A Trip to Yugoslavia: Directors Cut is a Point & Click game in where we play as a young photographer named Dimitri and make many a decision to try to keep him alive as an unforeseen war rages on. It is presented via full-motion video with a heavy dose of VHS effects to capture the retro feeling when this long gone nation existed. Dimitri is not a lucky guy, almost immediately he gets captured and held hostage which serves as our short tutorial. The first thing you should learn is how the QTE scenes work. You are shown a small icon of your character facing a certain direction and that is the arrow key you should press immediately. If you get to the point where it flat out tells you which key you needed to press then it is far too late and you’ve failed that prompt.
One of the most unique features is the ability to pause, rewind, and fast-forward the game. Rewinding immediately takes you to the last checkpoint, though since the game auto-saves so frequently as to prevent you from changing your choices when things go south, it is pretty useless. Pausing will allow you to search the scenes for hidden aliens if you want a specific achievement and has no use for anything else. Finally, you have fast forwarding. It is the most useful of the lot as it lets you get to the area where you died during the last playthrough faster to make different decisions. Yet that too has a flaw in that it is far too slow and barely feels any faster than letting the scenes play out normally, which does affect your willingness to explore all of its many endings.
The point & click sections are simple and typically require you to find something around the environment be they bullets or a camera. They make up the smallest portion of the game, but interestingly enough some have random placements of the item you need so it can be located somewhere else next playthrough. Where this title shines is in the choices it lets you make. There are a ton throughout this short adventure and will keep you coming back to replay it. You can become a cold-hearted killer as months living in a war-zone heavily weighs on your ability to show sympathy, die in a ditch for refusing to sell someone out, and even be forced to join the military forces that are causing havoc. It is pretty grim stuff and is moderately tense the first time around as you never know when one of those bizarre QTE icons will pop up.
Failing a quick time event does not always mean death either. It can very well open up new paths or things to see. This is the perfect time to mention that the FMV scenes are far from big budget, so reel in your expectations. Instead, they have a homemade feel to them and was in fact made by a group of Polish high school kids as an experimental title. It is sold at a single dollar so it is easy to excuse many of its shortcomings made under such circumstances. Some of them being that there a very little in the way of sounds throughout, the game mechanics being all over the place, and there is not much in the way of an actual story. It is more about the journey than an actual narrative that will hold your attention, such as deciding if its worth risking your life for a shovel.
There is not much in the way of characters aside from yourself. In one scenario you gain a partner, but since right before that scene you’ve skipped five months and it is now your first time meeting him, it is impossible to care about his well being as things immediately go dire. This is more of a tale about Dimitri’s own personal struggle, with things being shown instead of talked about as there is very little dialogue. If you manage to get the true ending you will unlock neat extras like Photos, Movies, and the ability to listen to the game’s pretty solid soundtrack. You will be getting a good amount of content for the price and isn’t some shovel-ware title with no effort put into it. It is quite an interesting project that while flawed in many respects, is worth taking a look at for fans of FMV based titles.
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