Customer Reviews

Schizm: Mysterious Journey (DVD-ROM)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Usually I write a review to "gush" all over a product, but for me this game is the exception. In my opinion, some gushing and some caveat emptors are in order for Schizm: Mysterious Journey. First, a review I read before I purchased the game said it best: "Albert Einstein on his best day could not beat this game without a walkthrough!" Plain and simple, some of the the puzzles in Schizm are HARD--VERY, VERY HARD. Second, although other reviews I've read complain about the acting (it's really adequate for a computer game), one main reason I buy an adventure game is for the artwork, graphics, and atmospherics. In Schizm, these elements are "drop-dead gorgeous!" I have never seen an adventure game so beautifully rendered. Also, the music and sounds compliment the game perfectly. Finally, I strongly suggest that anyone purchasing this game buy the DVD version (presuming your computer is so equipped). I'm told that the DVD's graphics are far better than that of the CD-ROM version. So in sum--if it's easy puzzles, a great story line, and "award winning" acting that you want in an adventure game, keep looking. However, if you value REALLY HARD puzzles, a gripping plot, super graphics, marvelous sound and ethereal music, buy the DVD version of Schizm: Mysterious Journey. But beware: it's one for hard-core adventure gamers only.

the reviews to Schizm, varying from the positive to the dismally negative, only make clear one simple thing: we all see and hear complete different things in the same object. So: Schizm has a very bad acting. YES. Schizm has very difficult puzzles. YES. And then? For me Schizm's world is one of the most compelling I ever saw in a computer game, similar to Riven under many aspects but more surrealistic. If you like to explore an endlessly fascinating landscape, if you like a slow and meditating pace, if you DON'T like ridiculous inventory-based puzzles but love to try to solve tough but not impossible logical puzzles, then Schizm is your game. In any other case, if the shooters are yor cup of tea, well, give it a wide berth. Luckily, in the world there's place for anyone and for every idea and taste! For me Schizm is already a classic (and by the way, the DVD version is really better).

i started the cd version on a friends windows computer (i have a mac), but i didnt have adequate access to really give the game the concentration it requires. for this reason, i went out and bought a last year's model windows computer and the dvd version of schizm. of course, this gave me access to many superb games not available to mac, but schizm was the main reason for the purchase. let me also add that the dvd is not more convenient (you have to keep flipping it), but the visual quality is better than the cd, and there is an extra tough puzzle (the telescope). schizm is not a true adventure game, but one that has a rather silly story to serve as a framework for its puzzles (think the myst series)

the other reviews all come to the same conclusion: beautiful and very hard. the scenes are surreal and - i hate to use this word - stunning; whoever thought these up had a hell of an imagination. living floating islands, a city of huge balloons, a partially ruined temple cut into rock, and this is only part. the puzzles are difficult, more so than riven, but i only found one obnoxious, where in a village, you had to enter each house twice, and leave it only once; this was pure trial and error, and i looked up the answer. all the other problems are well within the capability of one who has high school arithmetic, as there is a triangle problem which involves simple proportion, no trig (kind of like pegging off distances across rivers in boy scouts). there is 360 degree panning at all points, with the novel feature of the directional keys causing rotation in 45 degree increments, if desired. another novel feature is the necessity of teaming up by the two characters, even though they cant see each other, in order to solve problems. this game carries a very small inventory, one or two items, and trial and error are not necessary as the use of each object is quite obvious. other reviewers constant gripes concerned the acting, but i consider this unimportant in this type of game; after all, the Millers (sirius, achernar, and atrus(acrux?)) are pretty bad, too, but their games are classics.

it appears from the credits that this game is of polish origin, and there are some areas where it could use some extra polish before it reaches the level of refinement of, say, riven. example 1: for the problem of filling the balloon with gas, the directions are run by very fast and not altogether clearly. if you miss part of it you dont get to hear it again. there should be a log to record these directions for reference. The solution to this problem is very clever. start with zero. example 2: the cut scenes dont always run smoothly, especially the ones of the living islands floating away. they freeze, but i lost no saves or progress on restarting. this may be due to XP, but i cant say for sure. example 3: several times in the game, mystical hand signals are given, when saying directly would have been just as good. when indicating that another pearl was needed, the planetary denizen raised one finger and said nothing. i thought that meant to go upstairs. but it was no problem finding and getting tne extra pearl. another time, bilateral chopping motions were given with the hands to indicate to close a door. the actor could simply have said that a door needed to be closed. (this caused a major hangup in my game).

all in all, this game is one of outstanding beauty, with puzzles to match. if you dont like these very difficult problems, buy the longest journey or syberia (both excellent), but if you liked riven, i think youll like schizm. incidentally, i read a sequel is coming out called Mysterious Journey.

