Well, as I vaguely remembered, this is a pretty rough experience for a modern adventure gamer, even someone who started getting into them around four years after this. No music, no Look At or Talk To, tons of small fiddly inventory items, unpredictable NPCs. And I believe there are a fair few dead-ends in here too. First things first, I need to choose some appropriate music to listen to, in much the same way that I'd put Nine Inch Nails on loop when playing Quake back in the day. Something era-accurate, but also befitting a teen-slasher parody. John Carpenter and Sisters Of Mercy are what immediately jump to mind...
On the positive side, it really pulls you in as much as it can, with the fun, cinematic (for its time) opening, the easy first puzzle, and the excitement of getting caught randomly by Nurse Edna then slung in the dungeon.
-
Okay, have played it for an hour or so, and the fun has drained away! I'm getting flashbacks to playing Wolfenstein 3D at the start of my FPS playthrough, where you can see the beginnings of the genre trappings, and some good moments, but overall it's a real slog with a dull layout and seemingly endless rooms and no nice music or pretty graphics to distract. I've already had to resort to a walkthrough because to escape the dungeon you have to find the tiny 'loose brick' hotspot with no hint that it exists. An early example of the dreaded pixel-hunt! I think I may have created a dead-end for myself already, but I've got a couple more ideas to try before going to the walkthrough again and seeing if I can be bothered to carry on...
-
Gave up after finding out I had fallen foul of a dead end by using some paint remover on some paint. There are a few cruel dead-ends like that, apparently. Even apart from that, the game is just not entertaining enough to push on with - it's incredibly aimless and you're just wandering around looking for stuff that might work together without any way of knowing why you might want them to, juggling loads of keys around and shifting kids back and forth. In theory, the idea of kids with different abilities that lead to different puzzles and endings is cool, but in effect it's just a bunch of tedious character and inventory management, and a lot of time wasted doing stuff you don't need to. Still, at least I got to explode a hamster in the microwave and destroy everything within a 5-mile radius by pushing the big red Do Not Push button on a nuclear device before I gave up, which was fun. I think a fan remake of this with just a few tweaks could improve it tenfold.(there's one effort along those lines with DOTT-style graphics called Night Of The Meteor which as of last year was still going, but I'm not holding my breath on that one).
Rating: Red.
No comments:
Post a Comment