Agarta

Agarta is a full-motion-video interactive thriller, filmed with real Turkish actors rather than rendered in-engine, following a character referred to only as "the Surgeon" — a serial killer navigating a world of corrupt police and government while the player makes choices along the way. FF Digital entered it into Early Access in May 2022 and released the full version that October, and its 520 reviews since have settled at Mostly Positive, roughly 71% — a score this review's research suggests reflects real, specific strengths pulling against equally real, specific limitations.

A performance that carries the material

The clearest, most consistent praise concerns the central performance and premise. One detailed review calls the story "gripping," specifically praising the acting and describing the show's approach — following events from the perspective of the killer rather than those hunting him — as a genuinely compelling angle on well-worn thriller territory. Reviewers who finish the playthrough consistently credit the atmosphere and tone even when they're critical of other elements, suggesting the writers and cast got the emotional core of the piece right even where the surrounding production has real rough edges.

Choices that mostly don't choose anything

The most specific, well-documented weakness concerns how much the interactive structure actually matters. One detailed review tracked its own playthrough closely and reports that of roughly 30 decision points offered across the story, 24 change nothing beyond the next ten to fifteen seconds of footage, five affect a single scene, and only one actually changes the ending. That's a precise, falsifiable claim rather than a vague complaint, and it lines up with a broader, recurring pattern in this game's reviews: players consistently describe replaying or exploring different choices out of curiosity about what they'd have shown, rather than because the story meaningfully forked.

A bug the developer tried to fix, that didn't fully go away

This review pulled FF Digital's public Steam announcements directly, and found a clear acknowledgement of a significant early problem: English-language players reported subtitles failing to appear at all, even with the option enabled, and the developer posted a specific announcement in November 2022 saying an update should resolve it. That's a responsible, direct response to a real launch problem. What the patch didn't fully solve, based on reviews from years afterward, is translation quality more broadly — a January 2026 review calls the English translation "criminally bad," and a July 2026 review, while noting the plot stays followable, still describes the captions as "not great." Those are two related but distinct problems: the 2022 fix appears to have addressed subtitles failing to display at all, while the underlying quality of the English translation itself remained a separate, ongoing weakness the developer never revisited.

Short, and priced to match

Reviewers are consistent that a full playthrough runs somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours, considerably shorter than many FMV titles in the same price bracket. At roughly NZ$4.50, several reviewers explicitly frame the price as fair specifically because of that short runtime, rather than treating the brevity as an unqualified negative — a reasonable way to think about a format that's inherently more limited in scope than a full game.

A small but real gesture toward usability

It's worth crediting a detail easy to overlook: Agarta includes a skip button for scenes a player has already watched, letting them jump straight to new choice points on repeat playthroughs rather than sitting through identical footage again. More than one reviewer flags this specifically as a thoughtful, format-appropriate touch that not every FMV game bothers to include, and it meaningfully softens the sting of the story's limited branching by making it faster to actually explore what those branches show.

A completion curve that fits a short, mostly-linear story

Steam's global achievement data offers a useful cross-check on the "choices barely matter" claim. Across 30 tracked achievements, the earliest story milestones clear for roughly two-thirds of owners, and while completion tapers off toward the rarer, presumably alternate-path achievements, the overall shape is a steady, gradual decline rather than a sharp split between "common" and "rare" outcomes. That's consistent with a story most players experience along broadly the same path, with only a handful of genuinely divergent endings or scenes for the more curious or completionist-minded minority — supporting the detailed reviewer's specific tally of the game's choices rather than contradicting it.

A majority-Turkish audience, with English as an afterthought

It's worth being upfront about who this review's evidence actually represents. Of the roughly 520 total reviews for Agarta, this review could only pull 42 in English — the remainder are overwhelmingly in Turkish, reflecting both the game's Turkish production and cast and its likely core audience. Reading a sample of those Turkish-language reviews alongside the English ones shows a broadly similar split of opinion — praise for the story's grip and the cast's performance, frustration with the short runtime and limited branching — suggesting the concerns raised here aren't simply an English-speaking-audience complaint about a game made for someone else, but are shared reasonably consistently across the game's actual audience.

Where it lands

Agarta gets the hardest part of an FMV thriller right — a performance and premise that hold attention across its short runtime — while falling short on the parts that make the format worth returning to: choices that mostly don't matter, and an English localisation that never fully recovered from its early problems even after the developer tried to address them. A 5 reflects a short, cheap, genuinely watchable production that oversold how interactive it actually is.