[Ascovel]

It seems to me that one of the best underground adventure games of 2008 isn't particularly well known. I'm posting a review I originally written for my blog so that more people can get interested in this title.

I played quite a few of the most lauded indie adventure games released the last year. While there are still some 2008 highlights out there waiting for me, Mental Repairs Inc. is the best one I came across so far. What’s more, although it’s completely freewere it matches (and in some instances surpasses) the technical quality of games that require some kind of financial investment before playing.

First of all - no glitches! It’s a flawlessly working piece of software created using the free and popular Wintermute engine. The prerendered backgrounds present classy, art-decoish interiors of a corporate building from the future. We also get cinematic angles, well conjured atmosphere, super-professional designs of the various company and product logos (possibly inspired by some real ones) and an interface stylized to look like from some electronic gadget. The main character is equipped with an impressive 3D model and the ones used for other “characters” are decent too. As for the music, it fits and helps the immersion, but doesn’t stay with you - very old school and backgroundish. And that would be about all there is to say… Oh, I should write what it is about and how it plays too?

Well, let’s just say that someone has finally realized that the great concept from Psychonauts of entering psychotic minds as interactive game locations can be much more interestingly explored in an adventure game. The major difference in the premise is that the subjects of the main hero’s “mental repairs” are not exactly human, probably even soulless. Yet all this is quickly established in the game’s beginning, so don’t consider anything spoiled. The actual tale is short, but fully embraces the short story medium and turns into a twisty, little piece of sci-fi that matches the quality of writing for a decent Star Trek or Twilight Zone episode. With a touch of… Nah, that would be telling.

On the surface the interface resembles Monkey Island 3’s verb coin. However, it reminds me more of the very fun, but unfortunately lost in the mists of time interface of Return to Zork. In short, the command symbols that are available depend on the clicked object and they change if you approach the object while holding an item. This is quite refreshing after the simplified simple-click-solves-any-problem interfaces of todays commercial adventure games and should be lauded. It’s not the enormous variety of action choices that Return to Zork provided, but let’s not be too nitpicky .

The puzzle’s difficulty is medium/a bit on the easy side (very little on the side though). You receive plenty of hints from the characters and object descriptions and (if you want) also additional ones from Googles (come on, you must know Googles ). The inventory combinations (100% of all puzzles besides dialogue puzzles and operating Googles) while not awfully ingenious, allow you to have quite a bit of fun by often delving away from the usual physical, straightforward interactions. My favorite puzzle involved finding some kind of fuel for a symbolical representation of a stove.

Without a doubt the game provides several hours of very solid escapist entertainment. In the end, though, I wouldn’t say that I felt as strongly about the overall experience as I had in the cases of some much more amateurish looking games with more traditional approaches to things (although there’s nothing truly experimental here either). Perhaps this title is too polished, professional and technically smashing (undoubtedly a tremendous effort - it’s been all done by a single person!) for its other qualities to equally shine. Yet I definitely recommend Mental Repairs to everyone and in my opinion it puts to shame a lot of commercial adventure games we see nowadays.

[StarLite]

I played this game and I've got to say that the creator did an excellent job especially with graphics. Just like any other good game you play the only drawback was, length. I wish the game was longer. But still an excellent game, good job. Terrific display of the Wintermute engine. Hope we'll more from this talented creator in the near future.