TeknoEarth

When imagining a game based on the Italian pulp character Corto Maltese by Hugo Pratt, I envision a wide-open game filled with high adventure, sailing along shores and across European seas in the late 19th century. Given the rich history of the protagonist since he was originally created in 1967, there was a wealth of possible resources to be tapped. Instead, Corto Maltese: Secrets of Venice, by Kids Up Hill and now-defunct French developer Lexis Numérique, delivers quite a narrow representation of a beloved fictional adventurer. The present-day plot is underwhelming to the point of being boring, while the puzzles are isolated to minigames and riddles, almost never adding to the progression of the story. This game may be intended as a love letter to Pratt’s work, but it’s disguised as a very casual puzzler that really doesn’t do justice to its source material. Maltese fans may still enjoy it somewhat for nostalgic reasons, but newcomers will find very little here to understand the appeal.

Players don’t control Maltese himself, but rather take the role of an unnamed, unseen protagonist who wakes up in a café after a night of drinking and partying. Hungover and disoriented, you are greeted by the café’s mob-type owner. As a remedy for your hangover he you gives you a drink, but after consuming it you discover that you have been poisoned, and the only way to get the antidote is to do the man’s bidding. He asks of your knowledge of the sailor Corto Maltese, then explains that Maltese met with six women, each of whom was offered an emerald. When these jewels are assembled, they create a rosette called the Key to Solomon. In order for you to be cured of your poison—which is purportedly too old to be treated with modern medicine—you must journey across Venice and retrieve the fabled gems. The relevance of the Key of Solomon is not explained, and why the man randomly chose a drunken nobody seems completely irrelevant.

To get you started, the man equips you with a gazette—a magazine filled with background information about the six women Maltese encountered—and a compass, the one and only object you’ll use to solve all the puzzles. Rather than a traditional adventure, you don’t so much go exploring as find yourself being guided through scene after static scene, not unlike the developer’s previousRed Johnson series, though here you’ll (largely) be investigating the back alleys of Venice. There are only a few instances where you’re even allowed to move from one room to another, which isn’t nearly enough to offer any real sense of freedom. Each stop contains hidden symbols that must be entered into the top of the compass like a combination. Each combination then initiates a puzzle-like minigame or riddle that will reveal your next destination.

For every puzzle combination you find, there are two options to enter into the compass, one easier and one harder. I often chose the lesser of the difficulties, which I found quite manageable. The harder ones not only require more in-depth thinking, but the game even warns you that you may need external internet assistance to solve them. Many of the challenges consist of brainteaser-style logic puzzles, like drawing non-overlapping lines between colored dots on a grid multiple times in a row, or decoding a message of numbers into an answer (the first of which is, unfortunately, clued blatantly wrong). There’s a fairly decent variety of tasks, but not all of them are equally interesting. One puzzle involves simply looking at a series of landscapes and pinpointing numbers hidden in the lakes. If you find yourself stuck, there is a hint system that gives you layered clues on to how to solve the current puzzle. The last hint often tells you exactly how to solve it without directly giving you the answer.

The tasks themselves can be fun diversions, but there’s nothing you can’t find in your run-of-the-mill puzzle game. The problem is that they are so isolated from the story, acting only as a means to give you something to do while continuing along your linear path. None of the compass puzzles are related to any other, and puzzle-like environmental interactions are far and few between, like finding a specific object for someone based on the clues provided. The combinations to initiate puzzles are hidden throughout the environment, but are placed so obviously that it defeats any potential thrill of scavenging to find them. On the back of the magazine is a long list of ingredients needed for the poison antidote, yet the ingredients are simply collected and checked off as you go along, eliminating any sense of danger or urgency. I quickly realized that there would be no critical thinking required in order to cure myself.

The non-melding of story and gameplay gives the game a troubling identity crisis. Since the puzzles aren’t at all integrated into the plot, but rather seem to be competing with it, I couldn’t become fully interested in either. I didn’t really care about the puzzles since they distracted me so much from the story, but the constantly-interrupted story itself was too vague and poorly translated, missing a strong motive for me to grasp onto. With no real urgency to even heal myself, my only real interest lay in seeing the intermittent black-and-white Corto Maltese motion comics along the way. Although very basic they are beautifully stylized; I wanted to stay in them, wander around and click through them, but no such opportunity arose. Even so, they are quite a joy to watch.

German developer Daedalic Entertainment has established itself as a household name on the adventure scene with traditional point-and-click games like The Whispered World and the Deponia series. Fire, their latest effort, takes a more casual approach to storytelling, delivering a visually pleasant but extremely short environmental puzzler fit for the whole family to crack together. While the highly linear approach to problem-solving is engaging, and exploring each of the (admittedly small) world’s ten levels remains intriguing throughout, seasoned veterans won’t find much challenge here, and will breeze through the lion’s share of the game rather quickly.

