A New Beginning (2012) is a point-and-click adventure from Daedalic that tries to tell a complicated story about time-travel and climate change, and misses more than it hits.
Protag 1 is a retired scientist named Bent who overworked on an alternative-energy algae, to the detriment of his marriage and son. In an early scene, he answers a call from his therapist, who pushes him into repeating the statement, "I'm not responsible for the whole world". 1/
Protag 2 is a woman named Fay from a climate-change-ravaged future, who shows up on Bent's doorstep and tells him that saving the world depends on the alternative-energy algae he abandoned.
It's kind of a corny setup, but it's told in a dry way, despite comic-book styling. It feels like the game is trying to prepare you for a save-the-world quest, while lampshading the implausibility of the hero story.
But the game ends up somewhere different, and a little strange. 2/
The puzzles are mostly easy and tend toward pointless. I got stuck in a few places because of descriptions that unintentionally misled me. The sticking points were really easy puzzles once I did solve them, and I wish there had been more partial clueing on several plausible things I tried.
Similar to other Daedalic games, holding the space bar will show hotspots. It's not explained in the instructions. I'm not sure why not. The game is much less playable without that help. 3/
I'm going to talk about the ending a bit. This is a spoiler, so there's a content-warning. But I don't think the game is worth playing unless you're being a Daedalic completionist. And if you do want to play the game, the spoiler might improve your experience of it. 4/
What's strange about the game, the complicated thing that I think it's deliberately trying to do, is that it starts with a cartoonish portrayal of the climate crisis, but then ends with a fairly realistic view of where we're going, what needs to happen.
Most of the game pushes the idea of algae as the future clean-power panacea. But in the final chapter you find that Fay, protag 2 from the future, is an unreliable narrator and lied about that. 5/
Also, the crisis she tells of a nuclear plant exploding and devastating the planet. That's not something that did happen in her past. It's something that her teammates from the future are trying to make happen. It's basically an accelerationist plot to try to force humanity to fix climate change.
Fay's potential unreliability is lampshaded quite a bit, so it's not really a huge surprise that the story pulls out that twist. 6/
What's really interesting is that you do control Fay for about half the story, and a large part of what you play through is a lie. You play through what she tells Bent about how she traveled from the future, while Bent interjects with skepticism.
A couple times this does a puzzle reset. If you only do a partial solution to a puzzle, Bent says, "wait, what?" and then Fay says, "oh, I forgot something" and you retry. 7/
So, the game does a few cute things, and it tries something complex and interesting, but it flubs it. It doesn't really work. Fay's behavior doesn't really make sense. The climax that seems intended to be emotionally complex is just... shrug I felt really unsatisfied at the end.
There's a full playthrough on YouTube that's about 5h. Probably fine to watch at 2x. Probably not worth watching unless you're being a Daedalic completionist. /end
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