This disappointing game could have been so much more.
Positives:
* Great Premise
* Good Voice Acting
* Beautiful Environment Renderings
* Intuitive Interface
* Faithful Adaptation of the Book
Negatives:
* Graphics
* Linear Plot Bugs
* Poor Story Transitions
* Pointless Tasks and Items
* Misleading Replayability
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Let me start by saying that I was really looking forward to this game. I love the premise of a juicy “whodunit”, and I am far enough removed from the original AC novel to not be predisposed to the course of events or outcome.
I should mention that there are some mild spoilers in this review, though I will flag them in sections so that you can avoid them if desired.
I. Graphics:
Let’s start with the graphics, which are a mixed bag. First, I was disappointed in the lack of resolution control. I don’t know what the game was being displayed at (640x480 maybe?), but there was enough evidence to suggest it was low. It would have been nice to be able to crank up the resolution for some smoother representations. Given that the game’s environmental depth doesn’t come anywhere close to most games available today (not an indictment in and of itself--the story simply doesn’t call for it to), this oversight appears to be either because they couldn’t figure out how to do it, or wouldn’t spend the effort/money.
Second, the character renderings are antiquated by current standards, but passible. While I wasn’t necessarily expecting Half-Life2 renderings, some of the character details appeared either sparse or just plain lazy (Vera’s hair comes to mind as a really bad case of “helmet” design). And outside of the few cut-scenes in the game, the character animations are extremely limited. Characters you are to interact with always are either standing or sitting stiffly—some occasionally fidget, but they mostly just stare straight forward until you interact with them. Case in point: if someone says they are leaving the room, the screen goes black, and then reforms with the person gone. Again, apparently it was either too costly, or too difficult, for the design team to simply animate the character walking away.
The one exception to the lackluster graphics are the background environments. These range from very good to quite stunning in detail (at least, under the circumstances). The dining room in particular stands out as an environment where it looks like they tried to make every pixel count. What the environments lack in sophistication and intricate 3D modeling is made up for in the artistry of the presentation. Even with the predominately gray exterior locale, they’ve added enough detail to make it interesting to look at—quaint gardens, rocky outcroppings with waves crashing on them, stone huts—all have character enough to look like they belong in a different game than the one the rest of the development team was putting together.
The bottom line is that the graphics overall are serviceable at best—which I suppose is all we could hope for from a game likely not given a large budget to work with. Still, it appears that in some areas they could have done a better job within the confines of the degree of modeling chosen, and that’s disappointing.
II. Interface
The interface is inspired in both its simplicity and ease of use (even if not particularly original). All of your interaction is done with the mouse. The cursor changes to indicate the type of interaction you can perform on whatever object/person/area you pass over with it. If it’s something you can study, the cursor becomes an eye, if it’s someone you can talk with, the cursor becomes a mouth, etc. All of these are clear and obvious, and clicking will perform the action.
You only have two screens to worry about apart from the main viewing window: your inventory and your journal, both of which can be accessed with different keys and/or mouse buttons, but which also have conveniently placed unobtrusive icons in the upper corners of the viewing window that can simply be clicked on to have the screens slide in and out of view. The inventory window is straight-forward and intuitive. Items can be arranged however you like and there are plenty of spaces—my one minor complaint is that items cannot be “swapped out” by dragging one over the other and clicking (instead you must move an item out of a slot you want another item to occupy first—a slight pain when you want to shuffle a large number of items around). The journal is your collection of facts you discover throughout the game, broken into four sections: general, characters, documents, and books. And the items displayed in each section resemble the hand-written scrawl of a personal journal as a nice touch. Most written items you find are automatically transferred from your inventory to your journal for reading and recall by simply studying them.
Some inventory items you find can be broken down into more basic parts, while others can be combined together to create new items. Up to four items can be combined in this manner. Unfortunately, while some partial combos are allowed on your way to building specific items, others are not. In those instances where it isn’t, this leads to frustration because you are left wondering if you are even on the right track. It would have been much better if all partial combos were allowed so that you could at least know if two items were supposed to be combined—even if you needed more components to have a final useful item. Again, it was done for some—but it should have been done for all.
III. Gameplay
Herein lies the bulk of my criticism of the game.
A. Interactivity—What’s That?
Let’s begin this section with the least of the offenders—the inconsistent application of observable items. In each environment, there are typically a few things you can observe (ie. click on) for a detailed description: a painting on a wall, a towel rack, a flower setting, a study globe, etc. The problem is—the vast majority of these serve absolutely no purpose; however, there are so few of them that you wind up believing there must be something significant about them. So you wind up clicking on everything you can just to make sure you didn’t miss a clue. They should either have made more mundane items observable, or they should have done away with them entirely except for those items that actually do bear scrutiny. For example, there may be several paintings in a hallway, one of which has a painting of a flower. That painting is clickable to study further while the others are not. Upon doing so, your character says: “It’s a painting of a flower.” OK. Why was this necessary? I can see that it’s a painting of a flower, yet the other paintings in the room are just as obvious, but not clickable. There’s quite a bit of this illogical partial-interaction in the game for no apparent reason. Sure, they might be going for “red herrings”, but it’s such a half-baked attempt that you have to wonder why they bothered to waste their time and yours in the process.
