I thought a little more about how I feel about this game.
I liked some of it. The main element I got into is the story. The writing is strong and I found how the parallel plots - 1920s Prague, contemporary Chicago - intermeshed and played with each other. The art direction was excellent, details were lovingly worked on and the entire thing oozed atmosphere. The cutscenes were among the best I've seen in any kind of game, well directed and shot, and all at once moody, mature, disturbing, suspenseful, and sometimes gripping.
Now the laundry list of weaknesses. Easily one of the worst things to do to a game is to butcher it with contrived conventions, in this case those of the adventure genre that seriously need to grow the f00k up and reinvent themselves. I have no problems with Still Life focusing on intellectual challenges (personally it was refreshing for me because, you know, I play various kinds of games with various levels of action in them). I loved the lockpicking puzzle and the ring puzzle in particular, and reading the case files of the several murders.
However, I was disappointed by how lazy and complacent Microids chose to be by incorporating some of the most banal and trite details - stupidly out of context puzzles (the gingerbread cookie baking one especially), an obscene amount of running back and forth across town to fetch items, and kindergarten level acting, among other things. Victoria looks like a very competent, complex, sleek, intelligent, and driven woman, but the actress who plays her sounds like a whiny, nasal voiced suburban Midwestern teeny bopper. In a highly dramatic story such as this the voice acting needs to be as sophisticated and nuanced as possible and it was obvious that the actors were badly coached and wrongly cast.
I think Still Life represented a chance for intellectually challenging games (adventure games and similar) to show themselves at their most progressive and maybe even cutting edge. It's really deflating that this creative team chose not to think outside the box. As it stands, Still Life seems to exude a surface edginess that draws you in. But unfortunately the surface is as close you can get. There are few new ideas to explore underneath when all you find is vanilla flavoured conventions - with their worst characteristics - that limit creativity.
But I will definitely remember the game for its story and atmosphere, and I look forward to seeing how Microids create beyond their laziness and mistakes to make things better and more edgy and substantial in Still Life 2.
