It's nice to see the bump up in presentation from the original The Shivah, the music is trendy and modern, there's some stylish title art and stuff. It's funny to see a 2006 game running at 320x240 - it wasn't uncommon for AGS games at that point, but also many of them were at least 640x480 if not more. - but the in-game graphics are nice and crisp, even blown up to a modern resolution. I'm still a little irritated by Dave's use of portraits, especially as they flick off in between one character's multiple lines, but I'll get used to it again. (And using the eggtimer cursor instead of just hiding it!) I'm not sure if I ever finished this one, but I remember the opening puzzle and being very irritated by it! Your building's doorman is on strike, so some tenant has taken it upon himself to cover, but he doesn't let you in because he doesn't recognise you. So you have to go find some other tenant in the park to vouch for you or whatever. Now, firstly, this is breaking the cardinal adventure game rule of grabbing the player's attention straight away (it's quite a mundane puzzle and it doesn't have anything to do with the main plot), but secondly it's very frustrating because the obvious solution is to call the police and say 'hello I'm a young woman and there's some strange guy refusing to let me into my home', but you can't do that and in fact HE threatens to call the police which apparently is something we don't want! So yeah, I'm annoyed at him, but I'm more annoyed at the game.
But I'm only like 30 seconds into the game, so it's not really fair to judge it yet!
Oh, the acting seems good so far too. It did seem a tiny bit rushed in the tiny opening cutscene, but otherwise good quality stuff so far.
Before solving the prick faux doorman issue (with a neat puzzle where you get a dog to follow you around so its lead wraps around a lamppost), I did the other open strand which was to go and sit in a doctor's office having a long conversation. Reeeeally starting this game off slow! Weirdly, the doctor has waited until after my aunt died to tell me about her illness and the fact that it's hereditary, despite the fact that I've been visiting her for years! Feels like the best way to do this opening would have been for you to not have known she existed and find out about her death and all this other stuff all at once. (I think maybe it's done this way so that Joey already knows about Rosa and her life, but there would have been some way around that.) Make that the first thing that happens, Skip the whole door man thing, and get into spooky shit asap. Then move into the bit I'm at now where you're reporting on a local suicide.
But uh yeah, feels like the game is picking up a bit now. Reading the old family letters about this spooky hereditary dementia, and then getting something to go investigate is a lot more intriguing. I still really like the music, it reminds me of James Newton Howard's score for Unbreakable (which was 2000 I think). It's a shame there isn't a discrete volume control for it, though, because it's a bit bloody loud (a bizarrely common quirk of the genre).
One other nitpick - if you're going to have character portraits, make sure the character idle animations don't involve the head because it's very distracting when they scratch their face or drag on a cigarette in the main screen but not in the portrait! Anyway, if you wanted to know what it's like to work as the coder on an adventure game with me as co-designer, it's this kind of thing for two years solid!
Okay, there have been a few microphone pops and blowouts on Joey's lines now. Plus the composer seems to actually have used their own beatboxing for one of the music tracks, so it's still not AA indie production levels here!
The puzzles are not particularly inspired. Most of what you do is combine notes/clues to come to conclusions which then become new conversation points. So it's a lot of cycling through the same few characters talking to them about everything trying to move on one tiny step so you can then do another circuit. It's the old Broken Sword issue. Plus there was one legit bad puzzle where you have to work out what fake name to give to get into a hospital room, and the solution is to combine in your notepad one character who mentioned at one point that sometimes people think he's a woman because of his name (Adrian, which what?) with a guy who might be on the guest list, Alexander, in order to get Rosa to realise that she can say Alex and therefore pretend to be him. It's a big leap to take to realise that I've got to push Rosa to make basic logical realisations, plus the guy's been referred to as Alexander the whole time, why would it be written on the guest list as Alex?
I hear that the series gets better as it goes along, so I guess taken as the first entry and only Dave's first commercial game ever, there's a lot to be impressed by but also it's not very polished. It does have some cool stuff in it, like getting your ghost pal Joey to distract people, and the idea of an evil ghost driving people mad by just screaming at them all day every day and then in their dreams too. Plus, and I know logically this is a bit silly, but there's a radio in one room that started playing a song with vocals, and even now ten years after Full Throttle, it's still pretty cool to have that happen in an adventure game!
Ugggh, I just looked up the puzzle I was stuck on, and it turns out that the room which was initially a 'dialogue tree only' one has now become one I can walk into and pick items up from. That's another little adventure game polish thing - you've got to let the player know when things like that have changed, you can't just expect them to wander around double-checking every single thing for changes the whole time. Especially now we're getting to 2006, right on the verge of many people having large digital backlogs of games and seeing them as a lot more disposable rather buying them one at a time and spending all their playtime on that one game until they beat it, so they're a lot less likely to resort to double-checking everything, spending time on brute forcing a puzzle if they need to etc. They'll just give up (or at least check a walkthrough, and once they break that seal then the experience is already compromised).
Huh! I never knew this, but Blackwell Legacy is a remake/completion of a freeware game he made 3 years earlier. Huge chunks of it are exactly the same, down to the dialogue! Also, wow, Blackwell Legacy was $15 when it first came out! BTDT+TGP was $5! It's quite a short game at a small resolution, and clearly it did well enough to spawn sequels, so I guess having voice-acting goes a long way!
Alright, finished. So yeah, there are a lot of dodgy puzzles in there (that dialogue room thing combined with what I think is the only inventory combo puzzle in the whole game - and you can't use inventory items directly on world items ether - and I don't think it even gets a tutorial message at any point as a thing you can do! And this is right at the end of the game!) and it still needs some polish, but this can be put down to it being a half-update of a freeware game and a debut commercial effort. If I'd spent £8 on it these issues might have grated more. I really liked the stuff with the Deacon, though, this ghost who's so terrified of going to Hell that he drives a bunch of people to suicide. I'm hoping that John Walker at RPS was right and each episode is better than the last.
Rating: admirable but messy start
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