The story behind Fire is quickly relayed without words: Kicked out of his village for letting its precious firepit extinguish during his watch, Neanderthal Ungh sets out to scour the prehistoric (yet fantastical) world for a new source to start a flame. During a psychedelic vision from eating some rotten fruit, a nature spirit tells Ungh to seek out what amounts to ten magical fireflies, each one hidden in a different area of the world that will open up a portal to the next. In each area he passes through, Ungh will need to interact with his environments and advance past a battery of puzzles to get his hands on the elusive prize and advance to the next stage.

The different levels Ungh travels through include stalwarts like ‘Cave World’, ‘Volcano World’, and ‘Ice World’. But the game doesn’t aim to create a realistic prehistoric universe, so players will also find themselves traversing ‘Dragon World’, piloting a time machine, and donning a space suit in ‘Moon World’. Each location is full of colorful, hand-painted cartoon scenery and creatures drawn from family-friendly imagination. Turtle-like ceramic pots, a jungle-creature barbershop quartet, monkeys administering IQ tests, jumping rocks, and giant frogs all populate the lands you’ll traverse. For good measure, Daedalic has included plenty of Easter eggs to giggle at, with references to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and an unexpected brief, easy round of Space Invaders.

Puzzles in Fire operate in two different ways. Moving the cursor over an interactive object will result in it lighting up in one of two colors. A yellow cursor means Ungh can interact with the object directly, while blue indicates players can manipulate the object on their own. Generally, you’ll either have to make Ungh pick up a certain item needed to interact with a specific object in the environment, or activate and move items around to create a desired effect. Of course, accessing items and objects to progress might in itself require a separate puzzle to be solved first. Very seldomly, the game switches tack and will throw a movement-based or timing puzzle your way, though these are quick to master. The first seven or eight worlds consist of only three side-by-side screens to navigate back and forth using on-screen directional arrows, while the last few extend that number marginally.

Fire politely requests that you wear your lateral thinking cap, as its puzzles often require out-of-the-box logic. During the course of the game, you’ll encounter a wide variety of obstacles that need to be approached in differing ways. One scenario involves strategic shape-shifting, while another requires cycling between day and night, causing some alterations in the environment accordingly. Other puzzles are based on pitch-perfect sound recognition; navigating  a rock-strewn underground lake on the back of an octopus, letting you move one space in any cardinal direction, but never in the same one twice; and a segment where you must navigate past moon traps using zero-gravity space thrusts. Almost every stage offers something new and unexpected, adding greatly to the joy of exploration.

The challenge is fairly light, however, and experienced players will reach the end of their journey after only two or three hours. Once or twice, a section took me longer than expected due to a poorly clued puzzle. This is where Fire’s complete lack of spoken or written dialog came as a detriment; even when Ungh was communicating with a fellow Neanderthal in grunts and growls, I was left having to make sense of what to do through hard-to-interpret pictographs or gestures. Ungh alone is rarely much help, offering nothing but a confused response to many interactive items, indicating that he’s just as clueless as you.

Even with its lack of overt clues, the game is often a bit hand-holdey by virtue of being so streamlined. Pressing the spacebar reveals all interactive areas, on average around four to five per screen. Ungh rarely interacts with his surroundings unless specifically required to by a puzzle, and inventory is limited to the single item he’s currently carrying. There’s usually no more than a couple items to pick up in a level, anyway, so using the right one is just a matter of deciding between A and B. And given that each location is generally limited in size to three screens, process of elimination will typically lead to the correct solution before long.

To add a little bit of replay incentive, each level has three hidden Fire sigils to collect, which unlock bits of concept art in the main menu. At times I simply had to search the backgrounds carefully to see one cheekily peeking out at me from behind a tree trunk or other obstruction. Other times, manipulating objects in certain patterns or playing around with the environment will reveal one for you to collect. There is some challenge to be had here – I only completed the set of three in one or two worlds – and worlds can be revisited from the map screen at any time after completing them once, but returning to a previously cleared stage to find a missed sigil or two resets all of that world’s puzzles as well, leading to tedious repetition if you want to get them all.

Tilo Alpermann, having previously composed the score for Daedalic’s adventureThe Night of the Rabbit, returns on soundtrack duty for Fire, creating a curious mix of themes. Any given level may feature distinctly Bohemian folk music, upbeat Caribbean tunes, or songs made to clap and whistle to. While the music lends the game a lot of lightheartedness and humor, its quirky whistles and pops won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, and can quickly cross over from snappy to grating due to its repetitiveness.

Overall, Fire simply doesn’t have a lot of staying power. While it lasts, the constantly changing environments you’ll explore offer some engagement, but it’s all over too quickly, leaving little reason to want to return to it for more of the same. The first time through you’ll catch yourself with an amused smirk or two as Ungh flies into a comic rage when he doesn’t get his way, but the limited difficulty that will appeal to younger audiences will leave others longing for more of a challenge. It’s pretty and charming, and it seems like a world I would have enjoyed getting lost in for a longer period of time, but in the end I felt a bit short-changed on its promise.

