Pendula Swing – The Complete Journey

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Pendula Swing is a Graphic Adventure released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2022. Players take the role of a retired adventurer who finds one day that his home has been broken into, which sets him off on a journey to recover the one item taken, and discover why it was stolen.

The story here is decent enough, though it is hurt by the game’s decision to use a font that’s not especially easy to read on the screen. The characters aren’t very well-established, but the premise at least is sound.

Likewise, the game’s 3D visuals are nothing special, but they work well enough for what’s being shown here. The muted soundtrack fares a bit worse, and when paired with the lack of sound in the game (there are optional gobbledygook “voices”, but these are more annoying than endearing), this makes for a dull, silent experience.

However, all of those are really minor issues next to the main problem here – this game’s controls are atrociously bad. Selecting an item to interact with is excruciatingly frustrating, requiring you to move your character back and forth until you manage to find the sweet spot where the item in question is highlighted, a spot that isn’t even necessarily close to the item in question. This is your primary way of interacting with the game, and it is broken.

I figured that at the very least this game might have decent controls using the touchscreen which would at least allow me to directly select the object to interact with… except this game does not have touchscreen support on the Nintendo Switch.

As a result, Pendula Swing is essentially unplayable on Nintendo Switch. Oh, sure, if you have the patience of a saint, you can wiggle your character around every time you want to interact with something in a desperate attempt to highlight the item in question, something that will make simple tasks that should take seconds to finish turn into minutes of tedium and frustration. Or you can take the more reasonable approach, and skip this game entirely.

tl;dr – Pendula Swing is a Graphic Adventure about a retired adventurer tracking down a thief who broke into his home. While it’s a decent premise, the game has difficult-to-read text and compounds this issue with some absolutely atrocious controls that make it a nightmare to select items in the environment to interact with. This results in the game being torturous to play. Don’t inflict this terrible game on yourself, skip it.

Grade: F

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2022 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Worst Game, Worst Port / Remake

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