Which brings me to the next lesser negative critique in this area: “red herring” inventory items. Whether intentional or not, there are quite a few things you can pick up in this game that you never use. These run the gambit from the mundane to the intricate. It would be one thing if most objects in the game were interactive, but they aren’t. As with observational items, the objects you can collect are scarce enough to be considered potentially useful by the player, thus leading to you spending a lot of time trying to use them with the environment or combine them with other items—all for naught. If this is done intentionally, it’s a very poor excuse for trying to make things “challenging”…there’s nothing intellectually stimulating about adding frustration and time to the experience.
Worse than the inclusion of items you can interact with that never go anywhere is the inclusion of items that you can interact with that ultimately prove useless to the plot. These involve elaborate schemes to combine or use items and/or collect information that—although they do lead to action arcs for your character—do nothing to advance the story or help you in solving the mystery. These action arcs simply die without any cause or fanfare, and you are left wondering why on earth you had to go through all that trouble to find out facts, solve puzzles, and/or combine items when the result is zero reward beyond the fact that the game will not go forward until you have accomplished one of these tasks. This isn’t just bad storytelling, it’s bad game design. It would have been no trouble to close the loop on a number of these arcs with scenarios that would have been somewhat satisfying and add at least some minimal interest to the overall experience. It’s like they were just fishing for things for your character to do and ran out of time or steam to care to finish the full reasoning behind having your character go in that direction.
The flashlight is a simple (and less irritating) example of this. You go through the trouble of finding the parts and putting it together. The “reward” is that you can walk around in two certain hallways at night—they even go to the trouble of blacking the screen out in those areas except where the circle of light shines. It’s a nice visual, but then, nothing is done with it. You never find a single piece of evidence or even a necessary item while using the flashlight—nor do you “catch” anyone sneaking around in the dark. It’s simply a means to go from point A to point B in a small hallway, even though all the other rooms are still fully interactive without the flashlight even being turned on (they appear like in twilight). If they wanted it to be atmospheric or deemed as useful—why not require it throughout the house? Why not add some things that you can only witness/obtain if you shine the light in the right spot? So many missed opportunities for what should be basic interaction concepts.
Then some of these elaborate interactions are put in place so that other characters will respond to you in a different way. However, the insights you gain from their resultant reactions are minor, fruitless and ultimately inconsequential. Again, you are left wondering why you went through the effort at all. To add insult to injury, a number of these side quests can be skipped entirely and it won’t make a lick of difference in your perceptions or the outcome of events.
B. Linearity is For Suckers
If this story had blinders on any narrower it would be headed straight for the glue factory. The conversations are outright steered in a single direction. There are no options that lead to different reactions, and no way to avoid saying exactly what the script calls for. You simply follow the lines that are fed to you by clicking on them one by one until you are spent and then move to the next character. To make matters worse, you are forced to listen to your character and the character you are speaking with verbalize the entire diatribe—even if you can read the answer faster. No amount of key-pressing will cut off the speech. This is especially aggravating if you are replaying an area for some reason. There’s no way for you to hasten these interactions—you just have to trudge through at the pace the developers have set.
Nor can you skip them. Certain events and conversations trigger the progress of the story—and since you have the freedom to move about and change the order in which these triggers occur (believe me—this is not as non-linear as that suggests) some of these transitions can be awkward at best. At their worst, they can be completely irrational. There are bugs and/or loopholes in the transitions that leave you scratching your head and require you to completely suspend disbelief. An extreme example of these is that I once discovered the body of someone in the house who I then proceeded to go outside and talk with on the porch afterward—seems one thing I did triggered the body, but another trigger hadn’t yet been fulfilled to remove the person from being interacted with. This is really bad programming, and might be forgivable if it didn’t happen several times.
Still other triggers are there for that purpose alone—they don’t add to the story or make sense to help the logical progression of your understanding or events, they just simply must be carried out in order for the next cut-scene or chapter to begin. Again, this is poor design that does nothing to enhance the overall experience.
C. An Uninspired End ---SPOILER ALERT!!!!
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Probably the most damning critique I can offer for the game is the ultimate revelation that nothing you do or discover in it could have ever led you to solve the mystery. That’s right—the game is one big red herring and your amateur sleuthing is a waste of time. All the clues, fingerprints, bits of info, and facts you collect throughout the game are all for naught. Not a single clue you find, nor a fact revealed in the game will give you a hint of the truth behind what’s going on. While some of these things tie into the conclusion, they are merely backstory alone—they would not have aided in a deduction, for the key pieces to the mystery that would have allowed you to potentially discover the truth are not included.
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END SPOILER
As for replayability—forget it. The important aspect of the ending—the killer(s)’ identity is fixed. The only thing you can change is who else survives in the last chapter, and there’s no point in replaying the exact same linear story all the way through again to see a slight variation on the same theme. You can save the game before the last chapter and try a few different things with your final choices to see the possible variations—none of which are huge divergences that deliver on the promise.
IV. Conclusions
In the end, this game has style, atmosphere, a solid interface, and not much else going for it (well, the voice acting is quite good too). Unfortunately, the game play is so unflinchingly linear, hackneyed, ill-conceived, rushed, and illogical in execution that it overshadows those positives. You are instead left with an interactive mess that does a second-rate job of trying to turn a classic book into an immersive experience—an attempt that ultimately fails on most fronts. If only more time, money, talent, and thought had been applied to this game, I think it could have been something really special. Thank goodness the book is included—I’m sure it at least is a satisfying read.