Secret Files: Tunguska

I "grew" up on The Longest Journey (the first one, not the rubbish sequel). Secret Files: Tunguska is the only game that comes close to The Longest Journey for me. Great game, worth every penny!

I'd never really played a point-and-click game for a long while, possibly ever. During the GOG summer sale, I decided to take a punt. I was taken in by the charm of the game. Certainly in the early stages, I liked the premise and found the puzzles challenging and the story easy to follow. Most of the game is like this; interesting and engaging for a game that came out close to two decades ago. Certainly the earlier stages were always fun to play through and kept me guessing. Later levels, however, can be a bit obtuse and certainly the final stage I might as well have just read a walkthrough instead. Most of it was classic adventure game problems but sometimes you were left in a level with no idea what you actually had to do. I also felt the story ran out of steam later on and the entire third act went off the deep-end. There were also gaping plot holes and twists that are never explored. The romance sub-plot felt incredibly rushed and I reallllllllllllly wasn't drawn in at all by the 'meeting and fall-madly-in-love-within-30-seconds' nature of it all. As a final point, the voice acting is hilariously bad and inconsistent (even the Irish characters have American accents). Overall however, this is absolutely worth the money. It took me a few hours, was suspenseful for the most part and enjoyable in spite of its flaws.

Secret Files: Tunguska has a strong start, by putting the Tunguska event as the big mystery this game revolves around, hinting at an interesting solution to that mystery. It also introduces what looks like humanoid monsters, which kidnapped the main character's father - a father that was investigating the Tunguska event for a few decades. On top of that one of his fellow researchers went missing, so there are plenty of mysteries to go around. But soon after, it seems like those mysteries are abandoned and forgotten about, and instead we're solving puzzles that do nothing to progress the plot. Not that it gets resolved in any fulfilling way, partly due to the plot being taken over by run of the mill bad guys, which you are now trying to fight. Regardless, the plot isn't very important to the game - puzzles can be solved intuitively, without learning a thing about the plot. The plot only helps in giving you hints as to what to do next. But all you really have to do is scour every screen for the hotspots, pick up every item, make a note of where the puzzles are, and figure out how the items you picked up help you solve those puzzles. You only get stuck once in a while, and then it becomes a marathon of trying everything on everything else. You could pay attention to the plot, but dialog is so long and not very good, and there are plenty of videos that don't add much to the game, that I preferred to skip those most of the time. Not to say this is a bad game, it has a lot of effort put into it, but most of the puzzles are fairly straightforward, with only a handful of generic puzzles to solve - puzzles you see in almost every puzzle game. My other big gripe is with the character not being someone I want to follow. The game has a lot of potential, but the main character's remarks and dubbing seems off, considering her father was kidnapped and possibly hurt. Luckily she's self reliant, but she plays the damsel in distress if it gets someone else to do the work for her.

Very good game. I very much enjoyed it. It’s got a very rich and intriguing story and with a good pace. Also there are understandable riddles, help is offered at the puzzles and, thankfully, hotspots are shown with the press of a button so you don’t have to go pixel-hunting. I admit that I enjoyed it MUCH MORE than the first two Syberia games (I haven’t played the third yet), which had a more "serious" touch! Very good, very interesting. And at the end, you are rewarded with a funny (and somewhat lengthy) ending!