Vigil: Blood Bitterness is a strange bird. A white crow even among indie adventure games (or black and white crow to be more precise). Vigil is a surrealistic piece done in the some graphic art as Sin City comic books, with splashes of color here and there.
And that is the best thing (and probably the only good thing). The art is strange, pretty and endearing and it immediately bent my liking towards it. To be blunt everything else is an unmitigated mess.
The plot is made solely of pretentious pseudo-philosophic ramblings that were amusing at first, but get stale very fast. As I understood, the game tried to bring some sort of message across about Good, Evil and one's perceptions towards these concepts; Guilt and Redemption also plays in there somewhere. It all quickly loses its focus and becomes annoying rather than compelling.
In this game you are dropped in the environment without knowing what to do and without any guidance how to solve the puzzles or The Puzzle to be precise, as the game is a big fat one. For the most part you are wandering around and dying strange and bizarre deaths (like being eaten by a bed), while trying to get your bearings. That only serves to increase the playtime of this otherwise dreadfully short game, that can be completed in under an hour if you know what you are doing; if you don't, then you will spend more time reading the walkthrough than doing anything else.
Controls are very simplistic (both mouse buttons), however the pathfinding coding is dreadful. The main character will stumble around (literaly), catching edges and battling with cupboards, bridges and crazy camera. You will find you character running in place, because he can't turn a corner and etc.
Oh, and let's not forget deaths, both literal and figurative. The game has no internal save function and you have to rely on the autosave which preserves your progress after each of the four chapters (or should do that... theoretically). In between of that you will repeat each chapter a gazillion of times until you get everything right only to have Vigil crash on you at the transition between chapters.
Yep, that is another problem - the game was beta-tested by monkeys or not tested at all. If the game doesn't skip a cutscene that has important puzzle solving clues, then it crashes. If the game doesn't crash, then it will refuse to acknowledge you completing a puzzle even tho you did it right. That was the main reason I couldn't finish the game, even though I came to the very end.
I am tempted to think that the ones creating the game had a very wicked sense of humour. Remind me, why I gave Vigil two whole stars? Oh, yeah, I liked the art!