When Broken Age’s first act released last January, high expectations came with it. As gaming’s first multimillion-dollar Kickstarter success, it embodied Tim Schafer’s longstanding dream to make a traditional adventure game in the post LucasArts era, with more than 87,000 fans chipping in to make it a reality.Broken Age wasn’t likely to CHANGE EVERYTHING!!!, but for longtime fans of the genre, its initial release represented a significant milestone.

The game got off to a good start, with Act 1 drawing us into the lives of protagonists Shay and Vella only to see their worlds subverted by sinister outside forces—a charming, tantalizing glimpse over far too soon, with a massive cliffhanger to boot. And then we waited. What was supposed to be a six-month gap between acts stretched into fifteen. If you want all the gory details, check out the documentary that was filmed during Broken Age’s development. But if all you care about is the game itself, you’re in luck, because the finally completed Broken Age holds its own as one of the best adventure games of this century.

Just in case you haven’t been following along since the Kickstarter campaign, Tim Schafer’s first adventure game since Grim Fandango tells the parallel stories of two teens whose paths unexpectedly converge. Depicted with a whimsical, painted art style that evokes feelings of innocence and wonder, this is a world where a spaceship is steered with controls fashioned from a baby’s crib toy and where maidens dress up like frosted cupcakes in an elaborate town-wide celebration. On the surface, Broken Age appears childlike and magical, but it doesn’t take much scratching to reveal a darker, more intricate tale beneath the fluffy facade.

The protagonists, Shay and Vella, are two fourteen-year-olds in situations vastly different yet oddly similar. Shay lives on a spaceship where he’s grown up under the watchful “eyes” of computer programs named Mom and Dad, his only playmates a herd of annoyingly chipper, sentient stuffed animals. The entire ship has been wired to keep Shay safe; decorated with smiley faces and colorful toys, it holds Shay back in childhood like the bedroom of a teenager who hasn’t yet been given the go-ahead to redecorate. He spends his days going on missions manufactured by Mom to save his stuffed animal friends from ice cream avalanches and alien snuggle attacks, taking regular breaks to be fed nutritious meals by mechanical hands and a talking spoon. Not surprisingly, the teen has begun to rebel against this suffocating, bubble-wrapped environment, and when a snap decision to sabotage one of Mom’s missions leads to the discovery of an unknown portion of the ship, an exciting and dangerous outside world suddenly appears to be within his reach.

Vella, meanwhile, has been selected for the dubious honor of representing her baking town, Sugar Bunting, in the ritual Maidens Feast celebration. Vella is to be sacrificed to Mog Chothra, a monster who has appeared every fourteen years from beyond the Plague Dam for as long as anyone can remember, because towns that don’t offer up their tastiest maidens suffer catastrophic consequences. When Vella brings up the idea of fighting Mog Chothra instead, her suggestion is laughed off—only her feisty Grandpa Beastender takes her seriously. (He remembers the good old days when their town was populated by brave warriors… a far cry from today’s pacifist bakers.) Like Shay dutifully playing Mom’s rescue games, Vella goes along with the plan to a point. Then, in a move that blatantly defies her role as a video game "princess," she breaks out of her expected trope by standing up to Mog Chothra and her world also opens up as she embarks on a quest to save other towns in the monster’s path.

At first glance, these are two separate stories with a few parallel elements: two teenage protagonists fed up with rules imposed by authority figures; two coming-of-age journeys spawned by their rebellion. But experiencing these stories side by side reveals subtle links in Act 1 that you may or may not pick up depending on what order you play them in and how thoroughly you explore. Though their paths rarely cross, you can switch between Shay and Vella whenever you want. I initially played Shay’s portion of Act 1 start to finish in one sitting—a choice I later regretted because it kept me from noticing moments where his story synced up with Vella’s. Upon my second Act 1 playthrough, the story became richer and more complex when I alternated between the characters at each major story beat. Either way, the running time for Act 1 is around 3-4 hours.

I stuck with Shay at first because I intended to switch to Vella when I got stuck on a puzzle… and that never happened. Not that I’m complaining: Act 1’s difficulty level was just right to keep me engaged, always thinking about what my next step would be but never too stymied to progress. Each character’s section has some degree of non-linearity, with more than one task to tackle at any point, so even when a solution wasn’t immediately obvious I was able to send my character in pursuit of a different goal (usually figuring out the puzzle that gave me pause along the way). The obstacles are traditional adventure game stuff, requiring item collection, exploration, and dialogue to overcome. In Act 1, Vella visits four distinct locations, each with a few people to talk to and goals to achieve, so her quest feels meatier than Shay’s—she’s traveling as she hunts down Mog Chothra, while he’s stuck in place trying to hack the ship’s controls and break free. But even marooned on a spaceship Shay has a variety of things to do, from inventory puzzles to a couple of simple logic challenges to a recurring arcade sequence that gets trickier each time.

