As promised, here's a bit of a rant about things that bothered me in "A New Beginning." Don't read on unless you've played it and/or don't mind spoilers and complaining about nitpicky game details.
So the big twist in the game is that Fay and her future time travelers are actually planning to perpetuate the nuclear meltdown that Fay told Bent was the cause of the future's environmental destruction. That itself is a fine swerve and well enough foreshadowed, but there's some issues in the structure of it all.
Mostly, what does this mean for Fay's character? We first get to know her through the first couple chapters of the game, which she narrates to Bent. So how much of that really happened? (And why did it include so many annoying puzzles?) If she's trying to play up Bent's technology and downplay nuclear power, why is the time travel transport clearly nuclear-powered in the flashback? It's clear at the end of the game that Fay disagrees with her fellow time traveler's plan, but when did she change her mind? Did she always go into this preferring to promote Bent, or was she swayed over the course of the game? It's frustrating to me not to know, especially when all this learned just at the end of the game.
I'm also a bit disappointed at nuclear power as the "evil" technology. It's a tiresome cliche. And I'm a bit baffled by the game being set in the eighties. I don't have anything against the eighties, but the fact that Bent is working on his technology back then and we don't have it today doesn't exactly bode well. I'm not sure that was really thought through.
Spoilers Within
All that said, it was still a fun and intriguing game and these are in the end minor quibbles.
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