Modern Tales: Age of Invention

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

.

Review:

Modern Tales: Age of Invention is a Graphic Adventure set during the 1900s with a focus on inventors and espionage with a touch of steampunk influences. The story focuses on the daughter of an inventor who is kidnapped.

As much as that seems like a great premise for a story, the game does a poor job of delivering it, with awkward writing, and with a presentation that uses artistic renderings of characters that the game warps to make them look like they’re talking, with the end effect being really unsettling.

Players will largely be solving puzzles point-and-click-style, with occasional dives into “find the hidden object”-style puzzles. Unfortunately, most of the game seems to work out to be a “find the hidden object”-style puzzle, as the game’s visuals are fairly detailed, and the game does a terrible job indicating what objects you can interact with, making it far too easy to feel like you have to keep resorting back to falling back on the “hint” button.

Making it even worse, the game doesn’t really indicate when you can’t do more in your current location and should switch to another, and you’re constantly expected to be moving back and forth between the locations, with little indication why you should be doing so.

In the end, Modern Tales: Age of Invention takes a really good concept of going on a Graphic Adventure through a mystery involving steampunk inventions and makes it unappealing through creepy graphics, and makes it tedious through the constant backtracking and visuals that make it difficult to determine what you can do, with the presence of an easy, tempting “cheat” button at all times acting as a constant reminder that you’d rather not be solving the game’s puzzles when given the choice. Unless you’re a huge fan of the genre or love all things steampunk, you’ll want to skip this one.

tl;dr – Modern Tales: Age of Invention is a steampunk-infused Graphic Adventure where you’re on the trail of a mysterious kidnapper of inventors. Unfortunately, the game’s visuals have off-putting characters and make it hard to see what you can interact with, there’s to much backtracking, and the constant presence of a “Hint” button makes it far too tempting to just skip the tedious gameplay altogether. I suggest you take it one step further and skip the game outright.

Grade: C-

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}