PC Pick-and-Mix 7: ‘Aving Another Go At Avadon, Getting Sick of Stasis, and Declining Deponia

Time for another entry in my series of shorter game reviews. In this case, I’m going to dive into three games which in principle I should have probably enjoyed more than I did, but which I eventually gave up on after varying amounts of time.

Avadon 2: The Corruption

This is the sequel to Avadon: The Black Fortress, made by series creators Spiderweb Software, and really once you know it’s a Spiderweb game you already kind of know what to expect – namely, old school CRPG gameplay with turn-based combat and tile-based isometric graphics dripping with indie charm.

One of the gripes I had with the original game was that it felt like it was all prologue – you spent the whole game encountering hints that someone was going to strike at Avadon, the secret police headquarters for the edgy grimdark alliance of fantasy realms known as the Pact, and lo and behold by the end of the game someone did.

This game is largely about the aftermath, and chasing up leads from that. Notably, there’s no real mechanism for importing your old game or taking your choices at the end into account – there’s just one canonical version of how that pans out, and that’s what you are presented here, with a new PC who’ll never meet your previous PC because the game doesn’t include the infrastructure necessary to enable that.

Now, to an extent that’s fair enough – why should you necessarily expect that by default? However, as I mentioned, the plot here kicks off extremely soon after the last game, and it also involves you spending a bunch of time in Avadon itself, and consequently knocking about in the very locale which was the focus of the previous game. To take another Spiderweb series as an example, it’s not like the situation with Geneforge and Geneforge 2, where a fair chunk of time passes between the games and they take place in different locations. In this case, it’s like you’re stepping into the door just as your old PC stepped out, and you’d really expect to see the effects of their choices up close and personal – but you can’t.

Still, for the most part I thought Avadon 2 held up a little better than the first game did; the real reason I stopped playing was that it did the thing which Spiderweb games often do, and upped the difficulty to the point where even if I cranked the difficulty settings down to medium, actually continuing to play would feel tedious and time-consuming. There’s an interminable bit where you’re exploring a lost temple and some plot happens which means you can’t leave to rest up, and I got into a bad situation where, if I loaded from a save before I got into it, I’d lose about an hour or so of game progression, and I just realised I no longer gave enough of a damn to repeat that slog.

Edna and Harvey Hit the Road

Edna is a young woman who wakes up with amnesia in a mental asylum run by the unsympathetic Doctor Marcel. Her only companion is her stuffed blue toy rabbit, Harvey. Fortunately, Harvey’s a talkative little chap, and is more than willing to help Edna escape her cell, find out what’s going on in the asylum, and ultimately return home and regain her memories. But does she want to remember? From the “tempomorph” flashbacks Harvey can induce – which allow Edna to step into her own past to recall forgotten memories and re-learn unique skills – it certainly seems like there’s a shadow over Edna’s past, a shadow which revolves around the fate of Alfred, Doctor Marcel’s deceased dipshit son…

Edna and Harvey: The Breakout is one of the first games to be put out by Daedalic Entertainment; like much of their repertoire, it’s a point-and-click adventure. Specifically, it has some significant points in common with The Whispered World, another early Daedalic release: it’s a very traditional point-and-click adventure which harks back to the good old days of LucasArts, it eschews 3D graphics in favour of a 2D presentation which gives the game a distinctive artistic style, and it had its inception as a one-developer university project – in this case, the developer was Daedalic co-founder Jan “Poki” Müller-Michaelis. In addition, both games culminate with the uncovering of a traumatic childhood secret, though said secret is at least foreshadowed much more successfully in The Breakout than it is in The Whispered World.

In other ways the games are strikingly different. The Whispered World took place in an ornate fantasy setting, realised with beautifully detailed artwork – the sort of gorgeous visuals which Daedalic also brought to bear in their two point-and-click adventures based on The Dark Eye, the duology of Chains of Satinav and Memoria. Conversely, Edna and Harvey takes place in a cartoonish caricature of the real world, and has a suitably cartoony visual style. I can completely see why Daedalic opted for this style: as well as being nice and cheap to draw and animate (useful given the large number of characters and locations in the game), it’s a look which is simultaneously suitable for the dark comedy the game is based on and visually distinctive from much of the rest of the videogame market of 2008.

PC Pick-and-Mix 5: Point-and-Click Cornucopia

As is occasionally the case, sometimes I play PC games and I have some thoughts on them, but not enough to want to devote a whole article to them – hence this series. This time around, I’m back on the point-and-click adventure beat.

