Customer Reviews

Schizm: Mysterious Journey

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(17)

 

 

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.

(...)P>I started out liking this game a lot, but as it progressed, I liked it less and less. What I really look for in a game is a first-person perspective, a plot or story that you have to uncover by solving a variety of puzzles, not getting killed, good graphics and decent sound, pretty much in that order. While I found all these things in Schizm and they were enough to keep me interested, the game had problems enough that I became increasingly angry and frustrated with it.

Schizm was designed for DVD and it shows. The CD-Rom version not only has less of a game, but also does not run particularly well. Panning is slow. Sound halts and stutters. Sometimes the game freezes altogether. Allegedly you can correct this by using the full install, but about every time I tried this, the install procedure crashed my computer. The one time I managed to get it fully installed, the game ran in Hungarian or some other Eastern European language, so I had to go back to swapping discs anyway.

This game is complex. Sometimes it seems arbitrarily complex -- that is, the complexity really interfers with enjoyment of the game. The two character perspective starts out as intriguing but just becomes a pain as you can't ever move them at the same time, but have to keep going back and forth between them even when they're supposed to be together. Several times this involved swapping discs half a dozen times in the space of thirty seconds of gameplay. They come up with a lame plot element to explain this, but it's still a drag, especially since there is no zip feature to speed you past places you've already been. A zip feature would have been very helpful.

The puzzles range from somewhat hard to extremely difficult. Often the difficulty stems less from mental capacity needed to solve them than from some arbitrary complexity that just seems put there to make the puzzle hard. For example, several puzzles contained so many variables that even when you knew the logic involved you still had to spend an inordinate amount of time going through the variables to find the one that worked. Some indication of the correct path would have been helpful. (Spoiler)

The sound puzzles in general were ill-conceived. I really think if you're going to have sound based puzzles in a game you should make the sounds thins like tones or bells or rhythms, or even snatches of music -- things that are easily recognizable. Trying to understand an alien language that sounded like badly recorded backwards masking was just too much.

There were a lot of inconsistencies in the alien culture, as well. Why should you use one set of number symbols in one place and a completely different set in another? Because things were often so different from place to place, I, at least, had the feeling that I never really learned anything and was making no progress.

There were a lot of things in the game I got that just didn't function. Mission logs that were supposed to be accessible were not accessible, characters who were supposed to appear did not appear. Fortunately everything that was absolutely necessary to the progression of the game happened, but I was in a constant state of anxiety that I would miss something vital.

I was interested enough in Schizm not to quit, but I spent a lot of time in what seemed to be pointless busy-work and I never really felt like I knew quite what was going on or how to proceed. I like non-linear games, but at times Schizm seemed so non-linear as to be incoherent.

Probably this is not a game that is going to keep you completely absorbed far past your bedtime, but it is a good game to play for a couple hours, then put away and come back to later.

I must say that when I first bought this game I wasn't sure if it was worth it since the game was released by Dreamcatcher Interactive which I had bad experiences with their games, the only game from them worth mentioning was "In Cold Blood", but after I played Schizm - Mysterious Journey my eyes shined and I decided maybe I should give this company another chance.

Let me first state that I bought the CD-ROM version since I don't have a DVD-ROM.

The graphics in Schizm are absolutely stunning, although they graphics appeared a little blurry at times and the colors were a bit distorted, the overall of the graphics is very good. When you look and explore the beautiful gigantic world, all the Air Balloons, the flying ships, they were spectecular. I'd give the graphics a solid 4 stars.

The puzzles in this game were VERY hard, take it from someone who beated adventure games like Discworld 1, Riven, Ripper and some other hard adventures, this puzzles in this game are probably the hardest you'll ever encounter in an adventure game, you have to be some sort of a mathematics professor to beat some of them. I've been playing for a couple of weeks and I'm only half way. If you're the type who likes brain-busting puzzles (like me) you should definitely try this game out.

The plot of this game is very unusual, at times intriguing, at other times less intriguing.

Overall, this is a great Myst-clone adventure that if anyone who wants to experience something a little different and is willing to work his mind overtime, he should definitely give this one a look...

I have just finished reading a number of the reviews for Schizm and I cannot understand people complaining about the difficulty in solving some of the puzzles in this glorious game. Isn't that the point?

The graphics are beautiful. The story-line is good enough for an adventure game. The music and effects are on a par with the Myst Trilogy and the like. The added twist of having two main characters who must cooperate to accomplish some tasks is another nice touch.

I installed the CD-ROM version to my hard drive and the game played flawlessly. I did have a bit of trouble controlling the pan rate using the mouse, but soon discovered that the arrow keys provided a solution with the left and right arrows yielding a a 45 degree pan left or right, while the up and down arrows allowed a 180 degree switch (very useful when you realize you went the wrong way and simply want to turn around and go back.)

