A creepy game with stories that'll compel you to play this game to completation.
As implied from the short summary to this review, one of this game's strengths is its stories. Both are rich and contain a cast of characters that you'll feel for when you unravel Theresia's mysteries. To me, the stories were what kept me going when I got stuck in the game (I'll get to that in a moment).
The objective of the game is simple, escape and regain your memories. That's right, both main characters have some form of amnesia when you start either story. A little overused perhaps, but it fits in with Theresia's goal which is to creep you out to the max from the unknown.
Gameplay is kinda 'Myst-like'. You'll wander around corridors and enter rooms to find information or something to maybe help you get the hell out of where-ever you are. Occasionally you'll encounter stuff in the corridors themselves. In either case, you switch from a 'mobile-screen' view used to move in corridors to a more 'point-and-click' view to help you explore the rooms or something interesting anyway. Now, as with a lot of point-and-click adventure, there is a tendency for the game to degenerate into some sort of pixel hunt. Theresia unfortunately stumbles into this category. On the bright side, it doesn't do it too often to make the game unplayable, just often enough to render frustration.
Just to point one other item out (this is especially true with the 2nd story I found), to progress in the game you may have to trigger certain events for items to work. Does this sentence make any sense? If not, play a couple of other adventure game to see what I mean. For now, I'll say that it may be easy to miss key items or stuff just because you didn't search a particular room enough, more you got crossed-eyed while pixel-hunting etc etc. In both stories they try to minimise this by giving you an item that'll help you see what you've missed. Unfortunately it sometimes can be so vague that you have no idea what you've missed in the first place. An advice I can give for this is to not only use that particular item I mentioned but to also search in every different locale possible and to save often before doing anything!
To save often huh? You don't come across much adventure games with health bars that's for sure. Yeah, the game gives you a small health bar to deal with some situations you may find yourself in. The game may seem too generous with the health potions you find, but it does help release some tension, especially when playing this at night in the dark...
Ah, just before I conclude I would like to repeat (more or less) what it says in the menu: "Play this game with earphones/headphones..." Seriously, I believe this game is more enjoyable to experience/play with the spooky noises and the ominous music floating into your ears (although the game doesn't have a wide variety of music to offer, good as it may be).
Story: 9.0 (great stories and great presentation too)
Gameplay: 7.0 (what can I say, standard point/click stuff with creepy atmosphere included)
Finishing the game took around 20-24 hours approx, for both stories of course. For those of you with the game, I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I did. For those on the fence, c'mon over and give it a shot!
~mya