Tldr: Go for it if you like exploring unique gaming endeavors of their era, but only if you can stomach dated controls. "The most ambitious PlayStation game yet", says a praising quote on the back of the Playstaition 2-cd pack cover of In Cold Blood. And yes, it was ambitious in being a creative and original twist on singleplayer story based gaming. The mix of stealth, adventure, and tank-controls resident evil style action - and a quite succesful one - still remains a pretty unique gaming experience; parallels are hard to find up to present day. About the gameplay, I will only say that you have to try it for yourself and see. The controls are really dated and if that's something you can't get past, this game will probably be left in your library unfinished; somewhere around first or second mission. If you can have a little patience, or if you actually remember the gaming experience of Resident Evil 1-3 as "having fun", you'll get used to it. Anyway, you will find out that the game is built around the controls pretty well and doesn't want you to do much beyond their possibilities. As for the story, setting, atmosphere, etc., this is a classic cold war spy thriller, very well executed. While the story and the setting are rather gloomy, revolving around events in a small totalitarian country, the encounters are filled with a lot of humor and the dialogues are really very well written. The mixture of a serious spy novel with a absurd funny situations is not as bizarre as in Metal Gear Solid, the humor is more subtle, but nevertheless funny and sometimes very smart. The atmosphere of a dreary soviet-like country is mixed together with cool scifi stuff makes you want explore every little room, makes you want to progress unraveling the mystery and find out what you can about this particular fictional crisis. The visuals, while dated, do not fail at all to drive this point home. That's mostly thanks to the 2-d prerendered backgrounds which haven't lost it charm.
Calling it a "hidden gem" doesn't even do it justice. It's incredible how great and unknown this game is at the same time. Venetica presents you with a beatufil and lively world, composed mostly of a fantasy Venice. Everything, the world, the characters and even the story has strong Discworld vibes. The city si beautiful, yet rotten to the core. Quests are simple, but original and most importantly, actually funny. Venice itself is filled with lively marketplaces and beautiful architecture, but also shady alleys and of course mysterious cannals. You will spend about as much time swimming the cannals and running around on the rooftops, as you will walking the streets and the plazas. And then come the dungeons - as someone else already said in a review here - each dungeon is unique and interresting. Dungeons are quite huge, with many crossroads and shortcuts, they are a great playground for any exploration possitive player. The gameplay itself is a simple action-ish rpg, it's neither too difficult, nor boring. The story revels around dealing with undead overlords of the corrupted city, with a little bit of a darker twist ont the main character herself and her mission. Where the game trully shines is the mentiond environment design (the city and the dungeons), character design adn dialogues. I mean it when I say that for me, this is Terry Pratchett's Ankh-Morporok come to life. The fascinating but dangerous city, its dark but also comical secrets, its all too human citizens, all combined with the fresh and original fantasy setting make you feel the silliness of it all, while still making you care for some of the smallest characters. And when you meet that last nightwatchman patrolling, you'll want to ask him what's captain Vimes up to these days.