My only complaint would be the inability to terminate a video scene. While the videos are wonderful, deep into a game it would have been nice to be able to skip to the end... a small price to pay for a truly challenging game.

I must say that this game kinda surprised me since I saw it was published by Dreamcatcher. Dreamcatcher made my adventure gaming kind of boring and meaningless, as I played many of their games like: "The Messenger", "The Crystal Key", "Beyond Atlantis 2" and maybe another one I can't recall. Those adventure games were filled with beautiful graphics and lame gameplay and plots, so you better believe I was surprised when I picked up a copy of Schizm - Mysterious Journey.

The game has absolutely stunning graphics, which although sometimes appeared blurry and color distorted, but at many scenes the graphics absolutely shined (I'd give the graphics a solid 4 stars). You can see the air ballons, the flying ships beautifully detailed.

The gameplay kind of gave me mixed feelings since, there was a lot to tweak, a lot to look, a lot to use, but I regret not being able to sweep through the whole world in Schizm, and believe me there is a lot to sweep and explore in the Schizm world. Some people might call it "another" Myst-clone, but that's not the case here. You can play two characters by switching between them. Many people don't like the stranded/abandoned/lifeless worlds seen in Myst and in this game, people who love to interact and love the long dialogues with many characters should not try this game - go look for monkey island or discworld clones, but for people who love just to explore and see sheer beauty need to check this one out. Not to say that this game has no gameplay, it just concentrates more on the exploration side.

Now for the part I love the most: the puzzles. I'm a long time adventure gamer (and I mean long..., from the days of the zork text adventures) and I've stumbled upon many difficult/brain cracking adventure games (just the way I love it) and I solved all of them without using a single hint, my hardest one up until now was Discworld 1 in which I blew my brains out until I solved it, the Myst-Riven games were hard also, but I got through them also, but Schizm was EXCEPTIONALLY hard, maybe the hardest adventure game ever... There are certain puzzles that unless you are a mathematics professor it will take you forever to solve. I've been on it for a couple of weeks and I am only half the way...

To sum it up, this is a great game for the thinkers/brain busters types, definitely not for those hardcore Monkey Island fans. I recommend you all to buy it and try it out, but be ready to do some mind busting as the puzzles in this game will require the most of it...

After too many ads and superb screenshoots I was really dissapointed. Don't expect that the real game is the same as the screenshots. The graphic is terrible compared to this in Myst III Exile. I expected to see something much better. Almost all graphics contain really big squares (10x10 or 15x15 pixels) and look like JPEG images that are compressed 70-80 times. Don't tell me that I have a hardware problem - I'm with PIII @ 1GHz, GeForce II, DirectX 8a and latest NVIDIA drivers, and games like Unreal Tournament, Deep Space Nine - The Fallen, Max Payne and Myst III Exile look fantastic on this machine.
Maybe the DVD version is better.
The mouse navigation is not good also.

Well, the main reason I'm writing this is because there seemed to be a large lack of pride of the programmers, and it is reflected in the game.
----- Pride. In the flimsy booklet, and in the install procedure, you see that they will, and I quote, "gladly replace any disc free of charge, whether accidentally damaged or due to manufacturer defect." But, the very next sentence states that you have to send $8 for S&H [that's over 25% of the purchase price] and $2 for each extra disc [and again, that's even if it is damaged by the manufacturer, as stated. I mail CDs all the time for work... it costs about 75 cents... do they package it in lead? `Free' has taken on a new meaning, as has their `warranty'.
Moving to the game itself:
----- Characters. The voice actors were awful [probably my biggest negative, and hard to explain in type]... painful to listen to them... almost wanted to cut sound off and read subtitles. Listening to the woman 'heroine', I was just crying for Imoen, Charsi, or April Ryan. Wish they had spent the extra dollars and went with real actors. the guy hero... well... where's garret [or even Mr. Freeman or Max Payne] when you need him? [granted the actors may be very nice people, but they don't have game quality voices]. Actually, Jim Raynor would have been fantastic for this role.
----- Game settings... you have two settings: music volume, effects volume [oh, and subtitles on/off]. That's it. and the sound effects? Marginal. No video settings to tell the game "my system should have a stewardess on it, so throw as many triangles at the screen as you want." No video check, either. Nope... lowest common denominator, I suppose [which left it too blocky for my taste].
----- Interface. You can barely hear the walking sounds (so you don't know whether you're walking, or whether you're on a motorcycle, which seems like the case with the speed you move from room to room. But, that doesn't matter much, because you really don't have much control over where you can walk to... when you click to walk, you go automatically to where they want you to go, so you might as well just clip to there. There's not much looking around... stuff is either right in front of your face, or you don't get to look at it... but most scenery that you'd like to check out isn't available [plenty of doors on huts, etc, that are simply pretty scenery, even though you're right next to them and you're supposed to be investigating what's going on]. I'm left wondering, such as in the big lebowski, what's the point? What's the point of having all that scenery and what not, when there's a stiffly few things you can look at, and despite there being lots of `stuff' around, you can't investigate it. It's as if there's puzzle A, and you need to solve puzzle A, and other than that, that's it. Once you do that, you move on. Why even have a game interface or story? The walking was somewhat similar to Riven [and the year it came out... no progress, which is what I was hoping for].
Sure -- the backgrounds are somewhat nice, but stick to dl'ing some pretty wallpaper and you'll have the same.... artwork on your desktop you can't do anything with.

