The Magnificent Trufflepigs

[h1] Poor Start, saved by the twist [/h1] This game is many things, perhabs to much things at the same time. Some kind of Jack of all Trades and a master of none. It comes with flaw and problems in any form and shape, but surprisingly managed to leave behind a meaningfull lection to be learned by the player. When it comes to other review it seems that one half expierenced an amazing revelation while the other half got turned away missing the twist of the story and therefor the lesson. I wanna write this review a spoilerfree as possible so there is some stuff I cant talk about. I am going to adress some issues that would be part of big spoiler and I am going to vaguely speak about a few things. Please mind that. You are Adam and you are called by Beth an old friend to help and search for an earring on an old soon to be demolished farm. The game takes place across 5 days. Your tools to find the earing are a metaldetector, a shovel and a trovel. At first running arround the really beautifull scenery on this old farm and try finding and digging up mostly metal trash while being on the hunt for the big treasure sounds exiting. Sadly its not. Detecting mostly consist about walking really slow with a big metal detector arround and wait for the game to spawn something in front of you. You heard right. The game doesnt hide stuff arround for you to sweap for. It has an internal timer spawning items everyonce in awhile. A quick test to try this is to not actively search and run arround without detecting. Once you start the detector it goes of imidiatily. While some story items are fixed the game spawns random stuff for you to find. You cannot find everything within the first time you need to replay the game on new game + to find the last and missing items for the final achievement. Just a side note. This choice in gameplay is boring. Active the detector and press your forward button until the game spawn an item then one button for the shovel and 3 to 4 for the trovel till you have your item in your hands. There is no thrill of the hunt about it. Just a waiting game. This mechanic exist for one reason. To advance in time. Each time you pick up an item you take a picture and send to Beth. Depending on the item found you either get small talk on your smartphone or a full blown conversation on the walkie talkie. Each time slowing you down forcing you to listen. Just because this game is about a story. The story of Beth having trouble in her life growing up. The problem I have with this progession method is that is a way to complex system that could have been a simple walking simulutor. Instead I am forced either to the gameplay interrupting the storytelling or the storytelling interrupting the gameplay. The majorty looks like this. You spend a minute sweaping to be interrupted to talk for 3 minutes. Depending on what you enjoy at the beginning the other is interrupting therefor creating an inbalance of gameplay and story. Of course it may be you like both so the problem doesnt apply but i my case I didnt enjoy either. The first two days storywise are painfull to listen. As the player I felt like the third wheel stuck inbetween to friends on a long flight across the globe talking to each other about anything and everything. I had trouble finding anything to bond with either Beth or the character we play Adam. While some background story is dropped pretty early on about Beth. Adam seem to just exist. It give the vibe that Adam is no stranger to the player and we are supposed to know him very well. In reality we dont. We control a shallow shadow of a figure I couldnt care less about. Beth isnt better here. My dislike in her grew and grew early on. She is this type of workaholic that feels entitled and selfish about herself and we played the role of the mechanic fixing her after some stuff went wrong. Adam gets treated like ♥♥♥♥ by Beth. So I felt stuck inbetween boring conversations and boring gameplay. But I went on torward the end. The later half of the game got better for me. Obviously only the story started to get more serious and the greater picture gets more and more shown. The highlight are two twist the story has. One being kinda obivous and figurable pretty early on and the other is the one a lot of players miss. I liked the last twist. It made a lot more sense and gave away a great lection a lot of people should learn in life. However the first half ruined the game for me and the later could save it entirly. It just made the time not feeling like wasted fully. More or less like a little reward earned at the end. The story itself is more suitable for young adults struggling with the shift from being young to getting older. Specifficly arround the age of thirty. Its about dreams and purpose and understanding the meaing of life. Itself that would be a nice story listen to and with Darvill voicing adam I got one of my favorite Doctor Who companions Rory Williams talking. Which is really nice. However the game misses of balancing the story. One big mistake is not proper introducing the characters. A similar game, Firewatch, which is build almost the same way. A game hiding a story based walking sim within some gamplay, in this case exploration and observation. Firewatch has an introduction build arround giving us a brief choice of action while exploring the past years of the main character. He starts with broken feelings and we understand why and can feel themself. Trufflepigs doesnt do this. Adam exist without anything in background at the beginning. The only thing we know about him that nobody except Beth likes him. Which as part of the biggest reveal remains a mystery for the long time. The game tries to gain sympathy for Beth but fails to give a proper picture and paints only the bad things about her. The wonderfull Emily is away is game about to characters having conversations every once in awhile over a messager. Its only pressing one button for the text to appear and sometime making a choice but it does this whole social drama better. It has the same nonesense and meaningfull stuff at the same time. Eventhough Emily is away has a more romantical plot while this game is not a romance. It may come of here and there but trust me the twist shows my some stuff seemed like this. For me the game has a good idea making the wrong design and writing choices. Leaving it in the vast ocean of mediocre titles rarely remember in the future. I fait I wish no game.