The Descendant

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61

Mixed or average reviews - based on 9 Critic Reviews What's this?

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7.1

Mixed or average reviews- based on 17 Ratings

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  • Summary: In THE DESCENDANT, the end of the world is just the beginning. With what remains of humanity protected in underground Ark facilities, your mission is to keep survivors alive, while discovering a far greater conspiracy buried within Ark-01.

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The Descendant - Gameplay Trailer

Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2 out of 9
  2. Mixed: 5 out of 9
  3. Negative: 2 out of 9
  1. God is a Geek
    Feb 10, 2017
    85
    The Descendant offers a fascinating sci-fi tale intertwined with interesting puzzles, breathing fresh air into a genre that can feel stagnant at times.
  2. The Games Machine
    Feb 8, 2017
    80
    The Descendant is dubbed in English, but the interface and subtitles translation (in Italian) is excellent, and that's a very good start. The gameplay is rather original, different from what you can expect from an adventure game. It won't last too long (10 hours, give or take), but the experience is claustrophobic, cynical, disturbing and often surprising.
  3. Destructoid
    Jan 27, 2017
    65
    The Descendant is a wildly inconsistent adventure; reflective of the reasons why Telltale Games is seen in high regard, even on its worst days. At the same time, it's one of the better pretenders out there, thanks to the morally grey protagonists, daunting set-pieces, and odd gameplay subversions. Much like the sci-fi oddities found deep in Netflix, The Descendant has this rough B-movie charm going for it; flawed, but perfectly passable.
  4. IGN Spain
    Dec 22, 2016
    60
    The Descendant has a compelling plot but a very short length and a gameplay full of ups and downs. 1h per episode doesn't feel enough.
  5. GameOver.gr
    Jan 28, 2017
    50
    The interesting and well crafted story of this sci-fi adventure can’t compensate for the awful camera, bad design and poor overall execution.
  6. Adventure Gamers
    Jan 9, 2017
    50
    Despite the polished presentation, The Descendant is by-the-numbers sci-fi that rarely ventures out of its modest comfort zone. It won’t win an Emmy, but it does manage to entertain throughout its five brief episodes.
  7. CD-Action
    Feb 13, 2017
    45
    The developers from Gaming Corps don’t even try to hide the fact that they are shamelessly copying from Telltale. What’s more, The Descendant is a highly imperfect counterfeit – poorly written, not engaging, sometimes unintentionally funny and technically flawed. [02/2017, p.43]
    All this publication's reviews

See all 9 Critic Reviews

User Reviews

Write a Review
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3 out of 6
  2. Mixed: 3 out of 6
  3. Negative: 0 out of 6
  1. Pinnennet
    Mar 26, 2016
    10
    If you like Telltales games or Life is Strange then you’re going to love this!

    Right now they have just released the first episode so this    If you like Telltales games or Life is Strange then you’re going to love this!

    Right now they have just released the first episode so this will be a review of that, not the entire season.

    To start with the episode was quit short, just about an hour. That is my biggest concern this far. Humanity has destroyed earth ending it by nuking the whole surface. Luckily the governments built the “arks”. They held 4.000 of the most important people underground and made sure that there would be a tomorrow for mankind. You get to play the story throughout two separate timelines. First you play as Mia, a janitor, tasked with maintaining Ark 01. And you also play as Glen, two hundred years later. And Glen tries to find out why Ark 01 never opened when the other arks did.

    Its an intriguing story set in a wonderful apocalypse environment. The graphics isn’t amazing but I believe its better than both The walking dead and Life is strange. Gameplay is point and click puzzles mixed with a lot of dialog and dialog options just like expected. For me the puzzles was somewhat too easy but that could be just me. Something that I really like though was that in the end of the episode every failure I made in the puzzles during my gameplay resulted in one dead member of Ark 01. How many will be alive when I finished the season?

    To make it short. A great episodic game, perhaps a bit short but well worth the money!    … Expand
  2. Lordmetacritics
    Mar 27, 2016
    10
    You got to love this Telltales like game! A bit short but dirt cheap to buy. I dont even mind the somewhat bad voice acting cause the settingYou got to love this Telltales like game! A bit short but dirt cheap to buy. I dont even mind the somewhat bad voice acting cause the setting is perfect and the story really got me hooked!… Expand
  4. PublicNuisance
    May 3, 2019
    8
    I love Tell Tale type games such as Tales of the Borderlands and Wolf Among Us so when I heard about The Descendant I had to give it a go. TheI love Tell Tale type games such as Tales of the Borderlands and Wolf Among Us so when I heard about The Descendant I had to give it a go. The first episode is free which is something I wish more episodic games would do. The taster episode was enough to sell me on the rest of the season. It wasn’t the best of the genre but was solid and enjoyable.