Unforeseen Incidents

Harper Pendrell is a humble, unambitious handyman who likes fiddling with gadgets and tech. He enjoys a fairly simple existence in Yelltown, Backwoods County, a town currently blighted by a viral outbreak. RHC, a mysterious corporation, has stepped in to run the quarantine – but they’re not disclosing where they are taking the infected, and seem to be making no progress towards figuring out where the disease came from or finding a cure. When Harper encounters an infected woman dying in the street, he finds himself – along with the intrepid journalist Helliwell and Professor MacBride, a renowned medical researcher and an old friend and mentor of Harper’s – drawn into an investigation of the crisis, which turns out to be not so much of a pandemic as a plandemic…

Unforeseen Incidents was published in 2018. Developed by Backwoods Entertainment from Germany, it’s an old-school point-and-click adventure with an endearing hand-drawn art style, with backgrounds and characters who look like they’ve stepped out of a comic. As you might guess from that plot description, the story lands rather differently on this side of COVID than it did when the game was originally published – but that’s not the only awkward aspect of it, since in its later phases the plot starts becoming over-reliant on over-worn clichés.

The Remembrance of Aventuria’s Past

It is 450 years before the events of Chains of Satinav, and the fantasy realm of Aventuria faces a dire crisis, with a demon lord mounting a full invasion of this dimension. Deep beneath the Tulamede city of Fasar, an adventuring party explores a dungeon seeks an artifact which they believe could help them swing the balance of the war. One of the party members is Sadja, recruited because as a princess of the former ruling dynasty of Fasar she’d be able to decipher the mysterious inscriptions that are interspersed throughout the tomb complex. Though fate has left Sadja in the gutter, she has a burning ambition: one way or another, she will see to it that she makes her mark on the world and becomes a hero whose name resounds through history…

It is some three months or so after the events of Chains of Satinav. At the end of that story Geron, the bird-catcher turned unlikely hero, and the fairy Nuri had foiled the plans of the evil Seer, but at the cost of Nuri ending up in the form of a raven. Geron has been researching ways to help her transform back into her old form, and has stumbled across a lead: a travelling merchant from Fasar, who has an intriguing proposal. The merchant apparently has access to powerful shapeshifting magics, and offers to use this power to help Nuri if Geron is able to find the answer to a certain riddle.

Fahi explains that he’s been having recurring dreams about Sadja’s adventure in the tombs. He’s been able to substantiate some of the details of the dreams, but doing so has been surprisingly difficult – for Sadja is a totally obscure figure, an utterly forgotten individual who seems to have fallen through the cracks of history entirely. Fahi outlines to Geron a riddle which Sadja noted in one of the inscriptions in the tomb, and insists that Geron doesn’t need to do anything more than just find the answer to that brain-teaser – he believes that will be enough to let him take his research into this fascinating lost figure further.

However, it’s not that easy. The vicious prejudices of the folk of Andergast have not died down, and Fahi is in danger simply from being around here. There’s fairly clear signs that magical forces of Sadja’s era are stirring in the region. The apprentice wizard Bryda thinks this whole matter is her key to an adventure far more fulfilling than the stultifying routine at the magical academy. The longer Nuri spends stuck in raven form, the more her memories fade. And after a terrifying encounter, both Geron and Bryda are now dreaming of Sadja’s story. Was Sadja an unjustly forgotten hero, a ruthless glory-seeker whose ambition outstripped her accomplishments, or a total failure? And what’s more important, centuries after the fact: the thing that actually happened, or the story people tell about it?

The Dark Eye: Memoria is the followup to The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav, and like its predecessor is a point-and-click adventure developed by Daedalic Entertainment. As you might have guessed from the above, it’s a little more ambitious when it comes to its plot structure than Chains of Satinav, since it essentially tells two interwoven stories. On the one hand, you have the long-ago career of Sadja; on the other hand, you have the framing story which continues Geron and Nuri’s story from Chains of Satinav and ties off the dangling cliffhanger there, giving you a chance to win Geron and Nuri their happily ever after ending in the bargain.

Clicking My Way Into Aventuria

Young Geron is an apprentice bird-catcher and something of a social pariah in the city of Andergast, capital of the kingdom of the same name in the fantasy realm of Aventuria. Some 13 years ago, when he was but a small boy, a group of heroes from the kingdom tracked down and captured the mysterious Seer, whose magics had been blighting the land, and burned him at the stake. As he burned, the Seer stared fixedly at Geron and uttered a prophecy that Geron would bring about disaster.