Both the time investment and difficulty level ramp up significantly in Act 2. With the exception of a couple of new rooms, Act 2’s locations are the same places we’ve already been, but with substantial changes opening new hotspots to try out and dialogues to engage in. Vella and Shay remain separate (although their stories are more obviously linked), and switching between them becomes a necessity since several puzzle solutions rely on information you’ll find in the other character’s area. While the two protagonists don’t exactly work together, you have to think comprehensively as you hunt for clues, which makes Act 2 feel bigger than Act 1 and gives a reason to re-explore everything you thought you’d already seen. Most of the NPCs from Act 1 are still around, but their situations have changed, with the subplots of the depressed bird maiden passed over by Mog Chothra, the Dead-Eye Druids, frustrated shoemaker Car’l, and lightness guru Harm’ny Lightbeard all reaching satisfying conclusions as a result of your puzzle-solving.

Act 2’s puzzles are similar to Act 1’s, relying on inventory use, correct dialogue choices, logic, and occasionally good timing, but the later puzzles have more steps—just when you think you’ve solved something, an unexpected twist prompts one more burst of creative thinking. I solved most puzzles on my own with an a-ha! revelation and a deep sense of satisfaction; the two times I consulted a walkthrough, it turns out I was this close. It’s not every day that an adventure game challenges while staying fair and accessible, so I appreciate the care that went into Broken Age’s puzzle design. There was one puzzle that I didn’t quite get, involving a sequence of remote control operations around the spaceship, but I managed to solve it anyway; this was the only point when Act 2’s gameplay left me underwhelmed. On the flip side, several clever puzzles—such as one that requires describing a step-by-step diagram to a character who claims to be a “verbal learner” and another that involves adapting an antiquated star chart to work on Shay’s ship—are great examples of why Tim Schafer’s adventure games are fondly remembered, and I genuinely enjoyed the time I spent pondering them. Act 2 took me just over 8 hours, bringing my full playtime to nearly 12 hours. That’s more than I anticipated based on Act 1’s length, and it makes the long wait for the conclusion easier to swallow.

As expected, Schafer’s writing is witty and wonderful. The game is peppered with great moments that happen “just because,” like rotating through Shay’s comical cereal choices or leaving his spoon babbling on the counter long enough for it to embarrass itself. Some players gauge a game’s humor by how often they laugh out loud, and I’ll admit that much of Broken Age’s writing is more charming than knee-slapping funny. But even if my running tally of LOLs was low, I thoroughly enjoyed the absurdity of Shay and Vella’s situations. The other maidens Vella encounters see their sacrifice to Mog Chothra as an honor, to the point of throwing their dolled-up selves at the slobbering beast—there’s something inherently wrong and uncomfortable about it, and that’s why it’s great. Same with the lanky Shay crammed into the engine car of a toy train, rolling his eyes while his stuffed animal friends scream and cower over their imminent free fall down a phony mountain. Broken Age’s situational comedy is clever and meaningful, particularly when it becomes clear that the farce is only a frosting topper on a cake made from more mature, even sinister ingredients.

The intensity of Act 1’s surprise revelation is never duplicated in Act 2, but the story does build to its natural conclusion with most of the raised questions answered. One story point I had trouble wrapping my head around involves the sudden introduction of two new characters close to Shay; eventually I bought the explanation for their presence and I definitely got the joke, but the long delay between Acts may have made me less willing to accept it at first. It was great to see Vella’s family again in Act 2—especially her kid sister Rocky, who’s authentically childlike and makes a great BFF to cloud dweller M’ggie—but one brief appearance from another Sugar Bunting resident had me scratching my head. But these are small complaints about a story that’s generally well-written, entertaining, and doesn’t take itself too seriously, even with some heavy themes about leaving childhood behind and standing up to societal expectations simmering beneath the surface.

Horror runs a wide gamut, from the goriest, most blood-curdling viscera, to nerve-rending jump scares, to slow burns and edge-of-your-seat tension, and everything in between. The Charnel House Trilogy, by Owl Cave, falls squarely on one extreme of this scale: More Poe than Lovecraft, it absolutely smacks of classic gothic horror. Presented as a fairly normal slice of adventure narrative, it throws the occasional subtle curve ball to remind you that not all is what it seems. While not rating high on the modern Terror Meter, this surprisingly short and easy, low-res point-and-clicker is nonetheless capable of a feat many games strive for: to present a digital world that at once feels believable, even as belief-defying things happen around you.

A trilogy in name rather than in practice, Charnel House is more like one game split into three acts. You’ll jump between two main characters from act to act, but there’s a common setting, timeline, and supporting cast to tie it all together. Attempting to live the newly-single New York life after a messy breakup with her boyfriend, Alex Davenport decides to pull up stakes after some bad news concerning her ailing father, and heads to the train station to catch the next ride headed out of town. Armed with only a duffel bag, she meets Dr. Harold Lang on the station platform, both awaiting the same train. The two don’t know it yet, but their voyage will be anything but ordinary, and their arrival all but certain.

Each of Charnel House’s three acts gets progressively longer, with the first one clocking in at a generous 30 minutes of 2-3 hours in total. Taking place almost entirely at one location – inside Alex’s meager NYC apartment – the act introduces us to the mechanics and sets up many of the game’s main characters while leaving the narrative purposely vague, to be fleshed out more later on. It also includes a couple of interesting and unnerving twists, which set the stage for what is to come. Through a recorded voicemail message we get a glimpse into the strained dynamic between Alex, her sick father and estranged mother, and a desktop wallpaper photograph introduces us to her ex-boyfriend Gavin (whose face has been violently scratched out).

After some basic puzzle-solving and getting used to the controls (left-click to interact, right to examine), the first act, titled “Inhale”, soon nears its end. As Alex arrives at the train station, you are reminded that not everything is as it seems. The train attendant, a portly and seemingly friendly fellow, ushers the travelers on board, busying himself with a luggage cart left behind on the platform. As he amiably mumbles to himself, a crow flutters by and lands on his shoulder. What happens next is so sudden and unexpected that it made me sit up straighter as a chill ran down my spine, not least because of the absent-minded casualness it was performed with, an event no more out of the ordinary than tying your shoelaces or brushing your teeth. It’s eerie, unsettling moments like this – an out-of-place reaction, an off-putting remark slipped nonchalantly into conversation, an act of unexpected violence – that really draw the eye and let us know that anything can happen, at any time. And as the game draws on, it does so with increasing regularity.

“Sepulchre” and “Exhale”, acts two and three respectively, take place on the actual train itself (which I assume to be the titular Charnel House), with players taking control of Dr. Lang during “Sepulchre” before returning to Alex in the final act. The train’s confined space means you’re restricted to two passenger cars with three cabins each, and the dining car. This represents the entire setting for the remainder of the game, suggesting constant repetition for the duration. However, at some undefined point along its journey (or perhaps even the instant the doomed passengers set foot on it), the train appears to cross some sort of dimensional border between life and death, reality and purgatory, and you’ll never know what to expect when entering a cabin; even re-entering immediately after exiting may present you with a wholly different area than the one you just exited.

Since the train has clearly entered the realm of Anything Goes, it shouldn’t come as a big surprise when Alex and Harold run into people from their past, who have absolutely no business being on board. Luckily, the train’s staff – attendant Don and barkeep Floyd – are there to direct Alex and Harold along as the two discover the train’s secrets. The game provides a string of invisible step-by-step objectives that take you neatly through its narrative, with little chance to get stuck or “derail” along the way. A typical sequence of events may look something like this: Enter cabin, interact/examine/get item, leave cabin, hear a noise/notice a door ajar/talk to Don to find out where to go next, then repeat.

There are a number of inventory-based puzzles to solve along the way, well integrated into the gameplay. Whether finding keys to locked doors, opening cabinets and boxes, or using items on each other within the inventory window, you’re never taken out of the narrative to solve a forced logic puzzle. That being said, the level of challenge is rather low, what with a limited pool of items to choose from and the restricted space of the train; most of the puzzles hardly even register as anything other than pausing for an extra mouse click or two. If you find yourself unable to progress, a quick look into your inventory will often offer a common sense solution. Due to the game’s linearity, chances that you’ve missed an item somewhere along the line and must now search for it are also rather low.

When Dead Synchronicity: Tomorrow Comes Today first appeared on Kickstarter, Fictiorama Studios expressed their desire to deliver a dark and mature adventure game in the likes of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream andSanitarium. Lofty ambitions for a first-time indie developer, but as it turns out not only does the game live up to its promise—it’s violent, bleak, and at times flat-out disturbing—it goes above and beyond expectations, proving itself a worthy modern genre classic, though with a few rough edges. It succeeds at delivering an epic dystopian science fiction tale that’s truly thought-provoking. You’ll be faced with making immoral choices, but it’s the rational thing to do in a grim, post-apocalyptic land where the concept of right and wrong is completely turned on its head. The setting is brilliantly realized and filled with fleshed-out characters that feel like they belong; it immersed me into a sad, forgotten world that I wanted to learn more about, and possibly even make a difference in.

