Return to the Same Old Adventure Game!
As the title implies, this is a return to the same old adventure game you're used to playing. 10 or 15 beautiful landscape portraits followed by a tedius dance of "Is my mouse touching an active object?"
This game failed to deliver on 4 out of the 5 key features necessary of any decent adventure game :
1. Longevity : This game is far too short. In the attempt to make it non-linear, they made a game that can be solved in 30 minutes flat.
2. Puzzles : There are about 5 logic puzzles in this game. Far less than any other adventure game I've ever played. All the puzzles are completely solvable by anyone age 6+. Most puzzles have the answers conveniently carved right above them.
3. Cutscenes : I tease you not, all cutscenes in this game are black and white comic spreads. This is not counting the opening and closing cinematic which is probably 10 seconds altogether.
4. Sound : By the water? Hear the ocean. By the hot springs? Hear steaming. By the jungle? Hear monkeys. Yeah, that about does it. Even the comic book cutscenes lacked a lot of explanatory dialog. And speech? Forget it. If you pick up a book or notes with a few sentences, you will have to read them yourself.
5. Graphics : This is the only aspect of Adventure Games that wasn't horrifically bad in this game. What few screens you had to work with were 360 degree viewable and thank god, cuz you'd need semi-decent graphics to help you pick up all the redundant objects.
What's sad is that most folks seem to be content with what this industry is kicking out recently. Nevermind every other game genre has made huge improvements through graphics, ingenuity, and overall content. Adventure games(Excluding Myst Series) are essentially carbon copies of previous games. Carbon copies, and yet lately they all fall short of 7th Guest/11th Hour in sheer number of puzzles; and none seem to hold a candle to the length of other greats such as The Longest Journey and a handful of King's Quests.
Nowadays the genre is shooting for the shortest, cheapest, and easiest possible route. Effectively saying the consumer has ADD, is cheap, and doesn't want to use any brain power. At the very least Adventure games tell an interesting story through cutscenes, but this one doesn't do that either.
I believe the Myst series is one of the top 3 selling game series of all time. So there IS a market for adventure games, but no one seems to want to step up and do one right. Having to charge less than 20.00 for your product as soon as it touches the shelf tells the consumer that this is a cheap, short game immediately. But we'll continue to pay it, cuz we're sheep.