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Reader reviews for Saint Kotar

Adventure Gamers Reader reviews, read what other adventure gamers think of Saint Kotar.

Average Reader Rating for Saint Kotar


Average based on 5 ratings

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Stars - 15

Rating by Doom posted on Jan 15, 2022 | edit | delete


Kotarstrophic


I invested about 5 hours into this game and I think I’m done with it forever. With a solid 2.5D presentation Saint Kotar looked very promising, like a new Black Mirror, or a new Black Mirror 2. Unfortunately, all similarities ended right there. After 5 hours I still can’t understand what the game tries to be: a dark fantasy of the Twin Peaks legacy, with characters acting “weird” for the sake of it, a Gothic fairy tale by modern Brothers Grimm or an Italian-inspired horror that just throws nasty stuff at you. It doesn’t work either way around.

Both writing, storytelling and puzzle design are of very poor quality. There are plenty of locations to visit, but there’s very little to do since there are no challenges to be found anywhere. 5% of the gameplay consists of such epic quests as “go to the next room and look what’s in there”. The rest of the time we are just walking, talking and suffering from what we hear. In fact dialogues were so bad that I stopped caring about characters, their motivations and those moral choices we can make very early into the game. And what kind of moral choice is it anyway when both our actions lead to a character’s certain death?

I rarely dislike games so much, but this one left me no choice. Saint Kotar is a lost opportunity. It could’ve marked a new return of quality 2.5D adventures if only the devs knew how to develop games. Instead it looks like they did the art first and only then tried to come up with some story and gameplay to accompany it. This never works, especially if you are not David Lynch. And Red Martyr are not.


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Time Played: 5-10 hours
Difficulty: Very Easy

Stars - 20

Rating by MoonBird posted on Nov 4, 2021 | edit | delete


Uninteresting, badly designed, unfinished, unpolished, broken, buggy and not making much sense.


Unfortunately I can’t recommend this game at all.

Where do I begin? From the beginning?

The first thing you’ll be facing in this game is an unskippable tutorial, where you’ll be stumbling around in complete darkness trying to figure how to get some light. A BIG no-no how to start the game.

Interface is awkward and needlessly difficult to use, voice acting is poor at best and unbearable at worst. General tone of emotions is bland and most of the characters are pretty one-note. Timing of the dialogue lines would have also needed a lot more work. Sometimes the line changes abruptly, leaving unnatural, glitchy feeling, and the volume for the voice acting is definitely way too low even when set to 100% from the menu.

There’s also something horribly wrong with the rendering of the dialogue font. When the text moves in the screen, it gets somehow blurry and torn until it stops again.

The starting screen was black about a minute, and the main menu became accessible only after I pressed the space bar, which tells me that the game is buggy right from the beginning. The conversations are long-winded and unfortunately deadly boring.

Inventory could be more easily accessible, and the sound effect when opening and closing it, is completely futile. When the inventory is open, you cannot interact with the rest of the game, which feels odd. I also disliked the change of action for the right mouse button. In the demo you could look things with it, which added a lot of feeling and descriptions to the environment. Now it only shows hotspots, which is unnecessary, because space bar does the same.

Speaking of hotspots, I sadly noticed that there were a LOT more of them in the Yellow Mask. This means that Many of the hotspots were removed in this full game, which is really beyond my understanding. Why downgrade things from the demo?? I think it’s just plain stupidity and despising of the paying customers.

There’s no real puzzles, 90% of the dialogue borders on the knife’s edge on being just painfully boring or complete nonsense, quest list shows things that cannot be done anymore, and the implementation of the symbol puzzle in the cave (actually the only real puzzle here) was purely idiotic. If you happen to give a wrong name for even one of the symbols, you have to load a saved game, or replay the whole scene from the autosave, which means of skipping some 5 minutes worth of dialogue every time. Otherwise, you’re stuck and the only option is to die. What kind of senseless punishment for the player is that supposed to be!? One single puzzle, and you manage to make a mess out of it. Unbelivable!

