.

Really, they couldn’t wait until December for the release? Didn’t they learn anything from Blacksad: Under the Skin release?

They probably had to become Microids’ tool in order to survive. Agree that it had been better for us gamers if they had stayed independent. Really hope they sort the Tintin game out soon and I wish the team the best. Judging from comments on Steam the game seems to be more or less in a beta state right now.

walas74 - 07 November 2023 10:10 AM

It hurts me because Pendulo was the first Spanish developer of an adventure game, and they managed to survive all these years. But it seems to me that working with Microids wasn’t such a good idea.

Well, Microids has one of the strongest adventure catalogues of all still active publishers, which includes some of the most classic titles in the genre, and they have been releasing adventure games almost every year. This year three games (2 + Tintin), unless I am mistaken.

I have no idea how that company is as a business partner, but it probably makes most sense to release games through them, if a mid-size company is looking for a publisher.

There are some other options, but at least Microids seems to be financially stable and dedicated to adventure games.

Been on vacation, not a good sign i see.

GateKeeper - 07 November 2023 12:57 PM

walas74 - 07 November 2023 10:10 AM

It hurts me because Pendulo was the first Spanish developer of an adventure game, and they managed to survive all these years. But it seems to me that working with Microids wasn’t such a good idea.

Well, Microids has one of the strongest adventure catalogues of all still active publishers, which includes some of the most classic titles in the genre, and they have been releasing adventure games almost every year. This year three games (2 + Tintin), unless I am mistaken.

I have no idea how that company is as a business partner, but it probably makes most sense to release games through them, if a mid-size company is looking for a publisher.

There are some other options, but at least Microids seems to be financially stable and dedicated to adventure games.

No doubt Pendulo would probably have been out of business without hooking up with Microids, so a good thing in that sense of course. Without knowing about the formalities of the deal I have a very strong feeling the relationship since a couple of years back is more than a developer/publisher one though. Seems to me Pendulo has become sort of an in-house developer at Microids and only produces games that Microids orders them to make. I think it’s quite clear that Pendulo no longer have the same creative control over what they produce and when it should be released as they had a few years ago.

I had an opportunity to see and play part of the Tintin on Gamescom. I didnt have so much expectations, but what I have seen made my doubts even worse. When you are in adventure part, it is ok. But they decided to add more action and stealth passages and this was disaster. Especially one stealth passage was really boring and also presenter from Microids had difficulties to pass it. So my expectations of this game are not high, but bad technical situation on launch day is a big fail from studio and publisher…

walas74 - 10 November 2023 11:58 AM

I think Pendulo’s fate was determined the moment Day One Kickstarter campaign failed.

One of the reasons why it failed, was most likely the fact that it wasn’t a Kickstarter campaign.
They used a different platform, and very few adventure games have succeeded in gaining funding using other platforms.

Here’s the link to their campaign, which wasn’t even close to the target, so whether running it on Kickstarter would have made any real difference can be debated.

https://www.ulule.com/dayone/

They did explain why they didn’t use Kickstarter:

“The obvious choice in the beginning was Kickstarter, but when we approached them, we realized you had to be an American company or have a fiscal address in the U.S. to be accepted, so we started to look for other choices.”

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/crowd-funding-developer-compares-project-to-breaking-bad

But of course, if they can’t get even 20% of their target funding, and can’t manage to set up an address in the USA, it’s quite obvious that the company doesn’t have too many options to choose from.
At least they found a solution that has allowed them to continue somehow.