Seven Games of the Soul is the latest in Cryo's series of adventure games, all of which are loosely based on classic tales. In this case, the tale is Faust, and, in fact, the game was originally published in Europe as Faust: The Seven Games of the Soul. Like the other games in the series, including Ring and The New Adventures of the Time Machine, Seven Games of the Soul actually has little to do with its source material. There's a character named Faust and a villain named Mephistopheles. But apart from that, the game has more in common with dark adventure games such as Sanitarium and Bad Day on the Midway. Like these, Seven Games of the Soul is meant to be dark and atmospheric. It's set in a strange amusement park. And when it makes sense, it can be fairly creepy. Unfortunately, it doesn't make sense very often.
You play as Marcellus Faust, an elderly African American described as "a wise old man from Mississippi." You find yourself in an abandoned amusement park called Dreamland, and with no idea why you are there. A mysterious man with a bad smoking jacket and a strangely shaped chin appears and says he's Mephistopheles. He and "the boss" are arguing over seven souls, and you're meant to arbitrate their cases. This leads to a series of seven chapters, each based loosely on one of the seven deadly sins.
The first starts promisingly enough: A pair of conjoined twins are in love with the same man, and they act as moneylenders for the other residents of the midway. Mephisto offers both of them limitless wealth if they will give up the love of Hannibal. One accepts. This is where the story gets a bit confusing. Mephisto separates them, or something, and then one kills the other. Or something. Once this all plays out, you move on to the second story.
The second chapter deals with a scientist. Mephisto offers him limitless knowledge and immortality. He turns it down. Then you go on a treasure hunt for little rocks around his house. Then you build a homunculus with them. And so your hopes for an intriguing story, or even a comprehensible story, are completely dashed.
The game goes on like this: You'll track the life of a lustful artist and an overweight little girl. It'll get interesting for a brief moment and then degenerate once again into nonsense. The puzzles, for the most part, are a bit better than in previous Cryo adventures. But, as in virtually all of its predecessors, context is in short supply in Seven Games of the Soul. Often, you'll not even realize you needed to solve a puzzle, and exactly what you are supposed to be doing at any given time is also often a mystery.
What's strangest is that you actually don't act as an arbitrator in the cases at all. The game is completely linear, and the stories play out for you like badly acted, poorly translated little movies. At the end, you do have a choice, but it doesn't make much sense.
The game uses the second-generation Myst-clone format. You walk from preset location to preset location, at which point you can look around. The graphics are detailed but a bit bland. There are lots of huge, empty spaces, as well as lots of mysteriously inaccessible paths and walkways. The cutscenes look silly because of the human characters that appear unintentionally grotesque. Their awkwardness is matched by the quality of their voices, which are uniformly mediocre. At least Seven Games of the Soul features a few authentic jazz music tracks.
The real problem with Seven Games of the Soul is that it's not only nonsensical, but it's also pretentious. The title screen tells you, "Faust: A Game of Soul." What does this mean? Likewise, the dark nature of the game doesn't actually reveal any insights or interesting observations about human nature. Unlike in better games with similar themes, where the morbid plot and surreal situations actually add up to a larger, interesting picture, the shocking scenes in Seven Games of the Soul serve as little more than disturbing images, and not even very disturbing at that.
It comes closer to having a comprehensible story than Ring's or Time Machine's, and its puzzles are a bit more logical. But those who are looking for a dark adventure game are better off looking for older games like Amber, Sanitarium, or Bad Mojo. Or even strange old Inscape games, like Bad Day on the Midway or The Dark Eye. Maybe they weren't all great, but at least they made sense.
