Schizm is boring, ugly, and derivative.
User Rating: 4.7 | Schizm: Mysterious Journey PC
Yuck This might have been a great game: if it had been released about six years ago. Schizm: Mysterious Journey is a Myst clone that came out about five years too late. “Clone” is a bit too much of a compliment. “Wannabe” is a slightly better phrase, because this game falls short of the excellent series that it aspires to be. The graphics for the game are bad. Prerendered backgrounds can and should look lots better than this. Perhaps it is because the game is fixed at 640X480 resolution when most computers can go way higher. It looks like some effort was put into the artwork for the game, but it is spoiled by the smeared-out, grainy, pixelated look that occupies every screen. The screenshots on the box make it look better than it does. “Riven” is much older and, in my opinion, looks better. So do Myst 3, Grim Fandango and Syberia. The voice acting is abominable, and so is the acting for the game’s cheezy movies -- another convention which is about 5 or 6 years old. If the game had a good premise, then the poor production values wouldn’t matter very much, but it doesn’t. It’s another “abandoned world full of weird machines” game. This time, it’s an alien world. A good puzzle game has to have puzzles that fit into the virtual world. One of the things that I loved about Myst and Riven was that the mechanical puzzles had a legitimate reason for existing. Unfortunately, “Schizm” has lots of contrived puzzles that don’t make sense. Want to walk across a bridge? Figure out how to push a series of 20 buttons in the right order. Don’t expect to just push one button. Apparently, aliens are extremely bored geniuses who have nothing better to do than build complicated contraptions that confuse Earthling scientists. I wonder if aliens have to push a series of color-coded buttons in a special order to operate a toothbrush. I’ll give the game props for having good music and, yes, the puzzles are very difficult. If you are up for a challenge, they will definitely do that. It’s hard to get interested in them though, since the game always constrains you along a tight path instead of letting you explore a 3D world. Here’s a tip: skip this one unless you have played all other adventure games that you want to play first. It will exercise your brain, but there's just nothing to keep you pulled in when you start to get bored.
