Please, if you're an adventure games developer reading this, or you know one you can show this to, please, please, for the love of all that's good, please, think about your damn puzzles. For now, we must open the doors of frustration. There's a good reason for this, and we'll get back to it in a bit. There, that's a lot of detail about the set-up (cleverly without any spoilers).
It becomes immediately apparent that there are some strange coincidences afoot, as you learn of the remarkably similar series of murders occurring long ago in another country. As she reads her grandfather's tale, the game disappears back in time 70 years, and we take on his role in the 1930s. Inside is her late grandfather's journal from his days of being a private detective. In a move that is clearly supposed to give her some sort of April Ryan-like depth, the stilted interaction with her father offers little, but her exploration of the loft offers a lot. The moment it becomes genuinely interesting occurs when Victoria goes to her father's house. And as far as you'll be able to tell for a good long while, it's not a bad story. But with a story-driven game, at least hearing it spoken doesn't drive you away. Most the main characters at least don't make you squirm, apart from (and this is a very big apart from') the black uniformed cop who falls just shy of doffing his cap to you, calling you 'ma'am', and making his way to the back of the bus. The acting is wobbly, although not as hideous as we've come to expect from this field. It's a modest starter home, will need some paintwork, but it's certainly roomy. The interface may feel like going through the motions (in every sense) but the experience suggests that it might be worth it, just this once more. The lusciously painted backgrounds, replete with haunting graffiti and a degree of grime that makes you want to wipe your monitor clean, provide an evocative mise en scène. Luminescent spray on the walls, combined with dark-light gels over the forensic lamps, reveals ominous warnings written in blood. It's a troubling start - such interaction abusing the player in the laziest possible way - but finds forgiveness in its sinister results. In a manner reminiscent of the dreadful CSI games, you're asked to scour the scene using a few forensic tools, which amounts to clicking the inventory items on any of the (eventually) discovered hotspots, until it tells you you're done. Things begin at an appropriately brutal murder scene, the conditions of the building as gruesome as the mess made of the victim in the bath.
You begin playing as Victoria McPherson, a young FBI agent with some manner of mysterious past, and an attic full of emotional baggage. It all begins in familiar enough territory. In the case of Still Life, these garments are some fairly nice ideas of murder mystery across a broad timeframe. Until that time, it appears the only possibilities are constant attempts to dig up the skeleton of the past, and drape upon it whatever ill-fitting clothes the developers feel appropriate. They clearly need to make that next leap forward that has been so glaringly absent for the last decade (it was once the genre that reinvented its interface and ethos every couple of years, ensuring it remained fresh, challenging, and on its toes, and very much of interest to the wider gaming public), and once it's discovered and implemented, our lives will be all the prettier. Give it a 10.Īdventure games have so much potential. However cut the purity might be, however poor quality, whatever diseases might worm through their bodies as a result of playing, dammit man, it's a hit. Letting these people review adventure games is like letting junkies review heroin. These poor starving beings wander through their lives wraith-like, long gaunt faces, bony fingers clasping with a rigor mortis grip around any release that might feature some notion of pointing and clicking. Aside from the tedious inevitability of the mainstream press attempting some widespread analysis of the entire genre, there comes alongside them the frothing insanity of the adventure gaming specialist press. There's a peculiar thing about adventure game reviews.