Lace Mamba A New Beginning review

For decades, environmentalists have told us that mankind’s reckless stripping of the Earth’s resources will lead to the ultimate destruction of our own society. In A New Beginning, this has already happened.

The game opens in the year 2500, where the last remnants of humanity have abandoned the uninhabitable surface to live in underground bunkers. The planet’s depleted atmosphere can no longer protect its surviving inhabitants from a massive solar flare that threatens to wipe them out. With no alternatives left, they turn to unpredictable and untested time travel technology. After a failed landing on an already devastated Earth in 2050, the team’s only survivors are Fay, a young and idealistic radio operator, scientific prodigy Delvin, and Salvador, their driven superior who will stop at nothing to save humanity, regardless of the personal or ethical cost.

However, the game proper opens in the present day, where you take control of Bent Svensson, a retired bio-engineer who’s attempting to while away his twilight years in an isolated cabin in a Norwegian forest. Although the game’s painted backgrounds are beautiful, we weren’t entirely taken by the character art – particularly that of Bent – when all we’d seen were still screenshots. However, brilliant voice acting brought home the character’s world-weariness and produced a genuine sense of pathos as the objects around his home remind him of the sacrifices made in his attempt to engineer a clean fuel source from blue algae.

From there, a flashback brings the plot back to 2050, where you take control of Fay as she tries to contact other surviving time travellers in the ruined future world. Fay’s voice actor puts in a somewhat flat performance, making her emotions at times unconvincing, especially when compared to Bent’s well developed and very well-acted cynicism. Later chapters call for Bent and Fay to team up, exploring lush present-day rain forests in their mission to halt the future environmental catastrophe before it begins and face off against Emilio Indez, a vaguely Bond-villain nuclear power oligarch.

Throughout the game, you’ll be confronted by a range of puzzles. Many of these involve assembling items in your inventory to create objects that you’ll hopefully find a use for, but there’s also a smattering of logic and spatial orientation puzzles, which can be skipped if you’re not a fan of such things. The object puzzles embedded in the narrative provide sufficient challenge on their own, and even experienced adventurers may at times be stumped. The try-everything-on-everything-else approach common to many adventure games isn’t the most effective way to progress here. Instead, stopping and thinking about the most logical way to achieve something often gets results, whether it’s the potential location of a screwdriver to remove a hinge or the best way to forge a medical certificate.

The 2D hand-painted backgrounds are beautiful, and we grew accustomed to the slightly cartoonish character designs and movement animation that at times looks super-imposed on the background. The game’s exceptional music is often both evocative and moving and the voice acting, although a little flat at times, is generally competent. Cut-scenes are told in graphic novel style stills, which make for an effective narrative device, although a couple aren’t timed to line up with the narrative on the sound track entirely correctly, leading to a few seconds’ delay.

Serious adventure games are few and far between, and A New Beginning is certainly a departure from the slapstick of franchises like Sam & Max. Whether you can get into it or not depends on how you feel about your techno-thrillers. Hardened sci-fi fans might raise an eyebrow at the explanations of time travel technology, although the idea of algae-based bio-energy is rooted firmly in reality. Others may find a story based around environmental catastrophe to be a tad heavy-handed, although it’s a well-rounded scenario rather than a preachy lecture.

Despite a few flaws, A New Beginning spins an engaging story. It lacks the painstaking attention to detail of titles such as Gray Matter, but it’s deep, challenging and worth the money if you’re looking for an adventure that doesn’t place comedy before plot.