Neo Berlin 2062. Tina – a nine-year-old orphan – lives with SAM-53 – her big clumsy robot guardian – in a rooftop makeshift shelter in Neo-Berlin, a dark megalopolis controlled by corporations. Tina is an urban jungle kid, who has learned to live alone, scavenging from city dumpsters and eking out a living from scraps. Her funny robot is always with her, programmed to protect her no matter what. One day, the little girl discovers that her father left her an important mission: to finish his plan to save the world from greyness. Tina and SAM embark on an incredible adventure across different realities full of bizarre robotic creatures and grotesque human beings. Through puzzles and exciting dialogues, they’ll find out the true meaning of being alive...

While Encodya is a pretty slick looking game, it has some major bugs

Point and click puzzle games, by their very nature, are difficult enough (they rely on developers trying to get inside the head of the broad spectrum of the gaming community when they're creating the puzzles).

Only when the developers get this balance correct will the majority of puzzles have some sort of logic behind them. Getting gamers to use familiar objects in unusual ways without it seeming idiotic, or too simplistic, is not an easy skill to get right. But you'd expect that the least of their worries is delivering a game mechanic packed full of bugs. That, you'd assume, would be flagged up by the testers.

Encodya is a pretty slick looking, sweet game but was just too buggy, even a month after launch (which makes me suspect that the patches aren't even being worked on). And these aren't just little problems, there are some game breaking whoppers here.

Firstly, not a huge issue, but the characters glitch from time to time as they move about. But the two massive issues I had, before I decided to call it a day because I wasn't even sure if the game was possible to complete, were the glitch that makes it annoyingly fiddly to place you character at exactly the right position to travel to the next screen. This is something that should be automatic to keep the game running smoothly. As you walk off to the edge of the right of the screen, the game should load to the next position and you should appear on the left to the screen and continue on your way. But I found numerous times where it took me ages to get into the exact spot where the game would allow me to progress. And worse still on a handful of instances no matter what I did I could not progress. This happened in different locations and at different times, so an area you've been going back and forth in your quest would suddenly become impossible to return to (or leave).

The fact that a month after launch there's no patch, is a little worrying

The other major issue was an alley way with water running down the middle and sparking wires stopping you from going beyond it... Unless... if you stick to the wall you can walk in the water with no harm coming to you. But when you try to interact with anything in that level your character automatically turns around, walks right through the middle of the sparking puddle and you're told that you can't walk though the water or you'll be electrocuted.

If these issues are patched at a later date I'll be more than happy to replay the game and reevaluate my score. But as it currently stands it's a mess of a game which with a quick bug fix could be an engaging and enjoyable point and click adventure.

2

Nick Smithson