And here it is: The first point-and-click adventure game review of "The Inner World". I never heard about the game or the makers before, but it apparently is another classic adventure made in Germany. (It seems to me that mostly all recent point-and-click adventures are based here). Nevertheless the game looked so good to me, that I took the chance to preorder the special edition for a small discount on Amazon just ten days before the official release date on July 18th and I have to admit it was worth the money, although I tend to prefer downloadable software (and by the way films, too) which is also available through the Humble Store.
Story
I can't and won't say much about the story without giving it away, but I liked it very much. It had always the right amount of suspense and fun and humor is a very important aspect of an adventure. One thing which was not quite satisfiyng was the short playtime. I wish it was longer! But I can only speak for myself so you have to find it out for yourself. Watch the official story trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJfPXQzz66o
Characters
I must say I liked all the characters and their design very much. They're very believable and strongly integrated into the story, although they had old-fashioned German names, but that added an extra portion of humor to the characters. It's pretty predicatable that Hack will be the favorite character for most players as he is the funny little flying sidekick. I bet I'm not the only one who wished he would have been more present in the game as he only appears at the beginning and the end of the game. At least there is a sticker of him in the special edition.
Gameplay and interface
The interface is great and well thought-out. It is minimalistic and I like that. There were even two completely new elements, which I didn't encounter in this genre before: Autosave and drag and drop interaction with items in the inventory and the game. The former element was something I wish many adevntures would have, at least as long as adventures are completely linear and you can't make wrong decisions. The game knows best when to save (before you can do something wrong) and this even can prevent a rage quit due to another crash in the game without having a recent savegame. The latter feature, the drag and drop, was something I couldn't get used to, because it is so unusual and there was no fallback, but I'm OK with that, why not trying something new and it wasn't that bad at all, it even enabled disassembly of already combined items.
Technical aspects
One of the aims in my life is to make my very own adventure game, so it is obvious that I'm interested in technical aspects, too. The Inner World is advertised to run on Windows (even Windows XP) and on Mac OS X. The latter aspect was important to me, because I'm currently using Mac OS X as my main OS. I don't know why, but the whole game (especially the animations) really remembered me about Flash and I wasn't surprised when I saw traces of Adobe Air in the game directory. After that I'm pretty sure the game is running with Flash and I must confess I dislike Flash. But that said the game is excellent, though it crashed a few times without causing much trouble. I'm just a little bit sad, that it does not run on Linux by default, although Adobe Air is available there, too. Maybe one day it will be available for Linux and even sold in a multiplatform Humble Bundle, because it is already sold by the Humble Store.