Original Thoughts upon first starting the game: I have the DVD version of this game, and this is the first day I have played it. I have to say the install went well, very few options to choose from in the DVD version. Apparently in the CD ROM version you can select how much to load onto the HDD, but you don't get that option here. According to the website, this is most likely because the speed of a DVD rom drive is so fast, there is no need. Unfortunately, despite the speed of the DVD drive, the game play is so choppy that it's unplayable.

The recommendation from the vendor web site says that if your game play is choppy, turn the sound/music off. That doesn't make for a very interesting game if you don't have music in the background. (I did turn the music off, and it does make a difference, but the choppy scrolling and pausing is still there, plus, no music). The game seems to pause the DVD every time you finish scrolling or moving, which means it has to spin back up if you want to move and scroll again. This on a P4 machine seems a bit too problematic for the game to be any fun at all.

I agree wholeheartedly with other reviews too, the acting is a bit blah. When you read mission logs from some of the scientists, you can see them reading from cue cards pretty much. Though, the game isn't about the acting, it's about the puzzle solving.

Just for grins, I went onto the vendor web site and looked in the game hints section. I have to say that the first hint presented on the page is simply mind boggling. Not only are there random sequences built into the game so that each game is different, and each time you play it it is different, but all the mathematics involved seems to be quite counter intuitive. I'm not a meteorologist, so tracking weather patterns isn't my forte. So I have no clue how to get past the main first puzzle without reading that hint.

All in all, after only 30 minutes of game play, i'm quite disappointed. There is one thing to make a puzzle challenging, quite another to make it so random that game play ceases to be fun.

Final thoughts after finishing the game - I have finished the game now. Amazingly quickly. Mostly because after you visit three worlds...that's it. Done. There are so many features of the game, and especially of the ship that you never get to learn about because the game ends so abruptly. I was able to get around a lot of the choppy game play by disabling all virus scanning programs before starting the game, as well as closing any other open programs (even things like my printer manager).

Again, many more hard and counterintuitive puzzles through the rest of the game. There were some neat sound effects with bells you had to ring in certain orders, etc...and cool water effects. Unfortunately, since I had worked so hard on the puzzles, i felt like the end of the game was a real let-down. There should have been several more worlds to encounter before solving the game, and much more of the vivid scenario that you should be able to interact with. It's almost as if the game ended just as it got really interesting :-)

This is not an easy game, and even hardcore gamers are likely to find themselves scratching their heads. If you're a newbie to the adventure genre, better to start off with something like Syberia.

The puzzles are what define this game. Yes, the graphics are beautiful -- plenty of pre-rendered, first-person beauty that transition wonderfully from scene to scene. The background sound is reasonable and appropriate, although you won't be begging to buy the soundtrack. And you get to play two characters (often they help each other solve a single puzzle). But it's the puzzles you will remember...and they're very tough.

This is, after all, an alien world, and so the fact that you will be decoding other alphabets, working with strange symbols, and even performing plenty of math (!) somewhat makes sense given the story. You have to assume that the locals prefer to lock door and control bridges with puzzles rather than keys, but I'll press the "I believe" button for that. If it's been a little while since high school trig or conversions between number bases, you may want to prepare for some stretching of the brain.

Don't get the wrong idea, though -- these are praiseworthy puzzles, and I dare you to complete them without a walkthrough. They're all perfectly logical (incredibly logical, in fact), so there are no excuses -- but boy, they can be challenging!

The story is sparse, but then in many ways it is supposed to be. This is an alien world, and your job is to figure out how things work, so a large part of that is not knowing exactly what you're doing. That's great. But when the end of the game comes and you're still wondering what it was that you actually just DID...well, that's somewhat less than satisfying.

I have two main complaints. First: the voice acting is, sadly, very -- very -- pathetic. I mean no offense, but even I could do much better. It's actually kind of embarrassing. Fortunately most of the time you're wandering deserted areas.

Second complaint: There is absolutely much too much traveling. I enjoy wandering around new areas as much as the next gamer -- and with scenery like this, you'll want to, too -- but towards the end of the game, things got absurd. In the first locations, everything you needed to solve the puzzles was more or less within a minute's distance (your minutes, not the characters' minutes). By the end, though, I often found myself traveling ridiculous distances on the mere HOPE that what I found at the other end would be worth the travel. And then, if I forgot to bring the 2nd character along with me, I'd have to travel all the way back, get him/her, and travel back yet again. Couldn't there have been a map or something you could click on to jump to places you've been to already?

In the end, though, it's an enjoyable journey for hardcore adventure gamers. It's too bad that, having just finished it, I still have a bad taste in my mouth about all the needless back-and-forth running around I had to do -- because this is in fact and well-designed, thoughtful, and extremely enjoyable game. Just laugh along at the acting and be patient through the travels...the puzzles are enough to test your mettle.