Walking (and also running) around is tedious and slow. Double clicking the exits would have been deadly necessary here. Moving from place to another takes lion’s share of the playtime, which can be considered a real drag, especially when every other moment in the game is spent with endless and uninteresting conversations with voice actors ranging from horrible to bearable.

This is all quite sad, really, because the game has such a great potential what comes to background graphics. They are actually the only thing here, than I can give full credit for. Everything else was either uninteresting, badly designed, unfinished, unpolished, broken, buggy or didn’t make much sense.

If you can get it for maximum of 2 or 3 euros, it could serve a purpose for being a digital study book titled “How to ruin an interesting premise”. But DO. NOT. PAY. the full price for it. ever. It’s really not worth it.


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Time Played: 10-20 hours
Difficulty: Very Easy

Stars - 45

Rating by AkritazPowersound posted on Nov 2, 2021 | edit | delete


An Instant Classic!


I would like to begin this review by saying that Black Mirror, The Dig, Broken Sword & Gabriel Knight are in the top 10 Point & Click games list of my personal preference. All 4 games have been around during the golden days of the Point & Click era and most of the genre lovers will agree with me that they are very highly regarded and respected.

There is an obvious pattern in my selection. I love a well-crafted serious mystery game with a twist of darkness and sometimes even a drop of supernatural. The eerie atmosphere of both Black Mirror & Gabriel Knight haunted me for weeks after completion. That means they did a thoroughly good job of getting under my skin and succumb me into their immersive atmosphere and story line. For me that is the difference between a good game and a genre defining game.

Saint Kotar was on my radar for quite sometime now, since it was the only tittle of recent years that ticked those boxes in my books. Sure, I enjoyed the Blackwell Series or Lamplight City but if I must be honest, they felt nothing like my personal favorite titles. Saint Kotar was promising to give me the dosage I craved for. And it delivered almost perfectly on that promise!

Storyline:

Score: 8.5 / 10

Saint Kotar is a Mystery game surrounded by strong religious references (Your main character is a monk after all!) that grow stronger and become more evident as time passes by. You will have to make many choices that will develop and test your character’s faith towards God but also towards his peers. It takes place in rural Croatia and as the game begins you will find yourselves already in deep waters, searching for your vanished sister. You will soon realize that things are not at all what they seem and through the eyes of 2 different characters, Benedek (the main character) and Nikolay (your Brother-In-Law) you will embark on an adventure that will keep you on your toes from start to finish. Personally, that is all I ask for from a PNC game’s storyline!

The amount of work and dedication that went into this game is unbelievable and it can be easily understood after you played the game for about an hour. This was not simple task.

Making a storyline of this magnitude (deep and complex!) and following though it takes a lot of planning, motivation, and persistence because every mistake will create loopholes. (There are some in the game, but I must play it a second time and choose different options to see if they are loopholes after all or just different paths to a different story development.)

Even though it has some plot holes and some dialogues could have been more…believable, it has a solid and unique storyline that “mutates” to a dark and sinister tale which is bound to captivate you. That’s a promise!

Graphics:

Score: 9 / 10

Saint Kotar uses my favorite mixture. 3D Characters in a 2D environment. The gorgeous graphics are digitally hand drawn and you can clearly see the personal touch that the artists applied in every single shot of the game. Character animation could have been better but it does not take away anything from the experience.

The game was created using the Unity Engine and I am going to dare to say that this is one of the best usages I have seen for a PNC game using it. Kudos!

 

Shadows, Lighting, attention to detail on all the old buildings, paintings or simply the fog which covers the town are so well designed, drawn and thought of that make you feel uneasy at times. I found myself being alert of my surroundings on multiple occasions. Needless to say, that playing this game with a potent pair of headphones or surround sound at night adds A LOT to the overall experience and I would strongly recommend it.

Gameplay:

Score: 9 / 10

The game uses the classic PNC interface which is exactly what we need. Simple, Quick and Functional. You have an inventory screen just like the one you are imagining, you have the cursor that changes form whenever you are supposed to talk to someone, look at something or use an item and of course the point and click movement! (No keyboard usage here!!!).

