Could've been the creepiest adventure game ever... But nooooooo!
OK, we cleared that out... now let's get to the game itself. Still life is a stereotypical point-and-click adventure game, straight from the creators of Syberia (whoever the hell they are), where you point and click your way through a complex story of murder and mayhem. This time, you play as a young female FBI agent (I forgot her name) who is investigating a series of gruesome murders. The story itself is great. It's creepy, gruesome and very believeable. It might've been turned into a TV series about an FBI agent trying to catch a killer, it would've been bone-chilling creepy and I would be the first to downloa... I MEAN, purchase the DVD online. From a legal website selling legal DVDs. In a legal way. And being generally, you know... legal. Anyway. The story is great. So what's the problem?
Well, the most important aspects of any adventure game are three crucial things. First of all, the story. Great story, check. Next, there's immersive atmosphere, appropriate for the story. Well, Still Life is one of those games where you'll spend an hour on a certain scene, just to suck up all the chilling, scary atmosphere of this gruesome story. Just like Syberia, you'll observe every pixel carefully, smelling visual roses on every turn. Great, GREAT atmosphere for a Saw-movie-game-ripoff, just perfect... A metropolis shrouded in snow, abandoned buildings, creepy warehouses, dark alleys... it all makes you feel like reading some Edgar Allan Poe's story on a cold winter night, curled up near a fireplace, while the cold wind is howling outside your window. Weeeel, not quite. Don't get me wrong, the scenery, locations and atmosphere could make you feel like that. But there's a problem. You simply cannot FEEL it. Why? Because the characters look like they were taken from a Disney cartoon. That's right, even tough you are chasing a deranged killer through dark streets at winter, all the characters look like they were taken from "Lilo And Stitch". So yes, they kill the atmosphere more efficiently then a high-velocity bullet in the forehead.
Am I the only one who thinks that aspect of the game is seriously flawed and out-of-place? Seriously, how can you get into the whole creepy murder thing? Your character is arguing with her boss in a good old action movie fashion, spitting profanities like a drunken sailor, while looking like Mulan with short hair. What the hell?!?! Did the programmers decide the game is too scary, so they tried to ease it up a little by making all the characters look like cartoons? Then what's the point of making a scary game, if it's not allowed to be too scary?
But OK, the game does try to be more like a Noir movie and less like "Silence of the lambs". And we all love Noir, so I guess you can't mess that up. Right? Unless you write a script that is so dumb, cheesy and generally seems like it was written by a fourteen-year-old... Right?
Oh, sh**!
Here we come to the last, and most important aspect of any adventure game. Voice acting and dialogue. If a script is poorly written, it turns scary game into laughable. If a voice acting is crappy, you shouldn't have bothered in the first place. Does Still Life fall short in those two things? Kind of. Voice acting is not too bad at best, and cheesy and amateurish at worst. It sucks, but not too bad. Hey, not every adventure game can be like The Longest Journey... But the script is so cheesy, so poorly written at times, it makes you wonder just who the hell wrote this. Thanks to that, all the characters are forgettable, corny, and all in all unbelieveable. Their emotions vary from tough and determined to whiny (so whiny they make Natalie Portman from "Revenge of the Sith" look like Rambo) in a mere seconds. Seems to me that the only knowledge the author of the script has about human behavior is "changes from good to not good". At the most unappropriate time.
Next, we have the game's puzzles, who are... ah, what the hell! Just use the walkthrough!
One puzzle even involves making Christmas cookies for the main character's dad. I mean, come on!
Well, if the puzzles are tedious, unlogical and all in all a typical pixel hunting cliche, is there any reason at all to play this game? Actually, yes...
Just sit back, relax, enjoy the story and great atmosphere, and I guarantee you'll have a great time. Relax is the key word here, at least until you get your hands on new Gears Of War, Brothers In Arms, or something else that will make your adrenaline skyrocket. By the way, don't even try it until you get Still Life 2 as well. Because, as we know it, the best things come in 3. Not so bad, but also not so good either comes in 2.
Enjoy!