Adventure Gamers - Forums

The first demo Saint Kotar: The Yellow Mask generated a lot of negative reviews so I’m wondering whether it was these ones that were removed along with the demo at the dev’s request as it was no longer relevant & therefore neither were the reviews? 
They did apologise for the religious remark btw.

So, how many people here are playing Saint Kotar? I didn’t care for the demo (or prologue or whatever) but since this is a kind of adventure game I love I went ahead and bought the full game from GOG anyway.

I’m only two hours into it but, generally, playing this game takes me back to the first half of the 2000’s, when the market was flooded with low budget 2,5D adventure games with nice graphics but everything else being on the level of a C-movie.

Many budget corners have been cut here, the most obvious one so far being the way the scene with Vera the neighbor plays out. And it’s always a sign of cheapness when the main character has to explain how terrible and scary something he sees in for example a painting is instead of letting the player view the painting him/herself.

The writing is so so and there hasn’t been much of a “game” or signs of a coherent story so far. Just long, sometimes confusing dialogs. And the two or three “puzzles” encountered so far have been of zero challenge since the main character blurts out exactly what should be done with items he picks up. The voice acting ranges from ok to pretty bad. And the actors sometimes deliver their lines obviously without knowing the context of the dialog. I play the English version.

So, so far I haven’t much positive things to say about this unfortunately. It looks pretty good, but that’s about it. Hopefully things will pick up eventually. What say you @advie? Is it worth continuing?

I’ve had a chance to play for a while (1 hour +?) & so far so good. Yes, I like the nostalgic trip back to the early 2000s as far as the graphics & animation go.

So far it seems to be a narrative driven game with a lot of dialogue but which incorporates a lot of information. The story so far is driven by the disappearance of a woman & a search by her husband a deacon, & her brother who presents as a ‘whiny’ & highly-strung monk, after being invited by her to the town of Saint Kotar for a ‘function’. It’s all pretty clear so far. That’s all I can say for now! 

Have you finished the game Advie?

No. That expression is not descriptive of the game but I get the aversion to the nostalgia thing. I have a lot of faith in the game but I could be completely wrong I know. But I do think there’s going to be many more conflicting opinions.

Veovis - 31 October 2021 11:47 AM

So, how many people here are playing Saint Kotar? I didn’t care for the demo (or prologue or whatever) but since this is a kind of adventure game I love I went ahead and bought the full game from GOG anyway.

I’m only two hours into it but, generally, playing this game takes me back to the first half of the 2000’s, when the market was flooded with low budget 2,5D adventure games with nice graphics but everything else being on the level of a C-movie.

Many budget corners have been cut here, the most obvious one so far being the way the scene with Vera the neighbor plays out. And it’s always a sign of cheapness when the main character has to explain how terrible and scary something he sees in for example a painting is instead of letting the player view the painting him/herself.

The writing is so so and there hasn’t been much of a “game” or signs of a coherent story so far. Just long, sometimes confusing dialogs. And the two or three “puzzles” encountered so far have been of zero challenge since the main character blurts out exactly what should be done with items he picks up. The voice acting ranges from ok to pretty bad. And the actors sometimes deliver their lines obviously without knowing the context of the dialog. I play the English version.

So, so far I haven’t much positive things to say about this unfortunately. It looks pretty good, but that’s about it. Hopefully things will pick up eventually. What say you @advie? Is it worth continuing?

I played the prologue, and it was what you just described in a nutshell, plus, something I already mentioned, highly unlikable (to me) main characters and overly long sanctimonious dialogue. I’m watching reviews because the game looked attractive at first, reminiscent of Black Mirror, so maybe they reworked major stuff or did something differently, but it seems like the overall consensus is just the same.

Also, many people mentioned that while technically it is point’n'click, it has little to do with that or with any kinda of puzzles, mostly clicking through dialogues, because apparently a lot of interactive stuff was cut from the demo version. I do remember having an opportunity to interact with a lot, even in the first scene, so I don’t know what was behind making this decision… Dialogues are mentioned like the kind that say you have a choice, but you have to click through all the options anyway to move on, don’t know why games still do that.

It’s strange because I’ve heard something along the lines of developers “listening” to the feedback and making changes, but if you go over and read all the negative reviews from demos, a big portion of them mentions: unwieldy, overwritten dialogues; loathsome MCs; bad voice-over. It seems like all of that stayed though, and they took out interactive stuff?

Again, rarely do I have such negative feelings from a game, so I’ll be looking at more feedback from everyone here and around the web, as more people will post it, but unfortunately, yes, it still seems I’m better off skipping this one.

Surely ‘point n click’ is descriptive of the interface of a game rather than it’s genre?

Anyway I couldn’t leave Saint Kotar alone & got to over 5 hours of gameplay before dragging myself away to devote to non-game stuff I should have been getting on with.

I’ll get back to more later on but this game has to be viewed as a visual novel rather than   being judged on the basis of it being a game like Black Mirror.

This is the last post I’m going to make on review gate. The game on Steam has 26 reviews a couple of the negative ones magically turned positive or vanishe. maybe their experience improved as they played, but you can also see the Devs artificially inflating the thumbs-up reviews. One positive review has 60 something hours as a play time. That’s quite amazing considering the game just came out like two days ago. So either it’s a dev posting a review or a beta tester posting review to try and pump up the numbers. it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out. I’m sure there are several people that liked the game but there’s also some tomfoolery going on.

Also for the last time I don’t hate the devs at all. I don’t know them, but I do know an amateurish cash grab when I see one and I feel like that’s what this was. They threw out a lot of Buzz words like Gabriel Knight and classic point-and-click adventures and then did not make anything like that. as it was pointed out the gameplay is basically non-existent, and it’s more of a visual novel which is fine but don’t call it something that it is not then. The production quality is awful so let’s just call a spade a spade there. The background art got everybody excited including me because that’s the one area that looks really good. everything else from voice acting, animation to writing is downright awful to me and a lot of others.

By comparison I also didn’t really love Kathy rain and the story it told, but it was still a very competent; well-made game. It was also from a small indie team, so that excuse holds little water to me, when trying to give saint kotar a pass.

If you truly love the game great sing its Praises, but don’t get mad when other people point out the obvious flaws, nobody is on a campaign of hate here, just truth-telling. it’s time we stopped giving indie devs a pass just cuz we don’t get that many adventure games anymore. Rant over.