Adventure Gamers - Forums

I’ve recently finished playing it. I know the consensus on there forums is that it’s a bad game, so I’m surprised to have quite liked it. I tried reading the original thread but it’s extremely difficult to navigate, so I’m starting a new one.

In my opionion, the game had great plot and excellent voice acting. I had no problems with the characters (I saw many consider Malachi to be an awful protagonist), and I’m willing to forgive that the puzzles were quite easy, as well as the backtrack-inducing “don’t pick things up until you know you’ll need them” attitude that also plagued Cognition.
It’s no Gabriel Knight, but it’s certainly a good enough game in its own right and I think with more money or time or sequels, it could have reached greatness. The puzzle mechanics revolving around analyzing people were not only fun, but in a different world could have been leveraged to induce a different play-style where you set out to gather specific data points after partial analysis leaves you with several candidates you can’t decide between.

Besides that awful maze in the end (which I just walkthroughed immediately), I saw the main gripe is the 3D models and animation being of poor quality. Is this really enough to damn a game? Is it possible that it was just buried under the weight of hype and expectations?

it was only after the third chapter that i really got into the game.
In the beginning i never had sympathy for Malachi, but with the appearence of David Walker it began to slowly change, i even laughed at some of the corny jokes.
It maybe wasn’t the best game i ever played but it was good enough for me, so that when/if a sequel should follow i definitely would buy it.

ok, its been a while but lets talk about moebius. The biggest problems i have with it are.. the story, the writing, the ending.. the puzzle logic..
The story: it made no sense, everyone in the game is waaaay too eager to believe the moebius theory which is never clearly ironed out.
The writing: Im supposed to believe malachi is a super genius when he takes small stereotypical visual cues and turns them into underwhelming conclusions.. they didnt pull it off. 
The ending: the game goes into this tangent with saving the girl and david, which to me doesnt really conclude the story at all… it just ends as if the real goal of the story was about david and malachi’s bromance, and not all that world conspiracy stuff.
The puzzle logic: ones that jump to mind include.. flying to another country to buy a bottle of wine.. or the case of the millionaire who just cant seem to find a quarter.
You say…

Antrax - 26 March 2016 03:57 AM

The puzzle mechanics revolving around analyzing people were not only fun, but in a different world could have been leveraged to induce a different play-style where you set out to gather specific data points after partial analysis leaves you with several candidates you can’t decide between.

which to me makes a good point: in a better game it wouldv been better. It *could’ve* been a good puzzle mechanic. It wasnt. It couldv had good writing, and a plausible story.. it didnt. It couldv been as cool as this concept art:
 

It wasnt.

I thought the game was ok but not great. Malachi and, to a lesser extent, David were decent enough characters for me to get invested in their goals. Malachi’s arc to open up emotionally and accept friendship was not as compelling as Gabriel Knight’s arc in GK1 to discover and accept his heritage, change his lifestyle (see the purification dream sequence), and redeem his ancestor, but it was nice that Malachi even had an arc, which isn’t true of every adventure game protagonist.

Malachi gets criticized a lot on these forums, somewhat justifiably, but I wonder if David isn’t the weaker character of the two. He’s fine, but kinda bland, and did not for me emerge as a compelling foil to Malachi. (For comparison, I think Martin Freeman’s Watson is a great foil to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes on the BBC Sherlock, and arguably Watson is the emotional center of all Holmes and Watson relationships portrayed on screen. I use that comparison because Jane Jensen has mentioned that the BBC Sherlock’s portrayal of Holmes and Watson was a big influence on Malachi and David.)

One point in Moebius’ favor is that adventure games and investigative gameplay seem to be a natural fit (to justify the player needing to look at everything and draw connections), second only to adventure games and comedy (to justify off-the-wall puzzle solutions). So on that level alone Moebius’ gameplay was often enjoyable, as I personally tend to slightly prefer the more serious adventure games over the more comedic ones.

And globetrotting’s always fun to do. The mystery/thriller plot was unfortunately a big weak point for me but it had its moments. There were times (mostly in Venice, IIRC) where I was reminded of the feel of Gabriel Knight 3.

Antrax - 26 March 2016 03:57 AM

I saw the main gripe is the 3D models and animation being of poor quality. Is this really enough to damn a game?

