Edna & Harvey: The Breakout – Anniversary Edition | PC Review

Edna and Harvey: The Breakout is a point and click adventure game by Daedalic Entertainment. The original German version came out in 2008 and the English translation came out in 2011. Then why, you might ask, are you reviewing this game? The answer to that is simple: Daedalic Entertainment released an Anniversary Edition of the game, improving gameplay, polishing the dialogues and cleaning up the graphics. And that is the version I played.

Jet-Lagged Brain

I want to start this review by coming clean about how I played it. I made the mistake of playing this game while jet lagged, as I had just returned from my holiday in California. As I live in Ireland myself, that messed me up quite a bit. This caused me to take longer on puzzles than I normally would. I even needed to consult a walkthrough every now and then, but eventually I got my brain kick-started into adventure game mode. Good thing too, because Edna and Harvey: The Breakout is an old-school challenging adventure game.

Welcome To The Loony Bin

You play the role of Edna, who wakes up in a mental hospital. That alone is weird, because Edna doesn’t feel crazy at all and her toy rabbit Harvey confirms that. With the help of Harvey, you try to escape. Harvey can help, by tempo-morphing you into the past, where you can recover memories and skills.

Once Edna has escaped her cell, she gets to run around in the hospital, trying to not get caught again and finding a way out. She finds out that her father was convicted of killing the hospital director’s son, but Edna is sure he didn’t do that and wants to clear his name. But escaping this hospital is far from easy, and will take all of Edna and Harvey’s skills to succeed. The duo will also need the help of the quirky characters living in the hospital. Will she be able to convince them to help her escape?

Traditional Point And Click Adventure

Edna and Harvey: The Breakout is a traditional point and click adventure game, where you have a few ways to manipulate the world around you, gather items and talk to other characters. The goal is to escape the hospital and prove your father’s innocence, but you have a whole journey before reaching the end. The classic adventure game mantra “save early, save often” definitely applies to the game, as it can be brutal sometimes. 

Talk To Everything

The controls are very simple: a mouse click brings up a menu, from where you can choose to look, talk, pick up or use something. Commands that don’t make sense are left out. That doesn’t mean that Edna can’t talk to a door or a plant every now and then, though! The space bar shows the hot spots in a scene, so there’s no pixel hunting, although a hot spot sometimes isn’t exactly where the game shows it to be. If the item can be manipulated, Edna will do the most logical thing with it.

Tempomorphing

And then there’s Harvey. At some places in the game, you can switch to Harvey as a character and walk around with him. While Harvey can’t manipulate his surroundings, he can go to places that Edna can’t, and he can ‘add’ items to his inventory. In Harvey’s case this means that he can give Edna ideas related to the item. Harvey also has the aforementioned skill of ‘tempomorphing’. This means he brings Edna back in time with him to a specific memory that can unlock other memories or a needed skill. Once that is done, Edna returns to the present and can use that skill. It’s how I learned to forge signatures in the game. This kind of gameplay sets it apart from other point and click adventures and gives it its own feel.

Old And New

The voice acting is great and the graphics really got a big boost in this edition. It still retains the original’s comic style, but it looks so much more crisp and sharp. Daedalic really did a good job here. They even left the old graphics in, it’s easy to switch between the old graphics and the new ones. I prefered the new graphics, so I played the entire game in that. The game is pretty funny too, and delightfully weird with the characters. But it’s also quite dark, especially when Edna finds out more about her past, her father and why she’s in the institution.

Conclusion

The game manages to strike a nice balance between the dark, the funny and the quirky, while also giving the player a good challenge in the puzzles. Edna and Harvey: The Breakout will appeal to new fans of the point and click genre, while also be very interesting for adventure game veterans. Just make sure you’re not suffering from jet lag when you play it.

This review is based on a PC copy of Edna & Harvey: The Breakout – Anniversary Edition provided by Sandbox Strategies for coverage purposes.