BELPAESE: Homecoming

[h1]7/10 BELPAESE: Homecoming is a decent, cartoonish, but wacky and entertaining point-and-click adventure game featuring humorous characters and dialogue and is a challenging but obscure puzzle game. I only recommend it during a sale due to its lack of content and high price.[/h1] [b]Pros: + Challenging game + Decent artwork + Decent soundtracks + Humorous dialogue and characters + Funny reference to Trump Cons: – Somewhat obscure walkthrough – Unfriendly option menu – Minor spelling, punctuation, and word choice mistakes – Too expensive for a short game[/b] BELPAESE: Homecoming is a short, casual, puzzle, point-and-click adventure game set in a town in Italy, which leads you through the story of the protagonist, Peppe, who, blowing his money at university, comes back home without a degree and his journey into Italian politics due to a fake degree to “just please his mama”. Often, like with any other cartoonish, short, point-and-click adventure game, it is filled with humorous characters and dialogue. This game can last at least 1-3 hours depending on how fast you can solve the puzzles throughout the game. [h1]Gameplay[/h1] As Belpaese is a point-and-click adventure game, the…

Very, very annoying point n' click. The reasons: - Pixel hunting. Minuscule objects are essential to your progression. - (of course, no hot spots key.) - Timed pixel hunting. Some minuscule objects are only there intermittently. Yep, keep your eyes more peeled than that. - Also, you'll need to time your grabs. Devs got confused with the point n' clock genre. - More scene transitions, back and forth, than humanly tolerable. - (of course, no fast movement key.) - Many mandatory day/night changes, all triggered from a unique location, and not a central one. - (of course, with unskippable wait.) - Expected actions are commonly nonsensical. Simply put, you'll spend 72% of your game time waiting for your character instead of actually playing. One particularly terrible "puzzle" requires you to perform the exact same action 3 times, but on different nights. In effect, a basic repeat but slowly moving back and forth between 3 scenes and waiting 6 times for a sleeping transition. My jaw still hurts from the yawning. It's not the worse Pn'C around. It even has a quality, an unusual one: its music. That's hardly a selling point though.

It's okay to kill time, but I was expecting a bit more. At least the game is funny.

Belpaese : Homecoming is more a thumbs in the middle opposed to a clear dislike. The game takes a less is more approach. It’s linear and fairly simple and because of that puzzles never really suffer from point and click brain worms. However, the game’s humor didn’t really land for me and overall it didn’t really leave a lasting impression. Still the game is inexpensive so if you love classic point and click adventure I would still recommend it.

The way I see it, I'm part of the majority of people who had the chance to play this game and already didn't know what to do most of the time. By the achievements' percentage, I can only assume I may be mediocre at point 'n' click games, but in this case? No. This game is too orthodox and boring, requiring precision where no normal person would think about being precise. Take it if you like 'hard' PNC games like this. You'll most probably use a walkthrough anyway.

Long story short: lovely Italian story which you can enjoy if you have at least a bit of knowledge about the country. If not, you get a smooth short trip through that culture ;) Pros: politically incorrect snowflake-triggering feminism-bashing typical Italian habits uncovered and exposed! (Not that we didn't know about those :D) Cons: Rather short No voiceover (considering the small team, it's totally okay) Graphics are a style many would dislike (I don't mind it though) Yes, the game is not at the level of Syberia III (I won't stop giving this third inslalment as a bad exmple of failure) graphics-wise, but that story is one lovely ride! Fun, enjoyable, with multiple interesting references, which I gladly paid attention to while playing, (but I'm not the only one)! If you liked Monkey Island, you may enjoy how the makers referenced that famous title ;) I always complain how people nowadays don't make nice puzzles, but here you get a typical 90s adventure-puzzling method of story>action>dialogue>action just like in games such as TLJ (although the project is much smaller). All in all, I would buy an eventual second episode.