    The story was above average and kept me entertained. You play as a “janitor” in a post apocalyptic world. Janitors kept watch over cryogenically frozen people, coming out of cryo sleep themselves every so often, after a nuclear war wiped out most of the earth. You are tasked with waking up the “descendants” of ARK-01 two centuries after the war and a couple months after other ARKs have already woken. You will find though that your goals are not what you had first thought and that things didn’t go smoothly at this ARK. The game is a combination of choosing dialogue options that not only further the story and branch it as well as various puzzles. The puzzles range from annoying to easy but serve the purpose of breaking up portions of the game and giving you something different to do well. If the game didn’t have them I would probably be complaining how there wasn’t enough for me to do outside of dialogue. The choices themselves are fairly well done overall. They felt like they gave me a good portion of control over the story and allowed me to make it my own. The ending to the story was rather abrupt and could have used an extra cut scene or two to fill in the gaps at least to provide more of a hint about how things were after the end. I don’t mind having to use my imagination and not having things spelled out but this felt more vague than it should have been. The graphics overall are decent aside from the hair on the characters which was pretty poor. It was neither the best or worst I have seen from games using the Unity engine.

    I played The Descendant on Linux using Valve’s Proton. It ran very well. I didn’t have to use any tweaks at all to get the game running. It didn’t crash on me at all. There was one scene where it only ran at 19 FPS but it only lasted for two minutes and then was back to normal. The game has a 30 FPS lock that is hard coded and can’t be changed. Luckily with a game like this it doesn’t hinder things too much as it isn’t a fast paced game and was at the full 30 FPS for the full game outside of that one scene with lag. There were a couple instances where there was some flickering on the floors but they only lasted a few seconds. Alt-Tab worked without any issues. There were only two graphics options to adjust in the game. I played version 5.0 of the game from Steam. It took me about 6 hours to beat the game. My total system usage for RAM was between 3.3-3.7 GB of RAM while playing. It used between 19-25% of my CPU.

    I paid $3.39 CAD for the full season but can say it is easily worth the full price which is $16.99 CAD at the moment. At the very least give the free episode a try especially if you are a fan of the genre. It is a solid game overall which is enjoyable with a good story and gameplay.

    My Score: 8/10

    My System:

    AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 19.0.3 | Samsung 850 Evo 250GB | Manjaro 18.0.4 | Mate 1.22 | Kernel 5.0.9-2-MANJARO | Proton 4.2-3    … Expand
  5. chrismarcatili
    Jul 3, 2019
    7
    The Descendant is not a revolutionary game by any means. It's very much in the style of gameplay made famous by Telltale, and even theThe Descendant is not a revolutionary game by any means. It's very much in the style of gameplay made famous by Telltale, and even the artistic style is in the same vein. But if that's what you like, then the Descendant is a pretty solid offering. It's quick, five episodes taking less than an hour each to play through. There's puzzles enough just to slow you down a little but they're not challenging (and in a few cases just annoying).

    The plot wasn't anything original (kind of felt like a pitch to do Tales of Fallout), and there were a few gaps in it (what ever happened to that crazy guy?). In fact, it all fell apart a bit toward the end, and there wasn't the payoff of an ending I was hoping for. As a story-focused game, I was expecting a bit more to it. But overall it's pretty much what you expect.    … Expand
  6. Mandulum
    Oct 13, 2017
    7
    Five Word Review: TellTale-style post apocalyptic adventure.
    Favorite Thing: I rather like post-apocalyptic stuff. While not spectacular it    Five Word Review: TellTale-style post apocalyptic adventure.
    Favorite Thing: I rather like post-apocalyptic stuff. While not spectacular it was enjoyable.
    Least Favorite Thing: They heavily copied TellTale's style but it's no wheres near as polished. I particularly disliked the controls, especially during a camera switch.

    Date Completed: 2017-10-08
    Playtime: ~ 4h
    Enjoyment: 7/10
    Recommendation: If you like TellTale's style of point & click (just minus the TellTale) then yes.    … Expand
  7. Hack
    Jul 12, 2017
    6
    I really enjoy Telltale games so I'm always on the lookout for similar games and The Descendant is about as close as it gets, albeit lessI really enjoy Telltale games so I'm always on the lookout for similar games and The Descendant is about as close as it gets, albeit less refined.

    I've just finished the game and I enjoyed it for the most part, it looks and feels like a Telltale game, just not as polished, if you told me it was an early effort by Telltale I wouldn't question it, they're that similar. I found the story interesting and you were kept guessing all the way until the end, I was kept engaged throughout and I always wanted to start the next episode after finishing the previous one. The voice work was a little rough in parts, ranging from serviceable to good depending on the character and the visuals while nothing special did the job, they went for the cel shaded look ala The Walking Dead and co. Gameplay was what you'd expect, walk around finding clues, press the correct button at the correct time and select whichever story choice you prefer. The Descendant did have more puzzles though which I personally didn't like, episode 3 was especially bogged down with fiddly puzzles.

    Now for the bad though, it's technically not great (is this genre cursed?), it's a Unity engine game that's capped at 30fps, you have to edit the registry to fix this which is easy enough to do but you'll notice straight away the game is optimised for 30fps, even on medium settings I couldn't hit 60fps in all situations (although to be fair, I did most of the time). So my advice would be to uncap and switch to medium settings unless you're using something better than a GTX 970, there's high and very settings above medium for those of you rocking big boy GPUs.

    Overall though it was decent and it's dirt cheap on key sites (I paid £2.32), plus episode 1 is free to try on Steam so if you're a fan of the genre give it a go.    … Expand

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