[cbman]

Scratches for me, mostly because it's so overrated. If it hadn't been such a cult game then I probably would have just called it average and not been bothered but the way it gets talked up irks me a little.

How anyone can defend graphic design that leaves the entire game location too dark to see practically anything for large parts of the game I cannot fathom. At one point I spent about a minute trying to get through a door i had been through a hundred times before, not because it was hidden, but because it was just too dark to see the doorhandle! That isn't challenging, it's just annoying.

An awful lot of the gameplay seemed to revolve around using the telephone to phone up someone who would tell you what to do, and often it would be totally illogical how he would know anyway. Then, at the opposite extreme, there was the long periods with no hints as to how one should be progressing and nothing to work with (i'm somebody who finished Riven without a walkthrough by the way, i'm not an idiot when it comes to adventure games). At one point one is supposed to check the mailbox at a totally random time. I checked it dilligently every day for mail and there never was any. Finally, when you're not actually waiting for any anymore some turns up. Once it arrives your character suddenly totally changes his motivation and decides he absolutely must leave the house. Suddenly I could do a lot the things I had been fruitlessly trying to do because of this of this irrelevent game trigger. I hate that kind of thing in games: you're held back from doing the thing you obviously should be doing until the arbitrary time the game designer decides he's going to allow it. The whole game felt like being led step by step down a badly lit tunnel - graphically and metaphorically.

The story is much talked up but could have come from any Lovecraftian fan fiction. The 'shock' ending was shocking only for its predictability. It's the sort of game that people who don't read books describe as having a good story. The much heralded suspense only happens infrequently; the rest of the time you're just left stumblign cluelessly in the dark.

Of course, i'm emphasizing all of the bad things here and ignoring the fewer (but present) positive elements but that was the feeling the game left me with. All of its flaws just overpowered the good parts. I've played worse games for sure but none that left me witht he same level of frustration at poor design (graphical and gameplay).

I notice that the creator's next game is to be a Blackstone Chronicles knockoff... I don't think I will be going near it, despite my love for first person horror games.

I guess the only game I felt more strongly negative about was Still Life 2... but that is a game that gets almost universal derision (quite rightly) so I guess doesn't induce a rant so much.