A Trip to Yugoslavia: Director's Cut (PC) Review

A Trip to Yugoslavia: Director's Cut feels almost grimy, as it spends its first few moments barrelling down with tutorials. Some of these tutorials are very necessary, such as the ones explaining how to play the game. Some of them, like one that explains the game's "unique" save system, which is really just an auto save, seem superfluous.

Playing through the game (and, yes, it can be called a game) is fairly hands off. Players will occasionally make a decision, play a QTE, or click around an environment. The environment is, as is the rest of the game, all real-world locations, and pictures of those locations. It's a perfectly fine way to play through the game, and with things like having to turn off your own gun safety and checking your weapon, the level of interactivity is surprising early on, even if the game is largely watching cutscenes and making decisions.

The QTEs aren't particularly interesting, and as the game mentions during start up, a scan will need to be run to make sure the QTEs sync with your computer. Unfortunately, a lot of the time, it doesn't matter. As long as the arrow keys are pressed as soon as the prompt is seen, it doesn't seem to matter if you do it in time. You could theoretically just keep pressing it until the cut-scene plays out in your favour.

There are, as previously mentioned, choices to be made. It's interesting because the choices are conveyed in little windows, similar to how YouTube suggested videos used to be shown. It's a clever way to deal with these choices, but the choice isn't always obvious. While it may seem that you are going to, for instance, kill a guard, you're actually just going to walk away from him.

Fortunately, the story is pretty interesting, and is really the main selling point. The use of found footage is equally intriguing, but manages to be somewhat of a hindrance. Sometimes, it hard to tell if the video is stalling, or the tape is just "going bad." Navigating the world is really simple, as players will mostly just be clicking on things to proceed. Unfortunately, the game seems dead set on preventing you from doing much in the way of exploring, and the experience is very linear.

Really, A Trip to Yugoslavia is at its best during its point and click segments. Frankly, the acting is really off-putting during the cutscenes, and there are occasional problems in the storytelling. For instance, during an early cutscene, players have to decide whether to harm a solider. If chosen to, suddenly the solider is just incapacitated. This is symptomatic of this game's biggest issue. It's simply at its best when it's not trying to do anything experimental. Even then, it's not particularly remarkable, and just seems like some interesting ideas that never really gel.