A 2 Steam

J.U.L.I.A - Among the Stars

(Preface : Those of you that have been reading this blog may notice a slight change in the format. These write ups were initially going to be concise thoughts but immediately became 1500+ word articles. My desire was to knock off a couple of these a week but at that length it's not possible. So for the most part going from here out these will be shorter unless I feel I really have a lot to say about the game in question.)

JULIA Among the Stars is an adventure puzzle game in the style of Myth but set in spaceships and on alien planets. You are presented with a lot of slightly animated scenes that contain puzzles, clues and dialog boxes. 

The scenes are well done, some good looking stuff if a bit on the generic side for the sci-fi genre. A lot of the animated stiff was very herky-jerky, as if the there was some frame limit issue. It had a slightly dated look but that also gave it some charm. Neither the music or sounds particularly stood out, lots of short looping noises that eventually had me playing the game on mute.

It's all mouse driven, but the interface had some issues. A lot of buttons are in odd places - not where you would expect them to be (non-conventional for no reason). The pixel hunt aspect, scanning the screen with your cursor looking for the items you need to click on, was not great and only slightly compensated by ability to temporarily highlight them with a button. It was quite frustrating that this was not just a permanent toggle.

I stopped playing JULIA after about 5 hours (I'm guessing a quarter of the way through the game?) because I just stopped caring about the story. Games like these with a lot of text and (in this case) not great voice overs (some of the dialog is really painful) require a good story/plot to keep my interest. But JULIA just did not deliver or setting up the mystery the plot revolves around. I liked the puzzles a lot - there are a half dozen clever puzzle styles that were really fun to do - except where I had to trawl through piles of boring text to find the clues. The puzzle to story ratio was far to sporadic to hold my interest.

Adventure games in this style are some of the biggest perpetrators of the "does not respect the players time" video game crime, and JULIA Among the Star is no exception. I wanted to get to more of the puzzles but sifting through another 10+ hours of bland story was just not worth it. The game prompts you to figure out a mystery, but I just didn't care.