Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller (2013)

Rating was more like 3,5.

I liked working as detective. Serial killers. All that psionic stuff. Nice puzzles, idea, story. Not easy, but beatable without walktrough. Overall I liked it.

Disliked, when, as game progressed, it was less detective story, more like standard adventure. Did game developers have any idea, how FBI are working? It is not definitely like that, when one person is stealing from colleagues, ignore every instruction, break every rule, is contaminating crime scene. Sometimes it felt like parody of FBI detective work. Choices from last episode. Hated them. Basically game was forcing you to make choices like this - hey, I understand why you killed or mutilated my colleagues, its OK. In fact I don-t felt compassion or empathy. It was forced, railroading choices, which by some reason game developers felt as best.

The game has tons and tons of potential. The story is done well and I like the characters. I like how they have the setup. The voices are nicely done and extremely colorful. Unfortunately, while the game gameplay set is nice. The glitches in the game me a headache. Moving sometimes was way off point and made some of the life and death puzzles harder than what they should have been. I got stuck only once. But find a quick fix (I wish developers would play their games through before releasing it. But I digress) The soundtrack was nice. The game does force you to become heavily in gross as agent Reed.

I would play it as an in-between game. Or if your just a lover of this genre. which I am.

Touted as the spiritual successor to Gabriel Knight, I really wanted to love this. An intriguing murder mystery/supernatural crossover setup, a strong female lead and Jane Jensen as a story consultant. This has a lot going for it.

However, I never really felt that this had the heart that some of the best adventure games have, such as Gabriel Knight and the Blackwell series. You're plunged into the action from the get-go, but I missed those quieter, reflective moments that give more insight into the characters through idle chit-chat, relationship building and even the protagonist's home space. You never visit Erica's home (the closest thing is her work desk - this tells you something about her, but nothing particularly meaningful) or learn much about her outside of her job/predicament.

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Started with Episode 1, not sure if I'll ever get back to this.

I kind of like the comic style, even though it looks really messed up when the characters talk and in some cases the lips are smeared and you see the teeth in all the wrong places. Don't know if the "mystery" of the new case will make for a good story, but so far the plot hasn't been very compelling.

Mostly for two reasons: the way police work is portrayed (amateurish, unprofessional, unbelievable) and the stereotypical characters. Reed is like your typical aggressive male cop with emotional issues, her partner is the typical bad jokes non-comic relief variant, her boss is the typical captain who yells for yelling sake and all the other characters are just awkward and the dialogue painful to listen to.

The most fun I had when the killer blew Erica's brains out over and over again, because the game play is so full of glitches, that even though it was painfully obvious what needs to be clicked, it just wouldn't let me and thus forced me through the sequence over and over again. Okay, I might also have tried other stupider options thinking maybe they just trick you by making it too obvious, but no, it was the obvious thing.

That issue comes up so often: the controls don't really react, when it comes to interacting with objects or even walking somewhere. Overall Erica moves very sluggish and the psychic ability system is tedious to handle. Often you don't even get good hints or hints a good FBI agent should see without them. Erica is just not a very competent, compelling or strong (physically she sort of is) character.

Professionally she's not very good (but so are all the characters), emotionally she's all over the place - acting tough, acting vulnerable, but nearly always overacting - her reaction are super strong to everything. The game has yet to make me care over her pain or issues as she doesn't feel like a real person. Same goes for all the other characters.