"Don`t bother."

According to this game`s translators, Neugier was going to be released out of Japan with the title The Journey Home (a much more appropriate title definitely), but in the end they decided that it wasn`t a good idea.

And it certainly wasn`t if you ask me, because this game is something, how can I say, mmm, ephemeral?, yeah, it is something so short and insignificant it should never had existed in the first place.

Story:
It has some good points I have to admit, the main character actually talks and the beginning of the game is pretty solid, but everything gets extremely boring and completely uninteresting when you arrive to your castle (about ten minutes into game).

Graphics:
Simple and standard, not bad, however once we reach our castle (again) everything degenerates into boring, ugly and poorly animated and reiterative scenarios and enemies (there are more or less four or five different kinds of enemies without including the bosses in the whole game). The castle backgrounds are odd as well, sometimes they look pretty good and sometimes they become such a mess that it is hard to tell if you are on a castle or inside the mind of a psychotic serial killer.

Music:
In terms of music all I can say is that it has a rather good main theme, but that is as far as it gets, everything else is average at best.

Gameplay:
Think Zelda watered down to a ridiculous degree. We play from a Zelda-esque overhead view, our character works in the same way except we are able to jump at will and talk, we have an item that looks like some kind of sling shot to reach places that are too far away, a very short sword and a few items to recover our health we can`t use whenever we want because they work automatically when we ran out of strength or something like that, which sucks.

Something beyond terrible is the save system, no matter where or when we save, if we quit we will have to begin the stage again (the game is oddly divided in sections, mostly different parts of the castle called stages here). Thankfully our experience points remain there, but we will have to start the stage all over again, which is a ridiculous and dead annoying way to make the game seem longer and a real pain during the much maligned second half of the adventure where the difficulty level becomes excruciatingly high.

Despite what I`ve just said, for objectivity`s sake I have to say the gameplay isn`t THAT bad, in fact my biggest gripe is the absurd length, which is always a fatal gameplay flaw in my book, aside from that this could very well be your standard Zelda-esque adventure game and it is so short the awful save system and high difficulty described above are merely a minor inconvenient. By the way, this is not an rpg as some might say.

As a result:
So, I guess the big problem here is that Neugier is an utterly pointless title, it is kind of fun for a while and all but in the end you will spend more time downloading the game and applying the patch than actually playing.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 09/28/06