This is an absolutely horrible game. The first thing you notice, though fairly trivial, is that the graphics are bad. There's no changing the resolution or the color depth, so it runs at what appears to be 640x480 or something with a very low color depth. Everything's grainy with banding due to lack of color.

The next biggest problem is that the navigation is terrible. You move forward by clicking when you randomly pass the cursor over the right spot and the cursor turn to the right shape. But, to turn, you either have to use the cursor keys (which do an instantaneous turn instead of a pan, so it's hard to hold an image in your head of where you are), or you click and PUSH the mouse in the direction you want to turn instead of clicking and dragging the window in that direction (and the pan is so fast you can't see the scenery go by). There's no cursor change in those cases. Then, if you can look up or down, the only indication you have is a change to an icon down below the scene in your inventory. Plus, the cursor shape indicating a possible path is very easy to confuse as to where it's really pointing. In some cases, clicking forward will turn you 45 degrees before proceeding to take you somewhere nowhere near where it looked like it would take you. In other cases, you think it's pointing somewhere you've been, but it's not (so you miss a path). You end up watching the cursor and thinking about the mechanics of movement instead of looking at the scenery and tying to figure out what's going on. Also irritating is that once you click to go forward, it will stop at multiple, non-significant spots (even on straight, non-divertable paths). So, you spend time sweeping the cursor over everything in every direction wondering what's so important that the game stopped you here.

But, the biggest problem is the puzzles themselves. The charitable description would be that they're impossibly hard. A more accurate description is that there's neither rhyme nor reason to them. In some cases, there's no indication that a device IS a puzzle and not just a static display. If you don't have a necessary inventory item, you can't do anything and there's no indication that you could EVER do anything in it. If you have some random inventory item that it expects, it just changes the cursor in the right place (if you happen to cross the spot) and you drop it on. In others, the puzzle is so vague that you're not even sure what you're supposed to be doing with it or why. Then you have to work your way through multiple, non-easily-written notation systems or phonetics. In my case, I uninstalled the game when it became obvious that it wanted me to reproduce some long string of barely heard, non-phonetically-writeable, background-noise-filled, alien speech on a set of devices strewn in four or six places about a very large room.

Impossible. Not fun in the least. Do NOT, under any circumstances, buy this game.

I bought the DVD version from Dreamcatcher. It installed without problems, and there is no evidence of choppiness (at least so far). I'd say we're about two thirds of the way through.
The puzzles aren't easy - just about the right level, I think. Note to other reviewers: if you are trying to solve them by trial and error, it means that you either haven't actually solved the puzzle, or are still missing some information. Without giving anything away, I can think of at least two puzzles where the 'obvious' answer is not the correct one.
Another reviewer mentioned the multiple number schemes - you mean like decimal numbers and clock faces which count in twelves? Seems fairly natural to me.
Graphics are stunning, and the scene transitions are smooth and convincing.
One slight niggle - the rotation control was a bit too sensitive. Some means of adjustment would be nice.

Definitely worth buying

Schizm is a beautiful game, but not without its problems. First of all, its navigation is cumbersome. Unlike other adventuregames of today, it does not allow 360 degrees movement, wich is a bit of a let down. The movement by mouse is tricky, and often irritating - you can't stop the movement in time. Freezing is frequent, saving every two minutes imperative. The storyline reminds (to say the least) a lot of other games in this genre, especially The Journeyman Project 3, by Presto. I would say, it's almost identical. And then there's the graphics, wich, at least on cd-rom, are not quite the quality I've come to expect, having played Exile and Riven. The puzzles defy logic. I would say the're undoable without hints, nudges and pushes, or even een detailed walkthrough in times. That said, Schizm has a beautiful atmosphere, great music and superb sounds. The different worlds are stunning, although, again, a lot has been borrowed if not copied from either Riven/Exile or real life (Gaudi's architecture, for example.) Is it worth the money? Yes, well, maybe. But be ready for some major irritations and resorting to walkthroughs.