I need to make a nice catchy name for my three pillars reviews. Maybe a curator name as well? What do you guys think?
For now let’s take a look at my second systematic review:
(Again this is all very experimental as I’m trying new things and I very much appreciate and look forward for your feedback!)
The Fidelio Incident
Recommended with Precautions
The Fidelio Incident is a walking simulator following a plane crash in which you’ll have to look for your wife, you uncover more about your past as you walk through this cold freezing island.
Story Interesting and maintains your curiosity throughout the game (7/10)
I really don’t want to talk too much without spoiling what to expect. But I was interested throughout and I was not disappointed at all. It’s not something that will blow your mind, and the character development can be seen throughout journal pages written by your wife.
Gameplay Nothing special but it’s not a chore either (5/10)
Decent gameplay, you won’t feel lost, nothing difficult to induce rage quitting. Puzzles aren’t thought provoking: you find a hurdle, you walk around for a bit and find the thing you would need to pass through the hurdle. In this cold island you would need to keep yourself warm, in order to do that you walk nearby steam or fire from the debris of the plane. If you’re too far from steam of fire, the screen slowly starts to “freeze” starting from the border, and the closer the cold comes to the border of the screen the less time you’ll have before you die of hypothermia basically. Very straight-forward and clearly not the highlight of the game, but better than a simple walking simulator with no gameplay eh?
Immersion Potential technical difficulties and poor map design
(I removed the score here because of the next paragraph below)
This is where the precautions sets in. I played this on my secondary laptop which has a 930MX graphics card, i5 6th gen processor and 6GB RAM. It is well above the minimum requirements, but even with low anti-aliasing and low quality graphics, I still had a lot of frame rate jumps. towards the end I couldn’t get anything above 10 fps while throughout it kept jumping from 15-40 fps. I fought through it but it was a pain. I don’t think everyone will face this issue however, I did not see a lot of reviews mentioning this.
Another thing was the map design, as part of the gameplay as I mentioned above you’ll need to keep yourself warm, and there were valves to open up steam mehcanisms so you can walk over there and warm yourself up. More often than not they were randomly misplaced and doesn’t really have a greater purpose other than warming you up. What is worse is the placement of the plane debris and crash overall. They’re very far apart and you can’t help but wonder how the hell did this guy crash this badly.
The good part are the graphics, the games uses unreal engine 4, and the environment and atmosphere feels great. Voice acting was also pretty well done in my opinion except for one small character at one small point in the game.
Verdict
The Fidelio Incident is a decent game, but not a must play in no means. I was not disappointed and the story was pretty interesting as well. If you think you can somehow avoid the technical difficulties (like apparently most people did) and you feel like playing a short walking simulator, this wouldn’t be a bad choice to pick up really. It’s worth about 2-3$ in my opinion.
Have any of you guys played this game? How accurate was I in my review?
What did you guys think of my review in general? Anything I should add or remove for my next one? Don’t spare any detail, you’ll help me refine my next reviews!
Is there any question left unanswered after you read my review?
I personally think I should change the order of the pillars based on the game and not keep it systematic throughout, do you guys agree?
Oh don’t forget to help me come up with a name for my review method/curator group!
Next up: Far Cry 5
Nice! I like the way you set this up.
I have the Fidelio Incident already, but this gives me a better sense of what to expect from it. Thank you! I probably won’t be able to play it on my current laptop, though, based off of what you’re saying.
Well I wouldn’t know, DakotaThrice had worse specs when he played it but then again he is used to playing single digit fps at the time so not sure how well it played on for him.
“The 3 Shax Stacks”! ;) Not really… unless for some reason that really does appeal to you!
(Nitpick: a slightly more common way of phrasing the summary: “Cautiously recommended.” Although, reading further, I see this intrudes on your “this is where the precaution sets in”…)
I have not played the game yet, but am somewhat curious about it. I think you need to proofread a little bit still. Go over it again after spending some time away from it, and clear up anything that reads a little bit wrong to you. (However, I’m somewhat a nitpicker with my own sentence structures, and most modern news sources are way more lax about linguistic style guidelines than in the past.)
I personally think I should change the order of the pillars […]
I don’t see any reason not to, if you feel the review will flow better. Also, it will be less monotonous to write them (and probably less monotonous to read them).
You called the game short, but didn’t give an indication of the actual length. “Short” walking simulators definitely vary in length… so my only real guess is that it took less than a full day to finish – would love a more accurate time estimate.
P.S. For some reason, my head had the imagery for Fidel Dungeon Rescue in it while reading for most of the review, even though those graphics obviously didn’t fit! :D A single banner image of some sort would help!
would love a more accurate time estimate.
Under two hours.
Thanks!
I was planning to write my time in the verdict but I forgot about it when I reached there.
I’m not much of a writer and I hate proofreading, but I understand the importance of it and I’m trying to push myself more to start proofreading.
And yes, I will change the pillars depending on the flow of each review, thanks for pointing it out!
Do you die if you don’t warm yourself up on time? If so, are there any indicators to show you when that will happen?
Yes, the screen slowly freezes starting from the border, the closer it gets to the center the less time you’ll have.
Thanks for pointing it out, I’ll add it in the review.
Thank YOU for pointing that out in your review. I was interested in this game and no reviewer ever mentioned something like this when I was scrolling through them. I hate such mechanics, especially in a walking simulator where I just wanna take in the sights, enjoy the view, take some screenshots, slowly read and follow through the story etc. So I will avoid this game.
Thank you for pointing out what I was missing!