Review of Saint Kotar by MoonBird

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.