I streamed this game for this review. The link will be below.
Endacopia most certainly is a strange game that naturally fuels a sense of curiosity at what will happen next. However a "non-traditional" point-and-click is not how I would describe such a game.
For a demo of the upcoming game, this is a solid start. I'm not generally a fan of point-and-click games, however something about the strangeness of this world had caught my attention and so I had to give it a try. I was not disappointed.
Endacopia starts you off in a bedroom but like no other. The atmosphere and sense of strangeness already present. From there, the game invites you to click on anything, and that is where the magic lies. Like any of the old point-and-click games of the past, everything can be interacted with at least to a small degree - a nice little bit of polish and charm to bring the world alive. And through this polish it makes you naturally wonder what to click on and so inevitably you find your next clue to moving forward. Indie devs can often struggle to lead the player in the right direction. Either they just outright tell the player what to do (which most of us never enjoy the hand-holding), or they tell us nothing and can't even at least provide contrast between objects to give us a hint, leaving us to wander aimlessly and hopelessly until we ultimately give up (kind of like the game I played at the start of my stream). However, in Endacopia, this polish of naturally wanting to click on things is an intelligent way of getting the player to progress without having to guide the player directly through overly informative text boxes and tutorials. This game is a charm!
Where things really need to be improved is its commitment to the 90's era point-and-click games. First of all, it is very committed to that bit, which is why I would definitely not describe it as "non-traditional". It is very, very much traditional and that's okay! However, it's commitment to this genre brings along the warts of awkward controls. Having to awkwardly cycle through commands using the right mouse button is just…well…awkward. These functions could easily be mapped to the keyboard. Similarly is your inventory. Although you never have more than a single item in the demo, it is still somewhat of a nuisance (and archaic design) to have to open the menu and assign the item to your mouse. It could easily be intelligently bound to your mouse if you have no other items in your inventory, but even more so, items, once again, could easily be bound to the keyboard.
What is funny to me is that the commitment also seems skin deep as the game employs WASD movement, which is actually a somewhat modern control scheme (at least when we are talking about the age of games Endacopia is trying to emulate). So there is a disconnect between the game trying to be committed to the point and click with everything being mouse driven, and yet also breaks it's own rules by incorporating WASD which only further creates the desire that things were not so awkwardly (and unnecessarily) bound to the mouse. I don't share this as a way to give the excuse of removing the WASD from the game and double down on the awkward controls. Rather, I appreciate the dedication to the old skool way of controlling things, but some things are better left in the past, especially if some puzzles have tight time limits that require the player to quickly fumble through the controls to complete those puzzles.
It seems the Kickstarter was successfully funded. Congratulations to the dev! I cannot wait to see what the finished product is like, and I hope to be able to play it one day soon with hopefully an improved control scheme (it would also be nice if the options were accessible from the game itself instead of launching a separate config program).
Dev, please consider creating a Steam page for this game soon so that I and others who enjoyed this work can wishlist it and easily keep up to date with its pending release.
If you'd like to watch my experience with the game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing.