Gadget: Invention, Travel & Adventure

The Good
Understanding Gadget is pretty much an impossible task, just as previous games from Haruhiko Shono like Alice Interactive Museum or L-Zone, which garnered some modicum of notoriety when initially released for Macs (more of a testament of the lack of quality games for Mac than anything else really), the game is really not a game but instead an outlet for Mr. Shono's artistic visions. This is probably the clearest example of videogames as art, not in the "oh it means something so deep" sense of art (which is actually more allegory than anything else) but in the sense of art as an abstract representation of subconcious ideas through a medium, in this case an interactive story of a meteor on it's way to earth.

"Digital Artistry" has become a much too prostituted terms these days, with just about anyone doing some meaningless shit on the net being called a "Digital Artist", but Shono was one of the original pionners that dared not only to investigate the artistic posibilities behind 3D modeling and interactive storytelling, and he managed to release commercial products and not just relegate his creations to underground art houses. Granted, the timing couldn't have been better for Mr. Shono, at the time when he released his "games" the "multimedia revolution" was in full swing, and publishers everywhere were more than happy to publish anything with lots of videos, images and that took up a lot of cds...

Anyhow, provided you understand what you are getting into then you'll be rewarded with a pretty interesting... uh... "experience" when you load Gadget up. You'll essentially engage in a dream-like trip into the Gadget world with the excuse being for you to find a group of scientists that have some connection with the approaching meteor. The world of Gadget is a victorian empire that is really a bizarre collection of impressionist, victorian-like, sepia colored locations that seem to borrow elements from noir mistery films, in fact if there's someplace that reminds me of the Gadget world is the city from Metropolis and the one in Dark City, except the penchant for towering skyscrappers is replaced with a penchant for trains and mechanical machinery.

The characters in the game serve all sort of symbolic purposes that would surely turn the game into a field trip for any psychologist that tries this game out. There's a dissapearing mute kid that comes and goes for no apparent reason, a shady government officer called Theodore Slowslop (??) that comes and pushes you around the assignment, and I'll be damned if the scientist themselves don't represent a fragment of a collective psyche. Similarly, there are a lot of actions in the game that obviously have a deeper meaning, such as getting off a train in the middle of nowhere to follow a glinting light, or chasing after that elusive kid, etc... If you've seen movies like Fellini's Amarcord then you know the deal, lots of seemingly meaningless characters, doing seemingly meaningless things that collectively are representative of a bigger meaning for the creators. Just what meaning is that is pointless to try and figure out, being an intellectual game fit for those with just too much time on their hands. The fun part is really figuring out what they mean to you and what emotions they trigger, it sure helps to be in sync with the creator, but otherwise it's a free-for-all experience.

The technical aspect for the uh... "product" is truly top-notch, with stellar pre-rendered graphics (done by Shono himself) that illustrate the Gadget world with lush detail and a great sense of style. The game is really after all a Myst-like slideshow, so graphic detail is a given. As for the movies themselves they are lovingly animated but fall prey to the shitty compression techniques of the time using very early Quicktime videos. The haunting music composed by Koji Ueno deserves special praise however as it uses a collection of imaginative arrangements and experimental sounds that perfectly suit the game and create a surreal atmosphere for the game itself. It sounds like the more imaginative scores by Oscar/Golden Globe winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto and it truly deserves to be listened to on its own.

The Bad
Unfortunately if you are going into this thinking above all of getting a good gameplay experience, or even worse: to at least enjoy an interactive movie-like story, then the joke's on you. Even if Gadget is Shono's most game-like product it's still a far cry from what one would consider to be an actual game, think of it as Myst meets a hentai game, only you don't even get the actions menu, or any sort of coherent story at all (and certainly no sex...).

The Bottom Line
Know what's what before dipping into Gadget, a must for collectors and fans of the bizarre, but remember: It's art, not a game, and never before has this distinction become so important.