First, I'm sure you're wondering why I gave this game 3 stars despite the title of the review. The short answer is, a lot of work went into this game and it deserves that much credit. It's lengthy, entirely spoken, and some of the actors are surprisingly talented. The video and environments especially are impressive for their time to say the least. That being said, this game absolutely bored the hell out of me. I don't care about the homoerotic undertones or that Gabriel himself was one of the worst over-actors I've seen in a long time. Granted, the B-movie feel of FMV games are kind of what attract a lot of people to them in the first place, but he was f'ing terrible at times so much that I laughed when I was supposed to be all serious-face. But I don't really care about that. Let me get to the real reasons this game sucked (for me). Triggered Events: For those of you unfamiliar with the development process, most things are based on triggers. For example, in some game I just totally made up for the sake of argument, the wizard may not appear until you speak to the dragon, but this is an antiquated, irritating approach that was fixed for a reason. Nowadays, that wizard would still appear but mention something like "talk to the dragon first. I have nothing to say to you" which provides something this game sucks balls at: direction. I don't want to aimlessly wander to each location in hopes that a new event / character / option was available. But that's exactly what is required of you. Rarely will you logically conclude where it is you're supposed to go, because more often than not you just travel to every available location hoping a character has something new to share, or magically decides to leave the room so you can find that object previously inaccessible. The majority of the "puzzles" in this game are hardly difficult, and in turn actually add to the tedium of randomness. In Chapter 1 - and don't worry about spoilers here - you're tasked to do something that is retard-level obvious. Then, you spend the next hour trying to figure out who it is you're supposed to talk to, or what could have changed in any given area. It's just trial and error boredom. In addition, the majority of objects you use in the environment are dropping documents on non player characters or reading an abundance of text. Ugh. Items : The writers of this game (specifically Jane Jenson) are obsessed with flexing their education in history and focus a hell of a lot more on documents, paperwork, books, etc than actually devising complex situations where items are required and logic is utilized. About 97% of the items you receive require you to read every part of them which does two things horribly wrong. One, these are mostly lore-based items, which means all they do is build some back story and give you some context. Second, these are based on the trigger events I spoke of, where you literally cannot advance until you've listened to the crap voice acting stumble through them audibly. It's painful at best. Don't expect to use rust remover on bolts, then loosen them with a wrench you received after stealing a sandwich for a hobo. Instead, expect to use a screwdriver on a screwdriver-sized hole you find literally two seconds before you find the screwdriver. In addition, I'd like to add that at one point one of the only real "puzzles" completely confused the hell out of me thanks to Gabriel's idiotic interpretation of the situation. I'll avoid spoilers, but in short there was an item that contained backwards text. He stated something like "there's carbon on the back of this, but I can't read it." First of all, no. I can read a novel backwards without too much of a headache. And second, what he needed to say was "it's backwards..." instead of carbon. I ignored the backwards text on the paper because I assumed he meant I needed to get a pencil or something and scratch until I could see depressions in the paper - like you would on a post-it pad after someone wrote down a number and tore it off or after a clerk tore the carbon copy away and gave you a receipt. Instead I wondered around like a moron thinking "where can I get a pencil, or a way to lift an image off the back of this?" Another case of giving this game way too much intellectual credit. Grace: Grace is an annoying, bitter, obnoxious bitch and Chapter 2 is essentially you listening to her talk for an hour or two (depending on your speed). I have no idea why they decided after the not-at-all-action-packed-puzzle fest Chapter 1 they'd slow it down to a snail's pace, and encourage you to pour yourself a strong drink while crawling through a pretentious Hipster Birista's version of telling a short story with no climax, twist, or punchline. I almost uninstalled the game halfway through the closing movie of Chapter 2. That's how bad it was for me. Controls: I don't expect the UI designers to be of this decade, but the interface is brutal. There are no hot keys that you'd expect. You cannot ESC through close-up scenes. There are buttons for everything that could have been assigned to a key on the keyboard. More importantly, in chapter one instead of hopping around they make you experience Munich by walking all the way down the street. Several times, Or dozens if you're not sure where to go and you just want to go talk to that one guy real quick to see if he has anything new to talk about. You'll spend most of your time wondering why your i7 processor cannot take a game on DOSBox and turn it into something sans loading screens and hourglasses every time you take a few steps. In addition, the cursor's hot spots are garbage. If you've got a decent resolution running, the details of any given environment are a pixelated mess. You'll likely not realize that there is a bit of a pixel hunt here, and discover you missed random crap in the corner of a blurry object. Pixel hunts are bad enough, but slap a blurry rendition of a game from the 90s... and welcome to hell. The Story: I'm honestly blown away with all of the reviews claiming the story was amazing. I suppose 50 Shades of Grey was your last read? Seriously though, no offense, but the story was hardly gripping. I knew what was going to happen and why by Chapter 3. I'm not a jerk, and I don't mean to sound like some elitist literature a-hole, but really guys? The story blew your mind? I'd make more of a point but that'd "spoil" the story for people that actually want to experience it for themselves. Well, let's put it this way - the game constantly drops a small orchestral cue during a twist and more often than not you'll just think "well yeah, no &#@*" but that cue was there to make you crap your pants in surprise. In someone's review they mentioned Gabriel looks like a cheesy 80s soap opera star (I added the cheesy 80s part). I agree, and oddly enough the plot twists are written right out of one. Nothing surprised me. Literally not a god damn thing. Acting: The best way to destroy a story - albeit a bad one imo - is by hiring some of the worst talent you can find, giving them lines that would only be spoken in a wacky cartoon, and then asking them to present themselves in a horror genre. Campy, sure, but some of the game was just unintentionally hilarious. Gabriel's smoothing-talking badassery was just tragic. Grace's outbursts reminded me of a child pissing themselves over dropping an ice cream cone while trying to get through the monologue before the camera's turned off and they burst into uncontrollable laughter. In summation; the acting sucked. Gilbert Godfrey should have narrated this game. Conclusion: I've said it in so many words, but I'll wrap it up. If you're considering this game even at its current sale price of less than 3 bucks, don't. Not because 3 dollars means much to most of you. I bought Borderlands 2 and Torchlight 2 the same day, so clearly dropping cash on a video game is not a huge issue for me - but the time I killed hoping the game would get better, puzzles would get smarter, triggers would get less linear, and story would blow my face off is not 3 dollars. It's priceless. I sincerely recommend staying the hell away from this game at all costs, even 3 bucks. Peace.
