When Telltale first emerged onto the scene, nobody really cared about them. They were making episodic games of IP no one really bothered with. I enjoyed the Sam and Max games, but I didn’t delve into things like Jurassic Park or Back to the Future. It wasn’t until The Walking Dead that people started to rethink the place of adventure games in the video game space. However, the game they did that really grabbed me was The Wolf Among Us, based on the Fables comic series. At first glance, I couldn’t help but be excited thinking that Pendulo Studios was going to be giving the noir comic focusing on an anthropomorphic cat detective the same treatment. Unfortunately, the pedigree is not quite what I hoped for compared to its inspiration.

I’ve waited a long time to write this review. The game has been on my PS4 since well before it launched in the US, but I wanted to give it a fair shake with patches. If you didn’t see, the game actually launched weeks ahead of time in the EU space, much to the developer’s chagrin. They pleaded that people wait until it was patched to play it, but naturally that didn’t happen, and the broken experience influenced not only reviews, but sales. Knowing a similar thing happened with Days Gone, one of Chad’s favorite games of this past year post-patches, I felt it was only right to wait until the developers provided the necessary updates. Unfortunately, these didn’t help as much as I had hoped.

I’ve gone back and played through the parts that I completed prior to the patches, and quite honestly, they didn’t run much better at all. Textures still constantly pop in and out, lip syncing is still off, subtitles still fail to appear every time there is dialogue, and the game still crashes far more than it should. Probably one of the most frustrating things for me outside of losing progress to crashes was seeing the autosave icon and assuming I was good to close out, only to find I had to replay large portions I had previously completed. I’m not sure if the icon appears without it actually saving, or perhaps the save trigger just doesn’t work properly, but this inadvertently made me want to leave the game on like the olden days when I couldn’t find a save point, or worse, there was no such thing as saves.

When you get past the myriad of technical issues and the load times (you’ll never escape these – the first time booting up the game it took ten minutes before I was actually in the game proper), you’ll find an intriguing story with elements from the Telltale series and Frogware’s more recent takes on Sherlock Holmes. You’ll have small areas to explore, clues to find, people to speak with, and deductions to make. In addition to the Telltale decision tree with choices that seemingly matter, there are QTEs sprinkled throughout and several endings to see.

Each character is fun to meet and learn about, and the world truly is an interesting one. A particular charmer in the back alley at the beginning had me laughing quite a bit with what he’d say and do. The story starts out fairly generic but soon picks up, although it may take some extra time and effort to appreciate depending on the added difficulty of the tech issues. The game also offers collectibles to find which are seemingly everywhere – these were more annoying than I anticipated; when I was stuck and thought I had found a new clue, it was typically another card to add to my collection.

Blacksad: Under the Skin is a game that has the potential of being wonderful, but ultimately finds it difficult to keep the player engaged by constantly stunting their progress artificially. A game being difficult often thrives in today’s world, but one that prevents progress due to technical issues will be left to wither away on the digital storefronts. Even with patches, first impressions are everything, and it takes a long time to get past those – just ask Hello Games.

4 out of 10

Pros

• Intriguing World
• Fun Characters

Cons

• Crashing
• Texture Pop In/Out
• Autosave Doesn’t Work
• Load Times

Blacksad: Under the Skin was developed by Pendulo Studios in conjunction with YS Interactive and published by Microids. It is available on NS, PC, PS4, and X1. The game was provided to us for review on PS4. If you’d like to see more of Blacksad: Under the Skin, check out the developer’s site.

 

Here at GBG we use a rating method that you are more than likely familiar with – a scale of 1 to 10. For clarification, we intend on using the entire scale: 1-4 is something you should probably avoid paying for; 5-7 is something that is worth playing, but probably not at full price; 8-10 is a great title that you can feel confident about buying. If you have any questions or comments about how we rate a game, please let us know.

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