I just completed A New Beginning. I purchased it some longer time ago from GOG.com, and a couple of weeks ago I finally felt like playing point and click, and that ones seemed interesting enough with the theme and the art style that I liked.
Art style in A New Beginning is definitely nice. The animation sometimes looks like it's missing frames and in certain parts walking looked like a slideshow. But it still looks really nice. Character design is pretty decent, except for father and son looking almost identical (having same hairstyle and mustache), which doesn't really make sense given that the son hates his father, and doesn't want to be like him (at least that's what he says).
The story is pretty interesting. It's about the climate change and stopping it, and who can do that better than eco-friendly Norwegians! In fact that was why I was attracted to the game in the first place - it takes place mostly in Norway and main character is Norwegian (I love Scandinavia). However, Sometimes it feels like it really wants to educate the players about climate change all too much. But then, it's quite difficult to pick up a topic like climate change and saving the world without "educating" people, but still, sometimes it was too apparent.
My biggest problem with the story is that it gets really complicated towards the end, and you no longer know what's real or not, characters intentions start to collide with what they were saying at the beginning, and whereas it was most likely intentional, it ended up too confusing; almost as if the creators thought that without all those additional complications the story would be too plain and too boring. But it wasn't! In fact the relative simplicity of it from the beginning was great! I just really dislike whenever media (games, movies, books) add constant plot-twists at the end just for the sake of complicating it and destroying all the presumptions and expectations the player/viewer/reader had (I guess I can only excuse Secret Window, Secret Garden by Stephen King, because there it really makes a lot of sense).
And then A New Beginning throws in an epilogue, that while shedding some light on characters' futures manages to complicate it even more, and leaves you with this "what the fuck had happened there?" feeling. They left the ending open for potential sequel it seems, but even if it were released, I don't think it will manage to clear up all this confusion created at the end of this game.
But still, I believe the story itself is worthwhile, voice acing is really good for low-budget a point and click (although it takes getting used to), and the script is written pretty well too, with occasional sarcasm and funny expressions.
Mechanically, the game has some language hiccups, and on more than one occasion displayed me text in Russian (most often), German and even French, which I just think was hilarious. I know it's impossible to not have bugs, but then in a game as linear and pre-defined as this they could have at least made full test on the English version. Either way, no harm done. Those texts most often happened when I combined stuff I should not or tried to interact with object earlier than scripted.
I didn't particularly enjoy the click-and-hold mechanics to interact with object. In other point and clicks I played (not that many) interaction was solved with either left or right mouse click. Here it made sense because some objects had more than 2 options, but for those that had only 2 the process was annoyingly tedious.
Overall, the game took me approximately 25 hours, where there were times I got lost and confused for about half an hour, and possible even left it open when I was doing something else. Still, it's not really something you can storm through. Most solutions are logical, but sometimes difficult to find out, and elements to interact with difficult to find, so every now and then I needed to look up solutions in a walkthrough, but not too often.
I'd say the game if worth getting it on a discount price (I think I got it for $2 on GOG.com). And it's interesting and involving enough who's interested in the climate and all the eco-talk. Otherwise there are probably better sci-fi, post-apocalyptic (that was the best part actually), and point-and-click games. Still, I don't regret playing it, it was fun, involving, and interesting enough for the most part.
