Summary
Has good moments... but overall not very satisfying
The Good
In recent years we have seen some serious contributions to the adventure genre from various European developers.
The Longest Journey and
Syberia have gained world-wide popularity. "Moment of Silence" is yet another European (German) adventure game, trying, as most of its contemporaries, to revive the stagnating genre.
"Moment of Silence" is a solid package. Nothing (except maybe the atrocious path-finding) is really below average in this game. It is obvious the developers came up with interesting ideas for the game, and many of them have also been implemented in a convincing, natural way.
The setting of the game is probably the most attractive aspect of it. New York of 2040 looks neither like your typical dark post-apocalyptic city, nor is it overridden with senseless sci-fi elements. The designers cleverly utilized one of the most evident tendencies of our time, turning it into the dominating power of the future world: the overwhelmingly rapid development of communication techniques. A decade ago only a few freaks knew what internet was, and now any little kid can go ahead and browse the web. So in "Moment of Silence", you have an interesting picture of the future: everything is digital, each person has his own "messenger" which replaces all other devices (used for such different activities as calling people, paying money, identifying oneself, etc.), and one of the most wide-spread activities is chatting online with people you know nothing about, except their "avatars": animated faces, voice, and everything else.
A lot of thought has been put into the game's dialogues. While many of them are standard adventure fare ("Do you have the item I need?"... "What should I do to get it?.."), there are some in-depth conversations which are written really well. For example, Oswald's diary is quite a fascinating piece of fiction. It is rather long and contains vital information, but it is the style of the diary which raises it above average.
Even though "Moment of Silence" is quite a serious game, there is some humor in it, and the humor is surprisingly good. I really didn't expect the game to be so genuinely witty. What's more, the humor is never pointless, it never boils down to sarcastic remarks or "it's-just-a-game" puns: there is an obvious satiric direction in the game. Beside the more or less usual parodies on commercialism, there are some grotesque dialogues which are sure to entertain attentive players. For example, the conversations with the robot Claire nearly made me laugh out loud. The dialogue with the "hostess" on Lunar 5 is also very amusing. Occasionally there are some very clever remarks, even though the satiric style doesn't dominate the game entirely.
There are lots of conversations in the game, which is of course a good thing. And most of them are not obligatory. Of course, you'll want to deplete all the dialogue trees to make sure you haven't missed some important clues, but actually only a small part of those conversations is necessary to advance the story.
The gameplay of "Moment of Silence" is traditional third-person adventure style, but with more emphasis on conversations than on puzzles. It is not as "puzzle-less" as for example
Blade Runner, nor is it heavy on clue-combining like
Discworld Noir; you could best describe it as a "light" adventure game with a good balance of dialogue and inventory-based gameplay. Most of the puzzles are quite logical and can be relatively easily deducted (although many of them are marred by some serious pixel-hunting). The game also has a good tempo, you are neither stuck in one location for a long time, nor do you have to backtrack during the entire game. The first part is more open-ended, and you'll be traveling a lot from location to location in it, but the second part is very streamlined.
The graphics may be outdated, but some of the areas look pretty nice. More impressive are the pre-rendered cut scenes, which are quite dramatic and bring a lot of action into the game. There aren't many of them during the first part of the game, but later there are places where cut scenes abound, so some parts of the story develop almost like a movie.
The Bad
Even though there is nothing truly bad about the game (except path-finding!), there are also not so many things which are truly great. Occasional satire and interesting setting are not enough to make this game stand head and shoulders above the bleak adventure community of today, let alone bring the glory back to the genre. "Moment of Silence" is good, but it is not outstanding.
But first let's refer to what is really bad in the game... you guessed it, it's path-finding. As Jeanne stated in her review, path-finding is so terrible that it ruins the entire game, and while path-finding alone was not what ruined the game for me, I found it irritating to the utmost degree. You want Peter to move to the left, but he moves to the right. You want him to leave a location, but he gets stuck in front of empty place. You want to navigate him somewhere, but all he does is running in circles. This aspect of the game is really unprofessionally done. I can't adequately describe how annoying it is to control the hero in this game. What's more, like in many adventure games, the world of "Moment of Silence" looks much bigger than it really is. You see lots of cool places, but you can't go there. You can't move closer to something that looks interesting to you. Often you move in weird lines instead of just walking directly to the goal. And the camera is terrible. For some reason they decided to make Peter so extremely small in some locations, that he becomes almost invisible, a poor little pixel on the background, so you have to click somewhere on the screen just to find out where the damn guy is! And instead of making the backgrounds scroll, they let the camera change angle every few steps. You enter a large room from the right and see a table to the left. You click in the direction of that table, and suddenly the camera changes, and you find out it is now to the right! You click again, and discover the table has moved down! You frantically click everywhere, only to have Peter dance like a drunk idiot and run to the opposite direction. Why to have such an irritating and confusing feature?