Though they had no love for the Seer (hence the whole “burning him to death in the town square” business), enough of his predictions had come true that people tended to regard Geron as a bit of a Jonah, much to his frustration. Now Geron is on the cusp of adulthood and is keen to prove he’s not such a bad sort. He has hidden talents, after all – wit, cunning, and a minor magical ability to break small objects. As part of the festivities surrounding a diplomatic summit with the neighbouring kingdom of Nostria, the King has proclaimed an “oak leaf challenge”, a scavenger hunt for the youth of the town; surely winning that will make others respect him!

It’s not all fun and games, though. There’s been a spate of mysterious deaths in the realm, and whispers that the Seer has somehow returned. Birds of ill-omen gather. Gwinnling, the hunter who adopted Geron and has trained him in bird-catching, has been working on some private project, in service of which he sends Geron to obtain a fairy. To Geron’s great surprise, he finds one – Nuri, who for all the world looks like a feral sort of girl around Geron’s age, but who adamantly insists she is a fairy and has both the magical skill and eccentric tendencies to back up this claim. When it transpires that the Seer has his own diabolical plans for Nuri – which, if they come to pass, will spell woe for Andergast and perhaps all of Aventuria – Geron and Nuri must go on a cross-country quest to discover the means of foiling the Seer.

The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav is a 2012 videogame by Daedalic Entertainment, based on The Dark Eye tabletop RPG – or rather, Das Schwarze Auge, for whilst a translated version of the RPG is available in English, the game originated in Germany, and is far and away the most successful German fantasy RPG, occupying the same sort of place in the German-language market that Dungeons & Dragons occupies in the English-speaking market. The Dark Eye was originally published in 1984, whilst Chains of Satinav was released in 2012; as you might expect, in the intervening time there were a fair number of The Dark Eye videogames released – some five of them, in fact, beginning with Das Schwarze Auge: Die Schicksalsklinge (translated into English as Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny) in 1992, so Chains of Satinav is part of a long lineage.

A Muted Success

Sadwick is a preteen clown in the travelling circus operated by his small family. He’s a rather sad, mopey sort – not really cut out for clowning – and his best friend in the world is Spot, his cheerful pet shapeshifting caterpillar thingy. He’s also been troubled by dreams in which a strange glowing sphere addresses him in the midst of a disintegrating landscape.

Taking a walk one day with Spot in a forest the circus has camped on the outskirts of, Sadwick encounters Bobby, who identifies himself as a Chaski – one of the elite messengers of the King. Bobby needs to get the Whispering Stone – an item of great power – to the royal palace at Corona (look, this got published in 2009, cut it some slack) in order to save the world, but he’s been hampered by the Asgil, a sinister force who are intent on overthrowing the kingdom.

Shaken by his dream-visions of the world’s destruction, Sadwick persuades Bobby to let him help. Events soon intervene, Bobby disappears – presumably captured by the Asgil – and Sadwick is left alone with the Whispering Stone (well, Spot’s swallowed it, but it’s safe inside Spot). Worse yet: on consulting Shana, an oracle that Bobby had sent Sadwick to find in order to seek advice, Sadwick learns that he is destined to destroy the world. Can Sadwick get to Corona, discover how the Whispering Stone is supposed to be used, and save the world?

The Whispered World is a point-and-click adventure from Daedalic Entertainment which finally emerged in 2009, after a five-year development process that begun as a college project by Marco Hüllen, went through a difficult development process due to the initially-interested Bad Brain Entertainment going bust, only for Daedalic to eventually pick up the project and finally finish it.

Daedalic was a young point-and-click adventure-focused development house – their first releases had come in 2008, their first significant release being Edna & Harvey: The Breakout; that had begun its life as a university project by Daedalic co-founder Jan Müller-Michaelis, so perhaps Müller-Michaelis saw a kindred spirit in Hüllen both in terms of wanting to make fresh new LucasArts-style point-and-click adventures and in terms of having a university project that had commercial potential.

Edna & Harvey was fairly well-appreciated in Daedalic’s native Germany, but I don’t recall ever encountering evidence of its existence until I saw it on sale on GOG. The Whispered World, however, got more international traction, gaining a positive reception within the adventure game fandom as well as fairly healthy sales in Germany. Daedalic have put out a healthy crop of point-and-click adventures ever since, and there’s a certain poetic justice in them getting this invaluable early boost in their momentum from a game which commenced development in 2004 – the same year that LucasArts officially gave up on the genre when they cancelled Sam & Max: Freelance Police.