I'm only a few minutes in and wow this is a weird game so far. It starts off with a five minute monologue from a crazy computer who has killed all of humanity except five people, whom it's been torturing for over a hundred years. And it's voiced by Harlan Ellison, the author of the source short story! (He does a good job, actually; I thought it might be Curtis Armstrong before looking it up.) The computer, AM, asks for a volunteer , so you pick one of the characters and it challenges you to find its three mainframes and destroy them, thereby killing it. Having looked at the manual, it seems I'll need to save often, I need to keep my character's ethical levels up, and there's a book that offers hints but if I look at it that counts as weakness and will therefore lower my ethical levels, and apparently even if I complete this character's story, they might get sent back to AM and have to go through for a second time. So, it seems like it'll be quite a prickly game! I guess I'll try to complete Ellen's storyline and then maybe have a read around the game to see how much replay value there is in choosing her a second time or playing the other characters' stories.
The presentation is not great, incidentally. It all looks rather ugly, and there's not much polish or storytelling verve on display. This is the company that made Dark Seed and my memories of that game tally pretty closely to this one - parlaying a famous horror creative's style into a game, with crappy presentation and some tough puzzles!
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As predicted, this is crap so far! The presentation is fairly awful - ugly graphics, cheesy writing, jarring audio, no polish. The acting's not too bad but I chose the Black woman first and she's been written and played with a heavy emphasis on sassy. Foxy Brown would be rolling her eyes at this stuff. Worst of all, the puzzles are terrible. I look at a monitor of a room I've been in before, and if I flip the switch it shows me a secret passage. Fine. But I then have to Use the loose sparking wires below the monitor in order to unlock the secret passage. Bit weird. Then, because my character has a phobia of the colour yellow, she can't go in yellow rooms or pick up yellow objects. So the solution is, try to pick up the yellow fabric, then try to pick it up again at which point she'll decide actually she can, so that you can wear it as a yellow blindfold to allow you to get past a monster because you're now so unscared you can just walk right past it (it's a sphinx, but as far as I'm aware, this is not a standard aspect of sphinx myths). And apparently it also solves the problem of this room being yellow, but not the other room you refuse to go in because it's too yellow And the hint for all this (which costs me psychic health points or whatever) was 'yellow is a colour between red and green, and means cowardly'. Fucking hell. And worst of all is that the engine is so ropey, sometimes you have to try clicking on something a fair few times to get it to work, so you have no idea if you're thinking of the right stuff or not.
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I got through that character's section, using a walkthrough mostly for stuff that just wasn't working properly. At least these are relatively short! It dealt with some pretty dark topics as well, which I won't get into here. It felt fairly tastefully done to me, but I'm not the right person to judge really, so I could be well off-base.
I think I'll keep going with liberal use of a walkthrough. There is something weirdly ambitious and sincere about the whole thing under all the jank, it's kind of cool that you get a different themed set of locations for each person and it does capture that 60s/70s sci-fi horror fiction vibe pretty well. But I think I'd be very angry at the game by now if I didn't have the internet!
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This one feels a little more like a solid adventure game. I'm stuck on a zeppelin and I've got to stab/reinflate air bags to adjust the height and stuff like that. Also, I'm starting to wonder if the clicking issue is with my mouse rather than the engine. Still lots of problems that are definitely on the game, though, like pixel hunts - not only for objects but for exits too!
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Okay, I got to the point where there were so many dead-ends, pixel hunts and new (very small) new items appearing near-arbitrarily, I was just following a walkthrough. At which point I may as well watch a playthrough, really.
Like I said, I like the ambition and sincerity (even if the writing's not at all subtle), all the weird dreamlike imagery, and the way there are little references to the other stories in each one, but there's just too much jank and bad design here to wade through, so I am actually going to watch a playthrough!
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There's some pretty cool stuff in there that I didn't get to - a weird HR Gigery village with a Shirley Jackson style sacrifice lottery, a medieval castle with demons and witches, and a Nazi concentration camp with horrific experiments going on. It's actually quite LOTCGish in set-up - the end of the world, an underground supercomputer generating allegorical cyberspaces with lessons to be learned. And kudos to them for dealing with so many adult themes and playing around with multiple solutions and endings. But ugh, far too combative with the player for me to get through.
Rating: Red.
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