Overclocked: Eine Geschichte über Gewalt

Overclocked is an adventure game with an interesting premise, five young people randomly appear in New York City to embark on a shooting rampage, when they are caught and sectioned, and it's up to you as a US army psychiatrist to find out what their motives were and what compelled them to undertake such a horrific act. While the game is quite atmospheric, always rainy and bleak, it's not very exciting. The graphics are sub-par and the voice acting is atrocious, never failing to kill the mood with its unemotional lameness. The puzzles aren't impressive as well, but what is truly unforgivable about this game is that there is a section where you are required to keep walking back and forth between the patients cells and play recordings of conversations you've already had with the other patients, in order to 'trigger' a new memory in someone. Seriously, you have to stand there and replay all the dialogue you've just had with another person in order to advance with the next person. This is quite simply not gameplay. It's a bad design concept, lazy, and ultimately feels like a cheap excuse to drag the game out a while longer, and is the part that made me want to play something else. My advice: save your money on this one.

Overall I'd say really good narrative, in fact I'd go far as to say one of the most compelling adventure games I've played recently. The major flaw with the game is completely unintuitive puzzles. The main gimmick for the game is that you make audio recordings from patients and then play those audio recordings to other patients to trigger memories. The problem was that it was completely not obvious that you were supposed to do that to begin with, and then even when you knew that that is what you were supposed to do it wasn't very obvious which recording need to be played back for which patient. By the end of the game there are dozens of recordings, and it's true that usually the last recording made needs to be played back to a patient to progress the story, but sometimes that's not the case, sometimes you are actually just supposed to go outside and make a phone call. Sometimes the main character hints that you were supposed to do that, sometimes he doesn't. I'm actually mostly saying all this because I recommend the game. The story is just too interesting not to play. Especially if you're looking for adventure games with particularly good stories. Ultimately though, this ends up being a walkthrough-all-the-way game because even though you could eventually try every possible combination to continue the story, you just don't want to wait that long. So yeah, play it. It's really compelling.

As I already expected from House of Tales after playing The Moment of Silence this game has excellent story-telling with a cinematic quality. The puzzles are a lot easier to solve making the game a bit too short for my taste but the narrative makes up for it. As in many other adventure games you might also be forced to look around for unexplored actions to be able to continue. The game mechanic CAN be bothersome, especially if you do not know how to work your PDA, BUT you can actually skip every cut-scene, recording and many actions by pressing the ESC button twice. There's also a hotspot indicator (press the spacebar).

Funnyb's review already accurately described the frustrating "listen to entire conversations over again to trigger a memory in a patient" aspect. Usually every time you do that, the patient has a flashback. It starts out as some creepy tense stuff. They're in a weird place, not sure how they got there, and have a vague sense of being chased. From there each flashback goes to earlier events, so the whole thing plays out in reverse sort of like the movie Memento. The problem is, the story gets less interesting the more of it is revealed. Starts off creepy, almost Silent Hill like, and by the end turns into some lame techno thriller plot. Another downside is the psychologist main character. He gets his own side story and it does nothing but detract from the main plot. You think maybe it's going to develop into something, or tie into the main plot somehow. Nope. It just wastes time going nowhere. So with this game you're getting a mystery that starts out strong, but requires a tedious mechanic (playback conversations) to advance it, and it ends up getting lamer as it progresses. Then the psychologist's story further mucks it up. I think I paid $10 for this in a bargain bin 5 years ago. Paying $15 for it now is insane. Wait for a sale if you're a diehard adventure fan.