Charming Atmospheric Mystery Game
It appealed to me because I am a fan of horror. Fear is a wonderful emotion to feed on for games developers and Nucleosys did a sound job of tapping into that from the get go.
You play a writer who recently just purchased an abandoned Victorian house in northern England. When you arrive in your car with your suitcases and get to exploring the house you know very little, but as you start digging around the dusty rooms, bookshelves and scattered pictures you begin to reveal a very murky past. The game's story lures you in and drip feeds you with horrifying details of these murky deeds and eventually you have to face the darker corners of the house with all this in-mind.
The game is controlled entirely by the mouse, allowing you with single clicks to combine items within your inventory as-well-as look around and operate items such as doors and lights. It does get tiresome sometimes whilst navigating the house and you encounter numerous doors as each one requires you to operate the door knob which the game responds with a short animation of you moving through the door.
The graphics are immersive and although not on-par with some of today's more high-end games, is beautifully rendered and does well to hide away the key items to the game.
The puzzles throughout are ingenius and with no help or clues to be found, sometimes fiendish. The first puzzle has you searching through the back of the house where you come across a bathroom acting as a makeshift dark room. Two of the photos within the room are of the kitchen within the house and one of a china pot on a sideboard in the kitchen. On further investigation you'll find the pot missing from it's photographed position in the kitchen and instead in a hallway hidden cleverly amongst other pots. In the pot is a key to an important door and without the visual clues of the photos, would have been extremely hard to locate.
Music as you navigate the house is paced and often intensifies the mood and some of the scores are excellent. Sounds of the doors can get somewhat tiresome on opening your 500th door, but on the whole the lack of sound actually punctuates the times when sound is playing.
Overall a well crafted adventure game which seems to appeal to those outside of the genre due to its content and offers an engulfing plot and mysterious air. Thoroughly recommended for adventure gamers, but also to those who like a good scare, a good horror movie or an engulfing story. The developers of the game certainly need more recognition for what is a suprisingly good release and one that will keep me gripped for weeks to come.