Following the tried-and-true amnesiac premise, you play as Michael, a man who awakes with no memory of who he is or where he’s from. He rouses in a world long after its collapse due to what is called the “Great Wave” – a giant explosion that happened alongside a series of natural global disasters, wiping out much of the population and all electricity, sending the world back to the dark ages. Michael soon meets a man named Rod, who claims to have found him unconscious and has been taking care of him ever since. Rod informs Michael of a disease that has overcome the planet since the Great Wave known as the “dissolve”, which causes people to become tremendously sick and inevitably dissolve entirely into blood and mush. Rumor has spread that there is a cure for the disease, and if Michael can obtain it from a hospital where the dissolved are taken, then Rod promises to help Michael discover his past and who he was.

The journey first begins in what appears to be a junkyard that has been turned into a refugee camp for survivors of the Great Wave with nowhere to go. Surrounding the camp are hostile armed guards assigned to maintain order. The camp is ostensibly meant to keep those inside safe, but in reality it is something of a concentration camp, leaving many of its inhabitants uncared for and forgotten. Areas of the camp are separated by walls constructed of trash and demolished cars, all of which is surrounded by barbed wire and giant concrete watch towers. No one is allowed to leave unless bearing a special bracelet that indicates you work for the guards, which often means being an informant about what’s happening in the camp, including keeping watch over those who may be housing a dissolved. After helping someone in the camp, you receive one of these badges, allowing you the freedom to leave whenever you please, though at the risk of being seen as a mole.

Outside of the camp, stretched beyond a dried up wasteland, lies an unnamed city that Michael must reach. You’ll explore the city’s streets, the remains of a collapsed church, the grotesquely haunting “suicide park,” underground sewers, and a barely operating hospital. Each environment has a detailed history that can be learned by conversing with its characters. Along the way, you’ll often be interrupted with visions of Michael, most of which appear to be in the past but some of them set in the future. They occur upon entering more than half of the locations: the environment fizzles out, warping and transforming the surroundings into a cleaner pre-Great Wave version of itself or an even more degraded iteration. These visions left me intrigued about their meaning, but they happen far too frequently, and will repeat if you stand idle for at least 30 seconds. The visions have very little variation to them, leaving Michael repeating the same “I think I’m starting to lose my mind” line, every time, and though the dialogue is skippable, there’s no way to entirely bypass the vision. There is a clue later in the game that justifies why they occur more than once, but it would have been better if they repeated less frequently and with more variation.

The characters of Dead Synchronicity are much like the world they inhabit: sad, worn down, and filled with stories to tell. Everyone has a past, a life before the Great Wave, before becoming something else entirely once the “new world” began. Like the crazy homeless man who was once a wealthy businessman, or Ramon the former writer who is now a hilariously cynical man trying to survive. Most sympathetic and saddening of all the characters is easily Rose, an adult woman with the mind of a child – a coping mechanism to help deal with the faded world. Rose calls you “Mr. Sleepyhead” and claims to know who you are. When you find her she is being held captive by thugs, who use her regressed mental state against her and prostitute her out to those with money to pay. Her plight presents a quest to gain access to her to learn what she supposedly knows about your past, and possibly even help her escape.

The voice acting is diverse, with each character conveying a distinct personality, but sometimes feels forced instead of fluent and natural. The one character who seems to struggle the most with consistency is unfortunately the protagonist Michael. I found Michael’s voice to be too confident and abrasive for his small frame and fairly gaunt stature. I never got used to that voice coming out of him during my entire playthrough, which continually took me out of the experience. Michael’s performance is also frequently uneven, like when he goes from extremely angry to calm within a single line of dialogue.

The visuals are one of the game’s most impressive features. The stylized hand-drawn look is original and distinctive, simple in some ways yet complex in others, and sometimes extremely disturbing. The illustrated backgrounds, filled with muted reds and browns and grays to suitably represent this devastated world, are gritty and realistic, in stark contrast to the geometrically designed, Spanish expressionistic character art; the combination of styles makes the overall aesthetic much more memorable. Animations are minimal and usually only consist of a few frames. At first this lack of fluent animation seemed lazy to me, but eventually it began to fit the deliberately cartoony character design, to the point where I stopped noticing entirely.

Interacting with this bleak world is simple and intuitive. Left-clicking allows you to pick up items and talk to characters, as indicated by the shape of the smart cursor over hotspots, and right-clicking allows for observation. Michael’s observations are often metaphor-heavy analyses of the world around him – even mundane items like a door, for which he explains its struggle to stand and exist in a world crumbling around it. Such attention to detail goes a long way in supporting the richly dystopian atmosphere. The inventory is represented by a briefcase icon in the upper left corner, which can be opened either by clicking it, or by scrolling down on the mouse wheel or swiping down on a trackpad, which I found very user-friendly. Viewing the inventory fills most of the screen, visualized like an open briefcase. Many puzzles consist of combining several items together.

Aside from being able to highlight hotspots by holding down the spacebar, there is no hint system in Dead Synchronicity, but the notebook is extremely useful. As you progress, it will automatically fill up with important events and objectives, making it a great alternative to keep track of everything that’s happening and what it is you should be doing.

