[Once A Villain]

Don't get me wrong, the game sounds like a blast. However, it also sounds very much like an OLD game (and therefore, an old idea). It's a little game called Critical Path that came out in 1993. Heavily flawed, sure, but it has the same idea behind it. Here's an excerpt from a review I wrote of the game:

"You discover a control room with monitors, controls, and General Minh's very own notebook. It is from here that you must guide a woman named Kat through Minh's base. You have to explore Minh's notebook to decipher clues and discover codes which can save Kat from various things. You can activate machine guns to mow down enemies, stop conveyor belts, use various traps, etc...all by pushing a few keys.

Actually, as I stated, the ideas in Critical Path aren't bad. You'll really feel like you're in a control room where you are responsible for a person's life."


Here is another description of Critical Path from Wikipedia:

"...the player plays an anonymous soldier confined to a control room of sorts. The gameplay consists of the player using the available controls to aid Kat on her escape from the island on which both the characters are trapped. If successful, the player can guide, protect, and assist Kat to the player's location, in their bid to escape the island."


That, to me at least, sounds very similar to Jack Allin's description of Experience112:

"As the game opens, players find themselves in the boat's operations room facing a highly advanced panel of controls and surveillance monitors. The player has no onscreen avatar, but that doesn't mean it's a first-person game. I told you to forget what you knew about adventures. Instead, you see a woman on the screen in front of you, awaking in one of the cabins. With intravenous tubes in her arms, she is clearly ill, but you'll watch her discover a letter and then begin a desperate attempt to escape her locked room. Helpless but clearly NOT alone, she needs your assistance to escape her floating prison. And so begins a shared adventure that you experience through her, while personally remaining in your detached position.

Since you're unable to move about, what you have at your disposal is a wide array of sophisticated technology. Using a simple point and click interface to manipulate the onscreen display (though optional direct control methods are introduced for various tasks), you'll need to employ this equipment strategically to overcome the many environmental and human challenges facing the woman..."


I'm not saying the game won't be far better, more advanced, and give the player more to do than Critical Path did, it has been 13 years after all, but I don't think this game warrants comments like this...

"When it comes to game design, every once in a long while an idea comes along that's so brilliant in its elegance and simplicity that it's a miracle no one's thought of it before. Or maybe it has been thought of before, but rejected in an industry that typically recoils from innovation. I mean real originality, not the technological improvements we usually pass off as progress."