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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An adequate effort., January 15, 2008
Fun:3.0 out of 5 stars
I picked this game up knowing very little about it. I had played through another game by this studio, The Black Mirror, and while I had mixed feelings about the title I couldn't deny it had its moments.
This, unfortunately, is not as good as The Black Mirror. It is, however, an adequate adventure game for those of us who just need to work our way through a plot.
On the surface, the game has a lot of things going for it. The graphics are excellent, it runs well, and they set up a good and consistent style in their art direction. And the plot hook, that you may very well be in some Satre like afterlife, is quite promising. It reminded me of a cross between the TV shows "Lost" and "The Prisoner".
Unfortunately, the game suffers from several design choices that are just downright sloppy. For a start, almost all of the scenes have visual cues indicating an exit point at each edge of the screen. But all too often it has been implemented such that only one or two of these are actually usable, and even then you have to find a very specific point. Considering how small the primary game environment is, there is no excuse for making navigation this cumbersome. There is no sound track for the game, something that could have greatly complemented the good visuals. Instead, you are constantly bombarded by very loud, almost oppressive ambient sound effects. At first this is fine, but after spending 18 hours hearing the same wave-hitting-beach loop it gets ridiculous. The voice acting also is all over the place. Performances range from unenthusiastic to merely "reasonable", and some of the accents just sound fake.
Another major issue is the mini-games. In general I have no objection to mini-games in adventures. In fact I think they can quite often inject some much-needed tension. But this game seems to treat them as a method of slowing players down, and have difficulty levels that are so varied that I wonder if they actually bothered doing a beta-test before release. There is one ongoing mechanic where you need to tend to your physical needs: food, water, and bladder capacity, to perform demanding tasks. If you exhaust yourself by running everywhere or climbing up and down a rope too often, you'll find yourself having to stop and rest before you can do it again. For most of the game this is easily manageable and actually kind of a nice touch, but near the end it starts to fall apart. Aside from this there are 3 other puzzles that I remember. One is a fairly simple "direct the ball" puzzle to simulate trying to handle stress. This worked well, and was welcome. The next ones that followed, however, were ridiculously hard. In particular there is one which requires absolutely precise timing to execute that only gets more difficult the further you go. This in and of itself would almost be forgivable, except that once you do complete the blasted thing it turns out you have to repeat your performance two more times to get past it. This puzzle took me nearly an hour to complete, and left me ready to make one of the disks into a frisbee for my golden retriever. The final problem with the game is the ending. Like the Black Mirror, it seems like the writer simply changed their mind about what story they were telling once the end was in sight. Even worse is the fact that it seems to end with a personal message from the writer to the player, a wholly unwelcome intrusion and rather amateurish trick, suggesting they knew full well the game's story wasn't going to stand on its own.
Now that I've listed most of the bad aspects, it's only fair that I list the good. As I noted, the visuals here are excellent. One of the difficulties in the game is that most of it takes place in a very small enfironment that can be fully explored in about a dozen scenes. To compensate for this, however, every day of story-time presents you with a different camera angle, helping to inject a sense of variety and progress into the game. And despite the fact that it seems to have accidentally picked up another game's ending, the story throughout most of the game is quite intriguing. Skills that you accumulate doing puzzles, such as how to start a fire, can be reused later in the game instead of requiring you to learn something new. Also, there are quite a few characters here who are very well executed. Most notable in my mind is an old rather wiry communist from the early days of the Soviet Union, who seems to be one of the only people capable of coping with the island environment. If not for these I would probably not have bothered finishing the game.
I would recommend this game if you're fed up with FPS's and really need an adventure game to play through, but don't go in expecting all that much from this merely adequate title.
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34 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
The Side Game sucks, December 5, 2007
Fun:1.0 out of 5 stars
This game was quite interesting and fun until the first eye-hand coordination ala FIRST PERSON SHOOTERS side game during a dream sequence that disappointed me greatly. I cannot, repeat cannot, and repeat again, CANNOT even attempt to come close at completing these things so this game was cut quite short for me and must give it a negative 100 rating.
Don't buy it if you want an adventure game. Buy it if you want an arcade game.
Joe
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not a pure adventure game, August 12, 2008
Fun:2.0 out of 5 stars
This game is from a company known for adventure games. The description sounds like an adventure game. The pictures on the box look an adventure game. Heck, the instruction manual even makes it look like an adventure game.
This is not an adventure game. For the most part, it does follow the adventure format. Click to go places, pick up objects, talk to people, use items, etc. I particularly enjoyed the dream time puzzles.
The big problem is that each of the dream time sections has some sort of hand-eye coordination puzzle. If your hand-eye coordination is not very good, you are stuck. There is no way to bypass these. To add insult to injury, the puzzles are timed and have no instructions about what you are supposed to do other than some obscure icons in the upper-left of the screen.
I managed to muddle through the first one but the second one involves clicking on a rapidly spinning circle to light up blocks. Its a lot like those games with the spinning lights at Chuck-e-Cheese that always eat your money.
If you don't have superb hand-eye coordination, this game will eat your money too when you grind to a halt on one of these arcade games. Don't waste your money like I did.
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