Puzzles are mildly challenging rather than brain-breaking; logical and almost entirely inventory-based. Many items you collect serve multiple purposes, but will finally be discarded when they’re no longer needed. Sometimes, however, the purpose of an item is unclear, and it can linger in your inventory for the majority of the game before finding a use, which is illogical and doesn’t fit the serious nature of the story. The game does a good job of making everything feel as though it belongs to this world, so holding onto a broken street sign for nearly eight hours just seems strange. In fact, there are some items that I never did find a use for, which makes me wonder if a replay would reveal things I missed the first time around or whether they’re simply red herrings.

Many of the choices you’ll have to make will feel wrong and immoral, but are completely necessary to further progress in a world where ethics are no longer a concern. In many cases, the choices available result in jarring outcomes that change the world and characters around you in some shape or form. One puzzle in particular forces you to do things to a dead body that you certainly won’t feel proud of afterwards, however necessary it is. That sounds dreadfully wrong, but in the context of this broken world it is entirely appropriate, and really the only thing that can be done. “You gotta do what you gotta do” is a recurring line among survivors when justifying how to live after the Great Wave.

At the end of a substantial 12 hours of gameplay, I was left with a feeling of gratification I have not had in quite some time from an adventure game, or any game for that matter. The revelation of Michael’s past is surprisingly unpredictable and remarkably personal in nature, completely defying my initial assumptions of an expected and more conventional twist. Learning his background makes the protagonist seem deeper, better thought-out, and even more devastatingly sympathetic than before.

The ending of the game left me cheering, but also curious for more. The developers have said that Dead Synchronicity: Tomorrow Comes Today is just part of an epic saga, and the door has clearly been left open to pursue the idea. Even without a sequel, however, this game can stand entirely on its own merits, finishing with an ending that is concise but also open for interpretation. The game does bear some signs of a first-time developer still learning its craft, but overall Fictiorama Studios have started out on a high with their debut and established themselves as potential force in the genre. I am eager and ready for whatever they have next up their sleeves.

The Eberlings are a family of inventors and scientists who, for the past century, have tended to disappear just when their top secret research started showing promise. Where did these men go, and why did they leave? As a coming-of-age tale with surprising depth and heart-breaking dilemmas, The Perils of Mancombines gadgetry and the science of risk with an emotional tale of a family too brilliant for its own good.

As the game begins, the youngest Eberling, Ana, has just turned sixteen. She is celebrating alone with her mother in the great, creaky family mansion in Switzerland. It’s been ten long years since Ana’s father, Max, departed without a trace. Her mother, traumatized by the family curse, never leaves the mansion and does her best to keep Ana insulated and uninformed. To a teenager, isolation is frustrating and boring. To someone like Ana, who has a voraciously inquisitive mind, it is mental torture.

Ana’s mother is convinced that the Eberling mansion is haunted by her husband’s ghost. The mansion has strangely transient cold areas. Objects shift locations or mysteriously appear from nowhere. A fierce and interminable thunder and lightning storm rages outside. The roof leaks and the electricity has gone out. But the discovery of a purple cylinder, left years ago by Ana’s father to be given to her on her sixteenth birthday, thrusts Ana into an adventure filled with revelation, adversity, and as the title suggests, risk.

Ana soon discovers that her ancestors stumbled across a unique way to assess and manipulate catastrophes. Imagine the power you would possess if you had 20/20 hindsight and the ability to travel through time. What would you risk to change a seemingly horrible fate? As Ana follows her father’s footsteps into the past, she becomes entangled in decisions that earlier Eberlings have made to change or confirm a timeline where cataclysm has threatened many innocent lives. Along the way she must navigate a minefield of traps, opportunities, and potential missteps on an intricate path past the failures of her ancestors in order to return home unscathed.

 The Perils of Man is the product of the unconventional minds of Bill Tiller and Gene Mocsy, who also collaborated on A Vampyre Story and Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island. As in their previous games, Perils features characters whose backstories and personality quirks are amusingly revealed as the game progresses. Ana is obsessed with finding out what happened to her father and eager to learn more about her family’s past, no matter the cost. She has no interest in typical teenage concerns – clothes, friends, contemporary culture. Early on, she teams up with a sentient robotic bird named Darwin, who was invented by Thomas Eberling 150 years earlier. Darwin provides cheerful commentary as well as assistance at certain points (there’s even a brief sequence where you play as Darwin). He offers glimpses into the Eberlings’ secrets and facilitates an odd form of communication between Ana and his inventor.