As I said above, graphics are outdated. I really would expect real-time 3D from a game released in late 2004. Only character models, some objects, and very few places are in real 3D, while the rest are your usual pre-rendered backgrounds. And as almost always in such cases, the character models look as if they were cut out of another game and pasted into the pre-rendered world. Some places are nicely animated, but overall the graphics are really not that hot, and many locations look frozen and soulless. Worse than the technical quality of the graphics is the layout of the places, for some reason lots of things look small, camera angles are awkward almost everywhere, and the proportions are somewhat weird. Many locations are stuffed with important items, which you can discover only by slowly moving your mouse cursor around, stopping on every item. This of course leads to frustrating pixel-hunting.
There is not enough music in the game, except during cut scenes and some occasional quiet background sounds. And I don't quite understand why the voice acting was praised so much. Maybe they really did hire good voice actors for the English translation. I played the German version of the game (I like playing games in their original versions), and the voice acting was totally average. The hero Peter Wright was probably the worse, speaking in a drone-like, emotion-less voice which would make JC Denton from
Deus Ex sound like a passionate opera singer in comparison.
The puzzles are intuitive for the most part, but there are also some stone-age ones which made me raise my eyebrows in disbelief. When will adventure game designers stop using the hopelessly outdated "use three items together to make a new one, to use in the most inappropriate place, in the most weird fashion" puzzles? Think of how you had to enter that old geezer's shop - a ridiculous puzzle taken out of some
Monkey Island game. Only there it fitted perfectly the setting and the style, while here it feels like a neanderthal in a society of scientists. I think even the infamous cat puzzle from
Gabriel Knight III wasn't as bad. And while this puzzle is fortunately not typical for the game, there are enough boring inventory item combinations and improbable tasks which undermine the otherwise logical structure of the game's puzzles.
But what I missed most in the game was a really good story. Make no mistake: the premise sounds very interesting, and the story looks quite thought-out and fascinating on paper, but it is not. There are some good details, but as a whole, the story is thin and unsatisfying. First of all, the main idea of the game has been recycled thousand times and has little to no originality. Okay, we have a world which is controlled by some organization/government/emperor/whatever. We have a rebel group which are first considered bad, and then turn out to be not so bad after all. Instead, it is the organization/government/etc. which is bad. If this sound familiar, that might be because you have played some video games before. Since Orwell's "1984" such stories started appearing like mushrooms after rain. Among newer games I played, only
Beyond Good & Evil had a similarly unoriginal plot. But "Beyond Good and Evil" had plenty of redeeming features, which "Moment of Silence" unfortunately does not have.
But even such a standard story could have been told in a much better way. It seems the developers dedicated all their creativity to minor setting details and occasional small-scope satire, forgetting to add some pepper into the story. If you expect a "whoddunit?" thriller along the lines of Japanese
EVE series or, among Western adventures,
Noctropolis or
Discworld Noir, you'll be sorely disappointed by "Moment of Silence". Whoever says the story of the game is brilliant probably hasn't played enough games with truly brilliant stories. The plot of "Moment of Silence" is absolutely two-dimensional. Nearly no attention was paid to background. The story lacks power and weight, not to mention convincing explanation to the whole conspiracy theory. There is no true confrontation, no philosophy, not even an ideology worth mentioning. This is particularly pity because there are clever conversations and hints to in-depth ideological analysis, but none of it is evident in the development of the plot.
The story also lacks support from interesting characters. The hero, Peter Wright, is your average "protagonist" guy: there is nothing appealing about him, even his determination to help the family of arrested Oswald doesn't evoke enough sympathy. He has no own ideology, can only get witty in minor discussions, his vision of the world is totally unclear, and I must also add he sounds like an idiot during the conversation with the ultimate enemy, unable to find any convincing arguments against him. There also no other memorable characters, not even one I would remember fondly. Of course, this is not an Asian RPG, so I didn't expect to find truly appealing characters, but at least they could be interesting and original.
And I also have to add that even though this is science fiction, it should still be realistic. Good science fiction should be up-to-date, it should aim at our society more than at the future one. That might just be my personal impression, based on my personal opinions, but sorry, I don't buy this depiction of "digital future" as shown in "Moment of Silence". I wonder what was driving the developers more - "political correctness" coupled with fear, or the inability to accept certain aspects of globalization? Indeed, the world of today has enough troubles to make all the prophecies of "global digital domination" sound like little boy's fantasies. In a typically European way, the developers shifted the emphasis from truly terrible aspects of certain influential ideologies in the world onto an imaginary problem with very little political background. That's one of the chief reasons why the story of "Moment of Silence" does not really convince.
The Bottom Line
"Moment of Silence" has some attractive sides. Logical (for the most time) puzzles, good pacing of both gameplay and story, very nice cut scenes, a pretty original setting, and small bits of brilliant satire make this one a worthy addition to an adventure fan's library. But it is just not a "must-have" adventure game. A lot of things here are simply not developed enough to consider the game a "savior" of adventure genre, or even a powerful contribution along the lines of
The Longest Journey. Story and characters are decidedly too shallow, making "Moment of Silence" look for the most time like a pale copy of Orwell's "1984". There is nothing particularly memorable, let alone innovative, in the gameplay or graphical design. A solid and pleasant adventure game, but hardly a masterpiece of the genre.
