Saint Kotar brings back the point and click genre and ultimately fails.
Saint Kotar has a decent plot, but never improves
We begin in a strange town in Croatia called Sveti Kotar. We play as two protagonists, Benedek and Nikolay. Nikolay is married to Viktoria and Benedek is her brother. Benedek is a monk who never doubts God, while Nikolay’s belief slowly deteriorates. Viktoria has gone missing and the town is eerie and amiss. As we begin the story we quickly find out that it seems Viktoria is behind the recent deaths in the town. Benedek believes them, while Nikolay refuses to believe it. This could create a good dynamic, unfortunately not much is done with the duo. There is a cult within the town with mysterious deaths occurring as they mention ‘moon ghouls, yellow masks and occultist activities’.
The town itself is the best part of the game. It’s disturbing as characters from the town say it is cursed. All the characters are strange and seem to hate their own town. Many of these characters unfortunately aren’t interesting simply because of bad dialogue and voicing for them. The other areas don’t have the same atmosphere with the exception of the castle. You can also unlock early endings such as dying early or simply leaving the town, except they felt more like a ‘you died’ screen rather than a possible ending.
The game runs fine bar the exception where I had to restart the game twice because Nikolay wasn’t walking where he was supposed to, so I was just stuck being able to do nothing. The game can also give some very tedious tasks like having to find the right grave and having to look at around twenty to get to the right one.
Awful script and voice actors
I try to look at the positives for games, however Saint Kotar had none with the dialogue and voice acting. None of the characters were even likable with how dull and wooden they were. The dialogue was unrealistic and robotic at the best of times. For example when playing you ask a receptionist about a bricked up passage and ask what’s up with it and his response is ‘its bricked up’. The game is so overloaded with dialogue, with a lot of it not even being interesting. The dialogue is dragged out with awful voice acting, one character named Dr Kabeer made me laugh when he spoke because it was obvious it had been recorded with a poor quality microphone from home making him sound incredibly out of place of the other characters. The voice acting is either over dramatic or they have little reaction to the situation.
The dialogue choices can be strange with you having to choose three different choices in a row without a response. It just seems strange to make the player do this when there’s no need and it happens quite a lot. For a game that has no gameplay I can’t understand how they didn’t place more importance on voice acting and dialogue. It was interesting at first, yet it throws fetch quests in a game that roughly takes six to eight hours. The story had some interesting points, however the poor characters and voice acting decreased its value. The story was decent, but with all the bland writing it made it hard to care at all.
I couldn’t recommend Saint Kotar to anyone. The game feels dragged out for such a short plot and it was a struggle to keep playing. The game works, but what’s in the game is poor quality. For a point and click game the plot and dialogue must be good since that’s the focus. The plot had potential, other than that it was always going to be poor.
