(King's Quest 9) The Silver Lining, Episode 1

Well, if the review of this were over as quickly as the game, it would e

Sinking Island

Another adventure by White Birds, the company of Belgian graphic (and adventure) designer Benoit Sokal. Sokal previously made the very pretty but quite empty Amerzone, the two Syberia games (one very good, the other... less so) and the execrable Paradise.

Sinking Island places the player in the shoes of Detective Jack Norm, called to a private island to investigate a murder. The investigation mostly consists of clicking on everything in every room of the insane private hotel on this island and asking everyone about everything, listening to their endless monologues. Even the island gets bored of this very quickly and starts sinking, so you have limited time to complete the investigation.

Well, maybe. Let me explain.

There are two modes in which you can play this game: adventure mode, which works somewhat like Gabriel Knight 3 (triggering certain events or taking REALLY long advances the time, and new stuff happens, like dinner, or coffee, or dinner, or your wife calls, or dinner), and timed mode, in which you indeed have limited time to finish up the game.

I didn't try timed mode, but adventure mode certainly tried my patience: it's still time-based, but the timing is such that it assumes you want to listen to everyone drone on about absolutely everything. If you skip stuff, you will have lots and lots and lots of free time to wander around and admire the gorgeous scenery while you wait for the next dinner or phone-call-from-wife event.

This is, as I said, extremely tiring. Another thing that's rather tiring is that Norm asks everyone the same questions using the exact same phrase. This is occasionally amusing when he basically calls a young woman a hot chyk to her father's face, but those failures are too rare to make the game so bad it's good, and instead it's just booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooring.

The game is also advanced by solving several posed questions like "Who killed X" or "Was Y stolen?" For those, you go into your PDA-like device, which presents you with a list of empty clue fields you need to populate with the things you found -- photos, footprints, fingerprints, items, statements, and documents. So, for example, the "Was Y stolen?" question might require a document, two fingerprints, a photo, and four spoken statements. It is up to you to find the correct ones (thankfully the game will tell you how many you have) and use the Clue-inator to verify the solution, at which point it's spelled out for you again. You also use the PDA to check peoples' fingerprints etc.

Fortunately a person I needed to talk to vanished mysteriously and then the game crashed, so I watched the ending on YouTube. Absolutely everything is laid out in that ending, so ... the developers themselves didn't think anyone would pay attention? I don't know or care.

Three Cards to Midnight

This is not an adventure game.

Yes, it was made by the people who did Tex Murphy. I'm going to come out and say it: Tex Murphy is vastly overrated. (Which of them? All of them.)

This is an hidden object game. And not just any hidden object game: it's also a word-play game, so you have a common suffix that you need to find hidden stuff for to form a complete word (for example, you may have the word "finger", and need to find a ring and fish to form "ringfinger" and "fishfinger".

If that's too hard, you can use clues.

Except you can only get the "optimum path" if you don't use clues. But you can replay the scene without clues, right?

No, you get to replay the entire chapter in question, without using a single clue.

At which point I uninstalled this.

Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island

This is the second game by Bill Tiller's Autumn Moon studio, after A Vampyre Story. And much like that game, this too has Problems.

First, some praise, though: GPoVI handles being a ghost much, much better than the final instalment in Telltale's Tales of Monkey Island series. You can walk through stuff (though later on, the pathfinding algorithm suddenly moves you around stuff instead) and only directly influence smaller things.

The "I'll remember where this is for later so the player doesn't have to walk back ALL THE WAY and get it" mechanic is back, and welcome, though.

That's about it for the positives, though. The game begins in way over its head, and only sinks deeper from there. You get to play three characters at once, but their stories are entirely separate (closed in themselves, and fully linear), and the PCs interact a grand total of maybe five times over the course of the game; even there, you ask one of the other characters about stuff in your inventory, or how to clean a mirror (??). The jokes start out somewhat better than AVS's, but later turn into stupid and/or sexist as the writing runs completely out of steam, then dry-humps the cylinders.

The puzzles get ever more bizarre, and not in a good way: again, I found myself using a walkthrough from about the halfway point because the game degenerated into trial and error, then into plain WTF. The fact that it's impossible to skip the characters' inane blather (but all too easy to skip the cutscenes) made me want to experience as little of it as I could.

Oh, and there's a mini game where you have to try and lob a rock through a window by adjusting two dials that keep moving up and down. Fuck off.

And the ending? Worse than Monkey Island 3's. "Is that really possible?" you may ask.

Yes. Yes, it is.