I enjoyed Jensen's legendary Gabriel Knight series. The first is one of the best point-and-click adventures of its generation and the second is probably the best full-motion video adventure ever made, so I was really looking forward to Gray Matter--her first big adventure in many years. I was not disappointed.
Gray Matter revolves around two playable characters, Samantha Everett and Dr. David Styles. Getting lost in a rainstorm, Sam's bike breaks down in front of David's house, who, as it turns out, is looking for a new assistant. David is a tenured professor who was disfigured in an accident and had become a recluse. He mostly keeps to himself and his research, and through his own personal despair, tends to be hard on everyone else. Sam lies and says she's a student of the local University. In reality she's is a street magician who aspires to be a great stage act. She's generally kind, but due to her hard life, doesn't tend to trust people and is willing to use trickery to achieve her goals. Some of her puzzles, in fact, involves her craft and slight of hand to just that. I really like both of them. Not that both are always likable, but are well written. This extends to the most of the characters in the game. Each of them have their own distinct personalities and motives as well.
Much of the gameplay revolves around Sam in her quest to find a secret circle of stage performers. She's also tasked with running errands for David. Her first assignment, find students as subjects for this next experiment. She hears rumors about David around campus and begins looking into the secrets surrounding his past. Meanwhile, David is focused on his research, but eventually discovers that Sam isn't what she pretends to be and looks into her history as well. Their troubled past are slowly reveiled, why she's running and why he can't let go. By the end, you'll find that both of their goals are intertwined.
The gameplay overall is good. Other than Sam's use of magic to solve problems, the gameplay is the usual fare for modern point-and-click games. Basically, take everything that isn't nailed down, then try to figure out what to with it, and talk to everyone about every topic that comes up. As usual, the game is broken into chapters, where everything in a given chapter must be finished to proceed to the next. In each chapter, you are given goals and are free to work on them in any order. However, progress of some task involves completing others first. For example, at one point Sam needs to get into the library to use a computer. Problem is, she isn't really a student. So she needs to "trick" another student into giving her a card. Unlike some games that leave you in the dark about that you need to do, Gray Matter can display your progress for each goal. The game map also highlights points that still require attention and darkens those that are no longer needed to finish the chapter.
The artwork is standard for adventures this days, 3D characters with pre-rendered backgrounds. They are nonetheless well done. The cut scenes are of the minimalist low-budget sort that also has become common, like an animated shoryboard. Budgets for adventures aren't what they used to be in their heyday, so they put their time and effort elsewhere. I be honest, I'm OK with that. I would rather have most of the game look good and have passable cutscenes than to cut somewhere else or not even have the game at all.
The 3D rendering and effects are a bit more intensive though, such as rendered shadows, but can be adjusted depending on your computer's capabilities. Setting everything to high looks awesome, but my computer couldn't handle it at a playable rate. I was able to turn the settings down to a playable framerate, but still looked decent overall. My biggest problem here was setting the resolution. The game supports the native resolution of my high-def widescreen monitor, but the game was only playable at the lowest graphic settings. Most lower resolutions, however, wouldn't format properly. Rather than setting the display to fit the format for a given resolution, the game kept it in widescreen and padded the top and bottom with black bars. Then, to maintain the dimensions, my monitor padded the sides with black bars, making the display a small island in the middle surrounded by a sea of black. I found this really frustrating as other similar games never ended up like this, regardless of the resolution.
The voice acting was OK. The main characters were priety good, so I really don't have many complaints. The music choice was interesting. I liked the general feel it gave to the game and cutscenes. My only issue is that most of the game used the same looping track. I wish there were more variation in the ambiance, like different music for different areas. Or at least make the main loop longer. Also wanted to point out that the band featured in the game, the Scarlet Furies, turns out to be a real group, which you can find on Amazon.
I've played many adventures, old and new. Some have good game writers, some have good characters writers, but few this days have both. Jensen is not just an excellent writer, but a *game* writer. Adventure games are a marriage of both gameplay and story. First, and foremost, adventure games are games--they are meant to be played. A great adventure demands more than just a great writer, or even a great character writer, but also a game writer. Other forms of storytelling are linear, were the writer ties all of the plot threads together into a single string that is followed from start to finish. And indeed, I've played other adventures that were exactly like that, where the only "game" was picking each piece in the *exact* order the writer had in mind. A game writer doesn't tie all of the plot treads in a single string, but spreads them out for the players to find and tie together on their own; a great game writer can tell a great story regardless of which way the player weaves the pieces together. Adventures are also heavily weighed on character. Most adventures tell their story through the player's character, where everything and everyone you interact with in the game world is through this character's perspective. Games that hinge on the depth of the character takes a great character writer.
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