Welcome to Venezia Review

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   9
  SUPERB
  
  

Posted by Sxerks2 on July 18, 2014

Mysterious adventure Welcome to Venezia is an uncommonly enthralling experience.

The Good

• Beautiful and diverse environments 
• Superb, dynamic music 
• Great dialogs

In simplest terms, Welcome to Venezia is a third-person adventure in which you explore the deepest and darkest places of Venezia. The alchemy of developer SONICTHEHEDGEHOGXX's skill and vision, it is also unique, exciting, mysterious, and utterly lovely, with mesmerising landscapes and stirring music. It deploys more 'exploration' elements than any of the developer's works before it, and does so successfully, while maintaining the feel of an evocative, interactive art piece.

You begin without context, a character in the land of Venezia, and set out hiking towards the distinctive land seen from afar. Why? Initially, at least, just because it's there; instinctively there is nowhere else to go as well. Elsewhere, Welcome to Venezia's signposting is lighter-touch but similarly deft, suggesting objectives so subtly as to feel like you're always exploring on instinct--as though while being drawn onwards to that distant peak, every reveal is your own discovery.

You hike up a hill, and slide down the other side, getting worked out at the gym, or dancing until you're exhausted at the danceroom. The game is also an open-world game so you can finish objectives in your spare time.

Welcome to Venezia is an astonishing and eye-catching build by SONICTHEHEDGEHOGXX

Welcome to Venezia's gorgeous desolation and overwhelming scale bring to mind "How does he build it?". It's relentlessly beautiful, and there's much more visual diversity than you might expect of a futuristic-set game, not to mention some charming futuristic denizens, shopkeepers. While it may seem exploration is the main key, SONICTHEHEDGEHOGXX keeps in mind the gaming element by adding combat with guns, still under construction.

It's a real accomplishment that Welcome to Venezia draws together so many conventional game elements, and so well, and still feels like the art piece we expect from the ROBLOX Blog's mentioning: intriguing, ambiguous, and experimental. The game is just right for its paid BETA access. Its deliberate ambiguity brings on the urge to speculate on deeper meanings, but meaning here is bound to be personal, and best discovered for yourself. Discover it you should.