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It's New Year's Eve, 1938. On board the private yacht of the
wealthy and eccentric Ian Masque, you find yourself part of a
"select" group of guests invited to an "unusual" New Year's Eve
party. Each guest has a story to tell, but their connection to
you and to each other remains hidden. Something strange is bound
to happen, and everyone is a suspect.
Get ready to put your best deductive reasoning to work and
unravel the true story behind this game. Along the way, you'll
find challenging puzzles to solve and minimysteries to unlock.
This is a totally engaging mystery adventure that is sure to keep
supersleuths entertained--from the opening scene to the exciting
cliffhanging climax.
Review
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In the right hands, the Clue franchise should translate into a
fun, engaging computer adventure. The original board game is a
campy send-up of the genteel whodunit formula of Agatha Christie
and Dorothy Sayers. It has stuffy Brits with silly names like
Colonel Mustard and Professor Plum. The setting is a lush
'30s-style mansion containing an arsenal of lethal knickknacks
like a dagger, a wrench, and a noose. And the game's mildly
subversive subtext seems to be that any one of the elite,
cultured cast could be a murderer.
Don't expect any of the board game's promising elements to get
much play in Clue Chronicles: al Illusion, which is the first
episode in a lower-priced series of introductory adventure
mysteries from Hasbro Interactive. The game's execution is as
boring as its characters. You are a private investigator who has
been invited to a New Year's 1939 party by the dotty millionaire
Ian Masque. En route to his creepy mansion aboard a yacht, you
and the other invitees witness Masque's apparent murder by a
booby-trapped artifact. The game's afoot. You do the usual
adventuring thing - gather objects, question the other guests,
and solve a series of familiar mechanical puzzles (crack a
combination lock, find the missing gears, etc.). Once at the
mansion itself, you help each of the other characters resolve
riddles Masque has left behind and so gather together a series of
missing jewels.
All of the game mechanics are competent and pitched to a novice
adventurer, as are the straightforward puzzle solutions. From a
first-person view, you move from point to point through
prerendered period sets, questioning each guest via a pop-up memo
pad of subjects. The scenery design is sparse, and the cutscenes
lack any cinematic flair. An inventory of gathered objects also
glides up from below. A visual catalog of suspects offers a bit
of background and reminds you of each guest's possible motive in
offing Ian Masque. The hint system is especially good, in that it
lets you access up to three hints of decreasing obscurity at a
given juncture in the game. At the very least, al Illusion
serves as a fair introduction to the adventure/puzzle style of
play.
Unfortunately, the game never goes beyond the very least it can
do. At heart, it doesn't seem to understand the art of the
whodunit. The mystery genre is all about character and motive,
hidden desire, and personal secrets, which turn out to be the
least compelling parts of the game. The usual suspects are here:
a swarthy magician, a playboy, a pair of femmes ales, a
society matron, et. al. But the scripting, voice acting and
graphics of the characters are all as wooden as an oak.
Interviewing these stiffs is like trying to converse with
exhibits at a wax museum. Their background stories are too
shallow to be engaging, and they generally spend a lot of time
pointing fingers at one another. How could a scriptwriter not
have a little fun with the likes of Colonel Mustard or Professor
Plumb? Worse yet, the game really isn't about deduction at all.
Solving a series of mechanical puzzles rather than unraveling the
riddle of human motivation or eliminating suspects advances the
action. And the puzzles themselves are rudimentary - you just
piece together a half dozen pieces of torn instructions or jiggle
a few switches until the thingamabob powers up for you.
In fairness to the game's meager ambitions, al Illusion is
priced for and pitched to the very casual gaming crowd. If you've
played more than one or two adventure games in your time, the
difficulty and brevity of al Illusion will be disappointing,
as it takes less than six hours to win for even an average
player. When it hits the $15 bargain bin (next week sometime), it
will make a fair gift for mom and dad or perhaps the neighbors,
who just got their first PC. The initial mystery - Who poisoned
Ian Masque's puzzle box? - and its surprise conclusion make the
game a mild diversion, even if the rest of the journey feels
decidedly unmysterious. Nevertheless, and to their credit, the
designers integrate the puzzles into the setting and plot more
effectively than some more ambitious adventures.
But even as an introductory adventure game, al Illusion will
make most gamers wince because of its low production values and
unimaginative design. Games like it should be putting more effort
into weaving an engaging story by adding some suspense and
complex characters to the puzzles, because those are the dramatic
criteria most new gamers bring to the experience from other areas
of entertainment. The real mystery behind al Illusion is why
the designers didn't let themselves have more fun with the
rtunity to make a Clue game. Why reduce such promising
characters into Colonel Bland and Professor Pallid? Why not bring
the deduction-oriented gameplay of the board game somehow into
the adventure? Whodunit? The real question is whoblewit?
--Steve Smith
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