If you're a big fan of point & click, this game is worth your while. It's certainly not great, but it's nice.
the truth. But what will that cost him?
The game
This game is a point & click adventure game, meaning that you only need the mouse to control your character. The game is set in a 2D environment with 3D characters. This has worked for several adventure games and it also works for The Moment of Silence (TMoS).
As mentioned, the game is set in the near future in a world not unlike the book ‘1984’, although the public is quite content with that situation. In general they feel that these kinds of control by the government make the world a safer place and that this control of everything is therefore necessary.
The game begins when Peter witnesses a police raid at his neighbours their apartment. The police quickly enters the apartment and they apprehend Peter’s neighbour, leaving his neighbour’s wife and son behind in shock. Curious after what has happened, Peter decides to help the wife and son to find out what is going on. The player finds out that Peter has recently lost his own wife and son and is still recovering from that loss. Also, since Peter works as a communications designer who’s company has just gotten a major project called ‘the freedom of speech’ program, which in fact prohibits all forms of communication which cannot be monitored, Peter is one of those many people who are a big fan of the heavy control which the government exercises on its people.
However, during his investigation of the arrest of his neighbour, Peter discovers that all stories have to sides and that many things aren’t as beautiful as they appear and Peter starts to question his own believes.
The controls
Being a point & click adventure game, the controls are very straightforward. Objects which can be manipulated will become clear when you go over them with your mouse pointer: the cursor will change shape. A right mouse click will often give you a description of the object, while a left mouse click lets you interact with the desired object or character, or lets you pick up an object.
The inventory is shown at the bottom of the screen. Selecting an object will require a left mouse click, after which you can use it on another object, whether it’s from your inventory or something on the screen. Once again, a right mouse click will give you a description of the object. So the controls are simple and very easy to use. Furthermore, a click somewhere makes Peter walk to that location, a double click will let him run there.
The graphics
As I said before, the game consists of 3D characters walking around in a pre-rendered 2D world. Although many may prefer a 3D environment altogether, a 2D environment has always worked very well for 3rd person adventure games and the big advantage of a 2D environment is that it can contain much more detail, while not sucking up all the memory of your computer, resulting in the game having ridiculous system requirements. That said, I find the 2D backgrounds pretty good. They aren’t exquisite, but they aren’t sloppy either. They’re pretty good and help you to get into the atmosphere of the game.
The 3D characters however, I found to be somewhat less great. Granted, there are adventure games which use 3D character which look worse than those in TMoS and I’m not saying that the characters are badly done, but you have to take into account that the game was made in 2005, which is not that long ago. If you take that into consideration and you look at the characters, you’ll come to see that they could have been better looking.
But it’s not even so much the look of their faces that I found a bit disappointing, but more their bodies and their movements. Often when you see a character do something, you can clearly see that the movements aren’t human. However, this is not a too disturbing property of the game and if you can see past it, there is nothing to worry about.
A last point about the graphics is the fixed camera points that the game uses. I found this to be poorly done some times, meaning that I had to walk to a certain point to get the camera to switch, so that I could, for example, leave Peter’s apartment.
The sound
The game has some music in it, at certain moments and cutscenes and that music is pretty decent. During the actual gameplay, there are scenes where you have some sort of music, but I’m not entirely sure if you should call it music. They’re more like sound effects and although they help clearing the otherwise silence in the game, I believe that the game should have had more music in it.
The voices are good, sound quality wise. With that I mean that you don’t hear any background noise during the talking of characters, or any variances in volume (believe me, there are games which have both).
However, I found many of the voices to sound really stiff and rehearsed. There were times during gameplay that I actually could visualise a voice actor reading his lines from a paper in front of him. Luckily, that didn’t happen too often, but I found it a shame nonetheless. The main character, Peter Wright, luckily doesn’t have something this severe, although I often found his voice lacking somewhat in emotion. Not always, but often. Maybe this has something to do with the game being originally German, meaning that the original game with German voices. I don’t know if this has something to do with it though, but I do know that it shouldn’t.
Overall
If you like point & click adventure games and if you’re a conspiracy fan, than this game will give you plenty of hours to look forward to, because the game isn’t short. It will give you plenty of hours of gameplay, including the obvious getting stuck at certain points. However, you’ll never come to a point where you’ll actually have to reload a savegame because you’ve done something wrong; you can’t go wrong and you can’t die. The graphics are decent, although the movements of the characters could have been better and the fixed camera points are often poorly done. The sound is good, but the game lacks in music and emotion in the voices of the characters.
So on overall I would say about this game that it is nice and it will keep you occupied for some time, but it certainly isn’t great. But hey, that’s just my opinion.