A New Beginning Final Cut

Daedalic Entertainment are, or were nowadays, one of the main companies in bringing point and click that evoke the classics of the 90s, and one of their first games is A New Beginning, a story about climate change and the damage of industrialization on nature, involving time travel and the consequences of radical ideas.

The story begins far in the future, the Earth is uninhabitable, at least on the surface, and the few remaining humans go out in special suits to get resources and study the state of the Earth, it is when they see that the end is near that they decide to use a time machine to, as their main objective, prevent the disaster that caused this dire future.  But the first trip turns out to be dangerous and a failure, and the group, now reduced, travel to a more distant past where ecological problems already exist, but can still be solved. 

In the game, we have two protagonists that we can control: 

Bent Svensson, a retired scientist who invented a biofuel based on blue-green algae and now spends his free time in the countryside. 

Fay, the rookie in the group who traveled back in time, has a strong attitude and is convinced that people will listen to the problems that exist in the future.

The game is a classic Point and Click where we can interact with the environment to know more about the world or with items to pick up or use, but mouse handling feels stiff, you have to keep the click on the object to interact while the character moves slowly and needs to be close to activate the options making the gameplay a bit annoying.

Trough the adventure we can find two types of mechanics:

• Puzzles, where we will need to interact with objects in the scenarios to advance with the plot. Theres nothing much to say, puzzles feel easy beacuse theres not much objects to interact and although and even if they are not easy to differentiate with the scenery you can press space to highlight them.
• Minigames, scenario that we have to solve under a explained rule, these can be skipped. Unlike jigsaw puzzles, these are much more difficult and you will need trial and error to understand how they work because the explanations offered are not enough.

Overall, A New Beginning Final Cut it's an interesting premise with questionable execution, while the story is engaging, the characters are not, maybe it's the voice acting or the fact that several things are left unanswered, but the game itself has a good level design and you can give it a try.