The only thing missing is the “get-more-information-by-right-clicking” technique that we find in some other titles. It does not exist here and any extra information you might need will still be obtained by the left button. For example, you might be examining a stick and the response will be “There is a large stick on the floor” and then then when you examine something else that is relevant to the stick it will give you more information about the stick once you left click on it again. But that information will not be available to you unless you really need it and you already made a connection!

There is not much pixel hunting in the game and there is a “reveal-all-hotspots” option if you get into impatient. (I really dislike that option to be honest!)

One thing though that stuck out for me was the way the dialogue-tree in conversations expanded. As usual you get 2-3 options when talking with another character but in the end, you get to click all 3 options and they feel like a part of a big sentence instead of being used as options. Sometimes you can go through all the available conversation options and the NPC character will reply when you finish up clicking all 3 of them.

I do not recall having any noticeable problems with the gameplay or feeling that something could have been done better. Straight to the point and keeping the old but gold recipe of previously played and loved PNC games.


Soundtrack:
Score: 8 / 10

Most of the times, the soundtrack is the “make or break” point in such games. PNC games rely heavily on conversations and when these are done by actual talking and not just text, they are vital. Saint Kotar does a fine job with voice acting. Especially the main character. When he is angry, worried, relaxed or tired, the actor makes sure that he sounds exactly what he feels!

The rest of the characters (bar 1 or 2) are also pretty good, so the quality of the voice acting is kept at pretty good standards.

I am always worried about voice acting in PNC games since we have countless games that simply do not pay the necessary attention to it and as result, they feel cheap and rushed. It’s unbelievable that some developers still do not understand how much it can affect the overall performance / experience of the game. I am sure if they did, they would not accept sub-par voice acting.

The music soundtrack is subtle but also effective. It adds to the eerie atmosphere constructed by the graphics and storyline, so a fine blend of all 3 ingredients results to this creepy and uneasy (sometimes depressing!) feeling that you get while exploring the strange town. I am sure that this is exactly what designers were aiming for.

Longevity:
Score: 7 / 10

It took me around 12 hours to complete the game, but I am sure there were other options that I could explore so the game does have some replay value. Personally, I find myself wanting to replay my personal favorite PNC games every few years and Saint Kotar is definitely added on that list now especially since it offers different paths to follow.

Puzzles:
Score: 6 / 10

It must be said that the game does not feature brainstorming puzzles that will take you hours to complete or figure out. Instead, it focuses on information taken from exploring the town and proceeding with that information accordingly.

If you expect many puzzles and many inventory combinations, you might be a bit disappointed. I understand that being an adventure game, puzzles are to be expected so some PNC fans may feel that this is a major part of the game. The good news are that the story is so good that the lack of many brain-buzzing puzzles does not seem to affect the overall self-achievement feeling in the end!

All Time Classic
Score: 8 / 10

Yes. There I said it. Can it be added in the same company of Black Mirror, The Dig, Broken Sword & Gabriel Knight and be considered as an all time classic? For me it can. Of course, that is my personal opinion but hear me out here.

The guys at Red Martyr did a brilliant job at a time where the genre is not getting many games that are faithful to the “purebred” PNC games that we all love. And I am sure the tried to do exactly that. Stay true to the “cause” while stamping their own authority and signature in a “new age” PNC game.

They took the chance by the scruff and delivered an excellent game that I am sure will get under your skin. It is serious, dark, evil, complex and at times sick and surreal. Without displaying too much gore they will have you imagining things that are simply sinister and they did that by creating a story, a world, even some history that takes place in small town in Croatia.

At times I really felt I was there with Benedek feeling his every worry, thinking his every thought and evaluating every risk we were about to take. That is simply sublime when achieved by a PNC game and for that, this game will be in my “All Time Classic” list!


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Time Played: Over 20 hours
Difficulty: Easy

Stars - 40

Rating by desillusion84 posted on Oct 19, 2020 | edit | delete


Stars - 25

Rating by My Dune posted on Jan 17, 2022 | edit | delete


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