Encodya

My first hour with Encodya had me cautiously optimistic. The 2.5D art is legitimately striking, a rain-soaked Neo Berlin rendered in a hand-drawn style that earns every Blade-Runner-meets-Ghibli comparison the marketing throws around. Orphan Tina and her lumbering robot guardian SAM-53 are immediately likeable together, and the premise, a nine-year-old street kid piecing together her father's disappearance while a corrupt mayor tightens his grip on the city, has genuine promise. I wanted this to land. Mechanically, Encodya is a classic point-and-click: pick up objects, combine them, exhaust dialogue trees, move to the next screen. The dual-character system is the one wrinkle worth calling out. You can swap between Tina and SAM-53 at any moment, and certain interactions are locked behind which character is active. SAM can talk to robots and interact with heavy machinery; Tina gets through to humans who refuse to deal with a machine. In concept it is a smart split, and on paper it should produce interesting puzzle design. In practice, the division feels underexploited. Most of the time you are just trying both characters on everything until something fires, which is less puzzle-solving and more process-of-elimination clicking. The inventory bloat compounds this: you will haul a large collection of items through the game and use a fraction of them, and moon-logic solutions pop up often enough to send you to a guide. The difficulty toggle at least shows some self-awareness. Easy mode lets you press a key to highlight interactable objects on screen and gives access to SAM's hint system, which is a meaningful quality-of-life concession that the harder setting strips away entirely. The catch is that even Easy mode's object highlighting is inconsistent, sometimes missing items you actually need, which turns what should be a comfortable guided experience into frustrating pixel hunting regardless of your chosen setting. Runtime lands somewhere between five and ten hours depending on how often you get stuck, so it is not a long commitment. What works genuinely well is the atmosphere and score. The ambient synth soundtrack fits the neon-grey streets properly, and the world detail is full of small ideas that show the developers cared: a singer trapped in a floating tube by a contract dispute, bureaucratic robot receptionists blocking every archive, cyberspace addicts shuffling around in VR headsets. There is warmth in the Tina and SAM relationship that occasionally punches above the game's weight. The voice acting is competent if uneven, and the humor, a mix of fourth-wall gags and pop culture references, is hit-or-miss. When a joke lands it does so because of the characters, not the writing around them. The bigger problem is that Encodya cannot decide what kind of story it is. It gestures at corporate dystopia, child homelessness, and political corruption, but retreats into lightness every time the themes might cost something emotionally. Critics and Steam players alike flagged that the narrative momentum never builds to a satisfying payoff. For genre veterans looking for a puzzle challenge on par with the classic LucasArts era, this will feel slight. For newcomers wanting a gentle on-ramp into point-and-click adventures, it is a reasonable option with caveats. The art alone is worth seeing; the gameplay is the part you will need patience for.

Alex · Scout Team

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