Moment Of Silence
Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after you.
Tags: Moment Of Silence Categories: PC Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Brad on Apr 6th, 2005
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Moment Of Silence (title page) | 1 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Adventure | No | ||
A good, old-fashioned point-and-click adventure game is a sort of delicacy in today’s gaming landscape. The waning, but still hungry crowd of fans seems to have fallen out of sight for once great producers of these titles, such as Sierra and LucasArts, and the genre itself has largely been reduced to a sort of novelty; being a game that companies want to do, but can no longer risk the expense.
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One company still cranks these things out. Appropriately named, The Adventure Company is a sort of last bastion for games solved through rational thought and dialogue rather than lightning reflexes and rocket launchers. It would not be stretching things to say that there’s more plot sunk into any one of their games than in the whole year’s library of Capcom and Nintendo products put together.
New from the Adventure Company comes The Moment of Silence, a near-future paranoid romp through a United States plagued by luddite terrorists, thought police, propaganda pushers, and alien-conspiracy-seeking superhackers. You take the role of communications designer Peter Wright, who sets off to unravel the mystery of his next door neighbor’s unrecorded arrest by an apparently illegitimate SWAT team.
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Now, I say “romp” where The Adventure Company might use the word “thriller.” This isn’t to suggest that the plot of the game is not a dark and serious one. It’s not to say that the setting isn’t incredibly well realized, with expository details poking their heads out of every last corner of the scene. It’s just that the actual execution of this game wears a little thin in some places, and the lead character is such a goon that the dark and serious plot collapses under fits of giggles at Peter’s tough-guy act, and eye-rolling at his peacekeeping efforts over sniping office-mates.
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Wright seems a bit bipolar, and not in a good, intended-unpredictability way. He’s obviously a guy with a lot of internal conflicts, and won’t hesitate to lay them at the feet of anyone he bumps into on the street… at great length… through the usual branching conversation trees that games like these employ. These occasionally lead to trouble, as The Moment of Silence relies, perhaps more than its contemporaries, on hitting nearly every outcome of every character’s speech. It’s not always enough that you’ve spoken to a character, not even that you’ve gleaned enough information to get a clue of what to do next, but that you’ve got to hit the magic line that triggers some transition down the road. This can be quite frustrating when you’ve not exhausted all lines of conversation and have to run back to a certain character (if you even know which one) to get the game to catch up with you. Often, you’ll find yourself stepping backwards through conversations with: “I’d like to ask you something else.” or “I’ve got another question.” and “I’d like to talk about something else.” These sorts of lines, when strung together in a row, often give the game’s large banks of dialogue a stilted, unnatural feeling, accentuated by the stiff, robotic, occasionally bizarre character animations. Some are out of order. Some are missing lines. Some have accents that must either be accepted as “future tongue” or dismissed as “very silly.” One woman smokes a cigarette as she talks, though it does not track with her head, hanging there in midair as she gesticulates, waiting patiently for her mouth to return for another puff.
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Really, it’s one of those games – you’ve played plenty of ‘em – that is easy to nitpick into the ground, but assaulting the execution would hardly be doing the concept justice. It’s a tough adventure to play, with some traditional style puzzles, and some that will have you stumbling around until you manage to click the tiny hotspot on the screen or combine the right two wholly unrelated objects. Personally, I found the game to be lacking in the feedback department. There’s a hint button you can press, but it really only displays the various exits to a room, which doesn’t really help you when you don’t know where you’re supposed to be and can’t get any kind of reminder of your task list. Those exit points do come in handy, however, as the game does occasionally have problems with its pathfinding, and just getting Peter to leave a room can be quite the task. There are a few rooms that you just have to look at and wonder why in the world they were built the way they were, the entrances and exits totally obscured and in no way obvious.
That being said, I really enjoyed the fiction. The main character goes from Dr. Phil to Navy SEAL a little too easily to be convincing, but the world around him exudes the appropriate paranoid sensations needed to sell the future as a very creepy place.
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The music is actually very good, when it’s not too loud, drowning out the conversations. The many various locations you explore are very well realized by the background artists, and contain quite a lot of visual detail to explore while just walking around. The few cutscenes between chapters are nice to look at as well.
Is it fun to play, though? Not particularly. It’s just too easy to get sidetracked from the story by the sketchy clicking, the back and forth running between scenes, and the long dredges through conversation trees that often do more harm to the realism than good. Let’s put it this way; it’d make a great novel.
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Grab yourself a copy of Syberia, also by the Adventure Company, or wait for the next one to roll along. I can’t honestly recommend this game to anyone but the most diehard of fans, looking for a fix.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
|
+ Compelling story and settings + Good music + Some interesting puzzles |
6.7 |
| What Doesn't | |
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- Rather iffy execution of the character animations - Conversations drag the game into the unintentionally hillarious - Intentionally obtuse, sometimes to its own downfall |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| You could really see where they were going with this one, and it looks like it could have made it there eventually, but this feels like a game set loose before its time. | |
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Tags: Moment Of Silence
Posted by Brad on Apr 6th, 2005 and is filed under PC Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
