Scratches
A horror game, or just plain horrifying? *Revised*
Tags: Scratches Categories: PC Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Mar 21st, 2006
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Scratches (title page) | 1 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Adventure | No | ||
Scratches is an old-school point-and click mystery-horror game. Unfortunately, it’s old school in all the bad ways and none of the good. Designed to be played in relatively low-res 800×600 with no ability to scale the graphics to a higher resolution, and despite needing only an 800 MHz processor to run the game, Scratches comes with a default setting that runs the game almost exclusively off the CD it comes on.
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If you install and play the game that way, game play speed is just slightly slower than running in quicksand and the audio is almost always light years ahead of the movies, which crawl by slightly slower than the end-credits of 1979’s Superman: The Motion Picture. Fortunately, if you notice this, you can de-select this option and install most files to your hard-drive. This vastly improves game performance to an acceptable level, even though the resolution stays stuck at only 800×600.
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Of course, then there’s the game play, in which the player must work out all those old-style text-adventure puzzles like, “most doors are locked, did you check your inventory to check for a key that has been there since the beginning of the game, but we neglected to let you know.” To make matters worse, the house is pretty much abandoned when you arrive, so there’s only objects to interact with. Yawn. That sort of stuff is the main way the game plays out. When you do interact with characters, it’s mostly through storyline movies, but there’s not a lot of it in the early going. And the point-and-click system means the idea of “action” in this game is nothing like what survival horror games like Resident Evil or Silent Hill have prepared you for; think more like Myst. If you’re a fan of that sort of stuff, there’s plenty of it here. If you’re not, this game’s not going to win you over.
So how’s the story? Well, you play as famous horror writer Michael Arthate, arriving at the gloomy Blackwood Manor, a Victorian-style home you just bought on the rural outskirts of a British market town. The weather is dark and foreboding, but you find the place charming at first by the peace and quiet. Of course, that can’t last in a game of this type and soon odd noises begin echoing throughout the mansion, getting louder and louder.
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Isolated by a washed-out road, your only choice is the solve the mystery of the house. So you get that Myst-style exploration in which you investigate all the rooms in all the buildings of your estate, including the main mansion as well as the greenhouse, chalpel and a family crypt. The kicker that’s supposed to chill you? You’re not alone! Excuse me if I neglect to pee myself. While the story builds to a perfunctory conclusion, it’s simply not scary enough to be that big a deal. Of course, this only happens if you have the patience to run back and forth throughout the house, trying to find elusive items to open doors or trigger events and such. It gets tedious.
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If the game were displayed in at least 1024×768 resolution, had a faster-moving storyline, more action, and played cleaner, Scratches could have been more enjoyable. But the game is just “so-10-years-ago” and just isn’t fast-moving enough to fascinate, just isn’t interactive enough or peopled enough to make the eventual haunting very chilling. If you want a real scare, you’re likely better off spending your $20 reserving a copy of the forthcoming Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
| + If the game is installed on your hard drive, it runs okay and looks as good as an 800x600 resolution game can play. | 5.8 |
| What Doesn't | |
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– Sloggy game play. – Storyline not that chilling. |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| Scratches would have been a runaway hit … 10 years ago. Today? It’s just fairly tedious. This one’s only for die-hard point-and-click fans; others will be bored stiff. | |
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Tags: Scratches
Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Mar 21st, 2006 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.
I disagree on all levels with this post. If you read the booklet in the front of the CD case you would have been told how to use the inventory screen, and would not have been stuck trying to get into the house. Also you would have gotten a started storyline. It is also explained that you’ve moved to this victorian manor to be secluded, which accounts for the emptiness of it. The point of the game is to test your deductive skills, and it is hard, for example, without my knowledge of old movies I would never have guessed that in order to get a key from an old fashioned lock on a door when the key is in the other side you can slip a newspaper under the door and use a rod to push the key out, then pull the newspaper from beneath the door and hopefully retrieve the key, but the step is not needed anyway. This game is amazing for games of its kind, it just is more for an intellectual thrill rather than a blood thirsty one.