It’s perhaps not a fair reason, but it’s a real one. One of my friends (who is an indie game designer and artist, so maybe he’s biased by his artist side) said to me once that “beautiful equals fun in people’s minds,” at least when they are deciding which games to play. An oversimplification, but there’s definitely a kernel of truth there.

I developed lowered expectations for Moebius before it even came out, partly because of shortcomings in the artwork. Which I forgive because the scope of game that was delivered way exceeded the budget, but that doesn’t change the fact that the game could look better.

Is it possible that it was just buried under the weight of hype and expectations?

Sure, that was a big part of it. I believe Jane Jensen is very talented, but a great series like Gabriel Knight is always like catching lightning in a bottle, requiring a great idea, great team, and great circumstances (such as a supportive company, good processes, reasonable timeline and budget…) and even then it often doesn’t happen.

I think another factor that kept my expectations for Moebius lower is that I’ve read Jane Jensen’s novel Dante’s Equation, which has characters discover a hokey, nonsensical theory meant to explain how the world secretly works, much like Moebius does.

zane - 26 March 2016 10:32 AM

The ending: the game goes into this tangent with saving the girl and david, which to me doesnt really conclude the story at all…

Yeah, I imagine this ending is a key reason for the underwhelming reaction that the game got, at least among those who actually bothered to give the game a fair shake. It feels like the ending of a TV pilot —it establishes an ongoing working relationship between the main characters, and it resolves only one part of the story, which is really just setup for more story—and I think that hurt the game a lot because it made the game less satisfying as a standalone and many people could sense that this series would get canceled after that one “pilot episode.”

I’m pretty sure the TV pilot feel was intended—the final beat of Moebius is reminiscent of the way the pilot to the BBC Sherlock ended (“Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson…”). But the BBC Sherlock had the good sense to start and solve a mystery in its first episode, whereas Moebius lacks sufficient payoff.

All that being said, I would have been pleased to see the series get another installment to conclude it in a more satisfying way.

Moebius was the most “Gabriel Knight sounding” concept so it was pretty logical that it was going to win at the time.  Also, Jane quasi-sold a bill of false goods with it, it was originally going to be a 2D game as stated in the Kickstarter and Phoenix Online Studios didn’t come into the picture until after the Kickstarter was funded.  I still don’t think it turned out to be a bad game, but it had a lot of technical problems and was mostly a bland effort that was too short and far lacking the level of detail of her previous works.  For all the production issues it had, Gray Matter(which is also considered a lesser work of hers) was still at worst a very good game.

millenia - 26 March 2016 02:41 PM

That said, I do like the game, and Malachi. And I enjoyed the relationship between the two characters (I even ship them), and also think that David isn’t really much of an interesting character without Malachi.

Yeah, the more I think about it the more I feel that Malachi was actually the biggest strength of the game’s story for me. Sure, he’s a Sherlock Holmes variant, but I love Sherlock Holmes so I am ok with that. And despite being a bit bland, David was probably the second best character, and I agree that Malachi and David’s dynamic was one of the main sources of entertainment.

Maybe we should really be looking at the supporting cast. I can’t think of any supporting characters in Moebius that I found particularly interesting. I guess Amble Dexter, not-Grace, and not-Prince-James were . . . ok?

I wonder if that was an unfortunate side effect of the globetrotting in Moebius: we would meet stock characters but generally wouldn’t stick around long enough to discover that they had anything surprising about them, aside from the revelation that the people you’re working for aren’t trustworthy. It also didn’t help that the Moebius Theory plotline required you to meet several female characters who all had similar characteristics so that they were all contenders to be the re-incarnation of Livia Drusilla. I know the issue is not that Jane Jensen can’t develop interesting supporting characters, because that’s half the fun of the Gabriel Knight games. Even GK3’s characters, though stock, were colorful like in an Agatha Christie novel.

But even with its weaknesses, after finishing Moebius, I still felt about it how I described here, the first time the game was discussed.

And yeah, if I recall correctly I voted for Anglophile Adventure, to see Jane Jensen try something in a new territory.

Calling Moebius a part of “Jane Jensen’s B Catalog” is pretty spot-on. It’s not exactly great, but it’s still nice.

I haven’t backed the Kickstarter (I don’t think I even knew it was going on), so I didn’t even know we were given options.