A Thriller and a Great Adventure for the Genre Lovers, Even if Rushed at the End
The game story is strong, pretty well written although if was a little rushed at the end in my opinion. It starts very good, it builds a climax that can rival a good thriller but then the plot resolution feels a bit strange, and to be fair I was disappointed. I won't give anything else away regarding the story as it would spoil the party to prospective players, but I think much could have done and there was material to make it much better. This game could have been a classic and ended up being just another adventure game with an interesting point of view, and I think a lot of it had to do with the way the story was finished. There are also some elements that feels out of place like the mood of the characters, which seems to have no effect on the outcome of the game, or maybe they have but I didn't noticed it, and that can't be a good thing anyway: It's very hard that a game will stop because your mental health went to the lowest level of sanity. Then, what's the point with it?
But the thing that can spoil the party to many is not really how the story ends but the awkward game controls and camera angles when played on a PC. Jesus! I don't think I've played a game before with such very, very strange controls, and not because they are complicated using K&M like some of the GTA series titles, just because they are plain weird. For example, there is this PAR concept where you have to follow the input commands the game give you by typing on the arrows and on the arrows on the numpad, 8,4,2,6 keys. The game will give you some colors and some tones to follow, and you should type them within seconds in order to keep the action going. If you ever played Simon, it feels like it although with a very limited color/tone chain. It takes plenty of time to master it but once you do it you will rarely fail. You actually will fail because understanding how this PAR concept works takes a while to figure out. It's not clear on the manual or in the tutorial that you actually have to type BOTH, the arrows and the numpad, and mostly feels that you can type either one. It's not after many tries that you realize the game is not broken but that the commands are just plain weird. But the real problem comes when you have to fix your eyes over the commands issued and not on the ongoing action on the back, making you to miss a good chunk of the game cinematics, which is the real shame. It also takes a while to get accustomed to the use of the mouse, but it's never as bad as the Simon-like interface. My only guess is that they designed this game to be played with a gamepad, and when translated to a K&M this was the only thing they could do. Either that or they were lazy, but based on the overall quality of the game, I would think it was the former
In terms of stability, I played the game on a PC running Vista 32 Bits and taken aside two random freezes the game was very stable and looked great overall for a game that is over our years old; it would be unrealistic to expect 2009 graphics on a 2005 game. I think the biggest challenge was for it to work on Vista, and at least on my case that worked out pretty well
One last note of weirdness: play the game and if you also played Syberia, didn't Carla Valenti look exactly like Kate Walker? Even if not exactly, I think they look way too similar. And that's just either very odd or one of the biggest Easter Eggs in gaming