AR-K

[h1] FAR-T [/h1]

AR-K is a mixed bag that I really wanted to love — the sci-fi setting is genuinely interesting, Ash Sroka's voice acting as Alicia is fantastic, and the fourth-wall-breaking humor between Alicia and the narrator in Episode 2 actually made me laugh out loud a few times. But the puzzle design is where the game falls apart: too many solutions are completely illogical, and I found myself just clicking every item on every object until something happened rather than actually solving anything. The interface is also clunky, especially dragging items out of inventory to use them in the world, and Episode 1 in particular feels rough around the edges with bugs and unclear item descriptions. The protagonist herself is hard to root for — she does some genuinely awful things to the people around her — though Episode 2 shows some improvement in her character. For fans of classic point-and-click adventures who don't mind consulting a walkthrough and can overlook technical rough patches, there's enough charm here to be worth it on a deep sale, but I can't broadly recommend it.

A terrible point and click starring an unpleasant menace with a story that never gets traction. The game opens with main Alicia awakening from a bender and being late to pick up her final college assignment. Initial puzzle solutions involve combining two specific energy drinks together to break a floor-cleaning robot to steal its detergent, and throwing an energy drink into the sewer to cause an explosion that disturbs the peace and gets a full bottle of alcohol thrown at the player. The puzzles don't get better. Towards the end of the second episode, I only realized what the main character was trying to accomplish after I ended up with a collection of 3 items. To emphasize how bad the progression is, the game's second chapter (released episodically because that was the thing at the time) introduces a "narrator" character ostensibly because the puzzles were so nonsensical that they needed another point to give players hints. The addition would be nice if the authors remembered to even give him lines for three-quarters of the items in the game. Many items shown to the narrator even result in the generic failure dialogue. The game proceeds in a sequel, but this original episod…

Puzzles were more challenging than I was expecting. I needed a guide for a couple of them. I like Alicia's attitude and found it entertaining.

can't play without a walkthrough unless you think throwing a soda can into a sewer is a logical thing to do

https://youtu.be/hwCyc7_s7bg Oddly plastic character models put things in an uncannily valley while the opening stakes of causing mischief is hardly endearing to the point of view character.