I am not a gamer. At least I wasn't until I played Schizm and was drawn into its lush, exotic world. The reason I played it was that its storyline was created by award-winning fantasy and sf writer Terry Dowling. Like his stories and novels, the ambience of Schizm is full of strange wonders. A planet is deserted, apparently abandoned - your mission is solve the puzzles and find out why. Along the way you travel through breathtakingly beautiful alien scenery, travel in wondrous balloon-like flying contraptions, and meet the data-ghosts of the crewmembers from the mission here that went so wrong.

Shoot-em-ups don't particularly interest me; this world intrigues, and (like MYST, which could be considered a predecessor to this game) is full of fascinating detail and brain-activating segues. If you've read Dowling's WORMWOOD or TOM TYSON stories, you'll know that he likes to tantalise; SCHIZM does this so well...
Dowling is currently working on a sequel game called CHAMELEON which is to be published soon. It promises to followup SCHIZM with another even MORE mysterious journey. Keep a lookout!

Like the title suggests, Schizm is a difficult game and only for those who are willing to spend the time and patience to copmlete it. Some parts are frustrating, yes, but this game wasn't meant to be completed overnight, or in the space of a few hours for that matter. This game is well-worth the money - I'm not going to pay for an easy game that can be completed in twenty hours.

The graphics are absolutely gorgeous. It seems so real, with the water effects and the sky and the eye-candy. The producers did an excellent job making the worlds have a deserted and mysterious feel about them. Just as good as Myst graphics. As to traveling, well, sit back and enjoy the game. The producers obviously took their time to make this game seem realistic, so don't just play to complete the game and have done with it.

The puzzles start off easy and become more difficult as the game progresses. (Take time to tinker!) At first it was confusing playing with two characters, but gradually it became easier. That also gave me a break in case I was stuck on a puzzle with one character, I could switch to the other character and continue on. Towards the end there are two especially difficult puzzles, one involving math, the other involving auditory processing. They CAN be done without hints/walkthroughs (I did it without hints!). You just need patience. As for the first above-mentioned puzzle, if you don't have geometry under your belt, don't even attempt it. It requires patience and math skills. The second puzzle requires you to listen to a series of alien words and then play them back, though you have to get them in the right order. Difficult if you can't distinguish sounds too well. Bottom line: difficult puzzles but do-able.

Music was awesome, acting fine, I had no trouble with gameplay. Ran smoothly with the DVD-ROM.

The only thing I didn't like is that if you're half-way through a puzzle and you save, when you return to the game the puzzle restarts. No way to get around that, but it's really only a minor problem.

This game certainly does not deserve the poor reviews it has been getting. I have played the Myst series, Nancy Drew series, and several other logic computer games, and am in the middle of Mysterious Journey 2 (the sequel to Schizm- which is so far also excellent). Schizm is the most difficult so far but so enjoyable and rewarding. I'd rather have a difficult game that challenges me rather than one that gives me the answer. Can't wait for any other games the producers are going to make!

The graphics and sound in this game are beautiful; they help you to believe you are in another world. The acting and narration, however, brings you crashing right back down to earth and effectively ruins the atmosphere. Yikes!-- talk about some serious spoilers! I haven't cringed at acting that bad since I caught a glimpse of a high school play on public access cable. I could have handled mediocre acting- no one expects an Oscar performance from a video game, but this was beyond horrible. It truly is amazing how much the poor quality "acting" detracts from what would otherwise be a wonderful game.

Schizm was one of those games that just left me scratching my head. I've been playing adventure games for years, and this one tops the charts as being one of the most difficult I've ever played. I have to admit, I had to consult cheats online to solve some of the puzzles.

For instance, to make the balloon work, you have to click on each one of the levers the same number of times as the number it would be on a clock, while you move around it clockwise. So the first lever would be 1 click, second, 2 clicks, etc. And that was just to figure out the air level you needed. Arrrgh. I have no idea how someone would be able to figure that out on their own.

As far as graphics and soundtrack go, this game rocks. The scenery is beautiful, and very life-like. The gameplay was very intuitive, but it seemed to take forever to get from one point to another.

One great feature was the ability to switch back and forth between 2 different characters. That was a brilliant idea on the developers' part, because it keeps you from getting bored with being in 1 location. (Especially if you're stuck).

My only complaint, aside from the puzzles that ranged from easy to insanely difficult, would be the fact that the game kept crashing in the same spots. I found a way around most of them, but it was rather annoying to have to keep restarting the game. Typical Dreamcatcher feature. :-)

This game came the closest in rivaling Myst's amazing sense of aestetics and attention to detail..I also recall being impressed by all the movement animation that played in between clicks, thereby erasing that fake feeling of just magically floating from one hotspot to the next..Some of the puzzles are indeed, infuriating, but there is no shame in using a walkthrough when you have gotten to the point past fun and still have so much left of a beautiful alien world to explore..