Ana and Darwin’s journey sweeps them into the past to other locations, including the Aladon Theater in 19th century London and a ship at sea during World War II. Their travels generate encounters with other offbeat characters: the London Bobby whose ambition is avoiding danger and discomfort; a paranoid sea captain who wants to throw everyone in the brig; and the ship’s doctor who is the only source of calm and sanity during a colossal tragedy. Character animation is a bit stiff, though not distractingly so. Dialogs are often witty, imparting much about each character, and hinting at aspects of the unfolding mystery. Environmental hotspots advance the player’s knowledge; clicking repeatedly often initiates varied comments for those who want to delve deeper. Voiceovers are consistently professional, expressive, and convincing.

Frequent cartoon-like animated cutscenes provoke and challenge, divulge plot twists, reveal puzzle clues, dramatize moral conundrums, and provide backstory (those from the past are sometimes in black and white). These scenes emphasize close-ups of the characters’ faces during their moments of greatest vulnerability and physical jeopardy.

The 3D graphics in Perils are stylized, with blocks of vivid color and odd camera angles. Rooms in the Eberling mansion look out of kilter, slightly tilted. The ceiling in Max Eberling’s study is so high that the bookshelves ascending the walls disappear off the screen, seemingly stacked to infinity. Stately, elaborate windows ornament the ground floor, with hazy light streaming into shadowy rooms. The house hides many secrets, underground surprises, and unexpected exits. Two locations in this game are especially memorable: a circular room full of shelves containing evidence of every catastrophe in recorded history, and a theater lobby with a mirror-like floor and a silhouetted view through French doors of horses and carriages waiting at the curb.

Ambient sounds and animations add to the atmosphere in each locale. Rain plops on the ground outside the Eberling mansion, lightning flashes, and the fountain burbles, while indoors the fireplace flames crackle and dance. A dissonant piano melody accentuates the atmosphere of isolation and loss. In the Aladon Theater, sparks from an electromagnetic experiment sizzle downwards and reflections ripple across the shadowed cistern walls. Dust motes and the sounds of applause drift through the air backstage, while notes from a tentative waltz tiptoe in the background.

The emphasis on gadgetry and the interaction with century-old devices created by Thomas Eberling convey a steampunk aura. The puzzles are well-integrated into the story – the home of eccentric scientists becomes a mechanical playground, and looming disaster in other locations is the perfect inducement for tweaking things. Gameplay challenges include creative use of inventory items, assembling and operating contraptions, enabling a diorama device, wielding chemistry lab tools and materials, breaking a clock code, distracting or otherwise influencing other characters, breaking out of locked areas, and doing your best to accomplish some good, such as finding medicines or trying to prevent explosions.

Played from a third-person perspective with a camera that shifts along with your movement, The Perils of Man uses a simple point-and-click interface. The inventory is easily accessible via an icon in the lower left corner of the screen. Items can be combined on the inventory screen, which has a snazzy gear animation that whirls with a clicking sound as it attempts to connect the items you’ve selected. Unfortunately, sometimes the navigational hotspots are oddly placed, and you’ll need to hunt for them as there is no hotspot finder. Environmental hotspots can be very close to one another and easy to miss. The result is a classic pixel hunting challenge, where, when you’re stuck, you must carefully paint the screen with the cursor while trying to see if you’ve missed anything. The few times I was unable to progress, the inability to locate a hotspot was always the cause of the blockage. The game has an autosave system, but there’s no way to save manually.

Perils has a hint system – a welcome accommodation for all gamers, especially those with limited adventure game experience. Hints are graduated and based on the room you are in. The system does not track your progress, however, so if a room has three challenges and you’ve solved the first two, you must click through all the previous hints before you reach the one that applies to your current obstacle. Sadly, the hint system is particularly unhelpful when it comes to locating items. At one point, I needed an item made of a common substance – something that could be found anywhere in the house. I clicked through multitudes of hints, all for challenges I’d already accomplished. Of course the item I was looking for was in the very last area I searched.

Other than the pixel hunting, the challenges in this game are clearly clued and hit the sweet spot in terms of difficulty. This is not a game with head-scratchingly difficult puzzles. It’s a game with an intricate story, and enough puzzle challenges to keep you thinking and engaged without stopping the story flow for long.

I am always surprised when I encounter a humdinger of an ending in an adventure game, because they are so rare. This one had me transfixed. After about six hours of gameplay (spent taking my time, so others may well reach this point sooner), I watched the ending sequence, at first with trepidation, followed by a stomach wrenching sensation as a scenario unfolded with many lives at stake. At last I experienced one of those revelatory moments when all the subtle indications from earlier in the game came together and suddenly made sense.

There is much to admire about The Perils of Man. It starts with an eccentric family and a seemingly haunted house, and builds these elements into a tale of discoveries, inventions, dangers, and unintended consequences. The writing, voiceovers, quirky locations and ambient effects combine to make the world and the story come alive. The puzzles are logical and advance the story without halting the pace. Though the pixel hunting is frustrating and other minor aspects could use some polish, the overall experience is so compelling that, for me, it ended too soon – I would have liked it to go on and on. The postlude leaves a hint of a sequel. I hope one is in the works.