Nelson and the Magic Cauldron

I cant recommend this game! Not even on sale! The game plays and feels like a very cheaply made browser game from 2006: - The "hand-drawn" scenes are lifeless and ugly. - The sound mix is extremely bad, sometimes sounds are very loud, sometimes not at all. - Speech and localization are the worst I have ever experienced. They seem all to be spoken by the same person, as if they wouldn't care and have no feelings whatsoever / indifferent! They sound hollow, sometimes high frequencies are cut off, the volume changes all the time. You can hear echos and that the speaker if moving away from the microphone mid-sentence. They are bad in German, but even worse in English. - The story is very short. It took me 2.5 hours. That only because I had to use everything with everything/one at one point. All other riddles are easy and a lot of them obvious. - If something can't be combined, Nelson only says one of two different lines. No jokes, no hints there. - Humor: I smirked once, the joke abou...

The reason I'm giving it a thumbs down is the language, there are some translation issues that aren't really game breaking per se but they add up, one after the other and not using a question mark after a question is another thing that puts me off... Worse than that is the voice acting as it completely lacks acting most of the time, there's a place where something similar to how you'd expect a "like...no" would be stated in a slightly annoying tone and pace as from a teenage girl... In this case it was more along the lines of the "like, no" ripped out of; "I like noone!". The blacksmith also has the start cut off from most of his speech, so much that there may be an entire "the" and the first letter after cut from what was said. When I first went into the game I felt I could live with it but after about 20 minutes it did start to get a bit too much, I think this game shouldn't have english speech, if he got some proper proof reading done and only used english text this game might be...

Would I recommend this game? No. I wouldn't. Voice acting is hilariously bad, translation to English is poor at best, and intolerable at worst. Music is frustrating, scenes feel empty and poorly designed... for 1 or 2 euros it would've been half-decent experience, but for almost 8 euros... nu-uh.

Pledged back then for the game on Kickstarter, and bought it again on Steam (for support). For I enjoyed the game immensely. Funny, attractive graphics, a story that keeps you interested, and intelligent puzzles (some hard ones, at least for me). So I was quite happy to hear that a sequel (Nelson 2) has been Kickstarted. Of course I pledged, and keeps my fingers crossed it will succeed!

I liked this game, but it ended a bit abruptly. Buy on sale.

Wonderful game full of humour and puzzles. Can't wait for the sequel