Just got through Cognition Episode 1.
The graphics: Alternate between a comic book style, right down to the font and text boxes in the subtitles, and an isometric view. The characters themselves seem reminiscent of The Walking Dead game from Telltale, slightly, albeit a bit more realistic than that. I liked it.
Characterization and story: Best part of the game. It's set in Boston and the accents are mostly there. Characters are mostly stock but it works. Erica Reed is a neat character - strong, sensitive, not afraid to use her power for good but stressed that it creates an unfair advantage over her boyfriend. The characters and story are, as they say, "wicked good." If there's one complaint I'd have to make with it, I'd say there are too many references to previous adventure games. Some subtle, some bashing you over the head and saying "Get it? It's Quest for Glory!"
The gameplay: a bit complex. Kudos to them for trying a bunch of different things in the interface, but with that comes the problem where you know what you want to do but you're not sure which command gets you to do that. There's a "Cognition" mode that you can go into to see residues of past events, but it carries over from one scene to the next. At one point I had it on, activated a cutscene, it took me to the next area, and I'm wondering why I can't access my inventory or save the game. Turns out this cognition mode was still on and I couldn't even tell. It would have been better if they'd made that more obvious. Also I ran into more than one technical glitch: dialogue where I had my back turned to someone and still talked to them, walking in mid-air, asking me if I want to skip a cutscene after it's over, that sort of thing. Luckily, nothing game-breaking, but enough that you notice it in the amount of gameplay, and speaking of which.
The length: Five hours. Ample for one episode. Given there are only four episodes instead of five, that's downright healthy.
The puzzles: Oftentimes there's more than one way to solve a puzzle. That's always a nice touch. What's not a nice touch is creating achievements for using the different methods - false replayability. The puzzles themselves aren't tough: a lot of them are figuring out when you can do something and when you can't. "Oh, so when I clicked this button the other three times and you said I didn't need this, NOW I need this."
The music: I'd say it's its weak point. They created a band - lead singer is the same person who voiced the main character - and it just fell flat. They tried to incorporate it into the story and it just seems kinda lame. There's some bigshot vice-president of a company and I'm to believe that he and his girlfriend chose some forgettable indie rock as "their song?" Anyway, I can look over that, I guess.
The verdict: It doesn't stand up to later Sierra point-and-clicks like Space Quest IV or King's Quest VI - okay in a couple of ways it reminds me of Police Quest III - but it could definitely go toe-to-toe with anything Telltale does, and I'd put the story on par with the Blackwell series (only this has better graphics!) So if those appeal to you, this will.
