Pendulo Studios closed several months ago: Management concealed the situation after the last round of layoffs in March
There has been no activity and no employees for six months, a tragic way to end a 30-year history of developing video games
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Pendulo Studios tarnished in its last years a trajectory of successes and quality titles, including the three titles of the Runaway series, the acclaimed graphic adventure Hollywood Monsters, Blacksad: Under the skin, Alfred Hitchcock Vertigo, and the most recent, Tintin Reporter - Cigars of the Pharaoh, which did not reach sales or quality targets.  https://www.gamereactor.eu/pendulo-studi...h-1613073/

Thats too bad. I played vertigo recently and it was an odd one, but it was a decent time.

I just tried “Tintin Reporter – The Cigars of the Pharaoh” and I definitely think that the game could be really fun – if the controls worked. Whether I use the mouse near the cleaning lady or not, the result is the same. That's no way to program a game.

I never got very far in “John Yesterday” because I didn't like the setting and the characters.

“Vertigo” was quite good, but I haven't played “Blacksad” yet.



Pendulo has always been a studio that put me off, which is no loss.

None of their games that I ever played (Hollywood Monsters and one or two of the Runaways) were to my taste, but it’s still sad that they couldn’t keep it together.

I played the first Runaway a couple of months ago. One of the worst games I've ever played. The main character was awful. All attempts at humor fell flat, half because the humor wasn't humorous and half because the voice acting was so bad it couldn't deliver a joke to anywhere within a hundred mile radius of its intended address. My favorite part was when the game lectured me on sexism. If you've seen the way this game dresses the female sidekick and the positions it puts her and the camera in, you'd know that this is actually the only half-decent joke in the game.
Also some of the most egregiously awful invisible pixel hunting since that piece of snake skin in the first part of Gabriel Knight.

I mean, I'll be honest, I quite disliked every single game I've played of theirs, but it's obviously awful for all the employees and bittersweet to see the end of a prominent adventure game studio with such a long history, way back to the 1990's.

That's a shame. Played all the Runway games and both Yesterday games, didn't hate them like a lot they were fine. Certainly weren't the worst of the early 2000 adventure games, but that isn't exactly a high bar.

It’s apparent that Pendulo Studios’ greatest strength was their talented team of visual artists. Their weakness lay in conveying a cohesive story, not to mention their inability to create jokes that were actually funny. (My memory had thankfully repressed the cringe bear joke from Runaway 2 up until recently.)

Despite the flaws, I enjoyed playing Runaway 2: The Dream of the Turtle. That opening location of a crashed seaplane in the jungle, with rays of sunlight bursting through the dense canopy, was an atmospheric beginning that I really enjoyed. All of the 2D backgrounds in the game have aged quite gracefully.

I liked the character Flowerpot near the start of the game. Hiring decent voice actors definitely enhanced character depth thanks to the addition of tonality that would otherwise be lost in freeware/indie titles, this was a smart decision by Pendulo Studios.

There are only a handful of games that I would automatically point to as having the most exquisite 3D graphics in an adventure game, one of those being Blacksad: Under the Skin.

David Gasman is a voice actor I admire in general, he does a phenomenal job as the mob boss Desmond O’Leary. I consider this to be Pendulo’s best game by far. The choices unfortunately feel rather railroaded, but it ultimately leads to an INTENSE ending.

I only got halfway through Runaway: A Road Adventure. I’ll be diplomatic here and just simply say it’s a flawed experience that I wouldn’t recommend.

My personal opinion is that lack of proper quality assurance was definitely a contributing factor in the downfall of Pendulo Studios.

For instance, many years ago I downloaded an iPad demo of The Next Big Thing (confusingly renamed Hollywood Monsters for iOS devices) and experienced a crash immediately after launching the game. They took ages to fix it, which by that point in time I was no longer interested.

In the PC version of Blacksad you can walk entirely off-screen when walking too far along the main street.

I absolutely adore the Tintin comics by Herge (seriously who doesn’t?), but I never played Cigars of the Pharaoh by Pendulo because the GOG reviews spooked me off with how many people were encountering bugs and glitches.

Hopefully the former employees have found work elsewhere by now. Overall Pendulo Studios was a mixed bag experience from my perspective.

My favorite game of Pendulo is The next big thing (spiritual successor of Hollywood monsters) and my worst probably Igor: Objective Uikokahonia which was rough around the edges and i still haven't played their 2 last ones. I didn't dislike Runaway series, I remember the first one came on a bleak era for adventure fans in the early 2000's along with syberia and sort of gave an energy boost in the genre in the west which was much needed. They also brought back production quality that was much needed at the time. I always liked their visual style and their puzzle design most of the time with the Yesterday titles being notably satisfyingly hard

I was playing lot of Pendulo games - all Runaways and also both Yesterday and I liked them. I was playing also Blacksad, it was not bad, but controls was disaster. I didnt played Tintin - I have seen it on Gamescom when it was shown by one of the Microids person. While I liked adventure parts, I absolutely disliked action passages with QTE, it was really ridiculous. He has shown us also one stealth passage, where he had problems to go through... For me it was too console-oriented game with focus to casual players with undemanding gameplay. I think for Tintin should be more suitable classic 2D hand drawn point and click adventure...