Summary
Sherlock in a world of void grey apathy
The Good
The story overview was promising, I've been longing for more well done Cthulhu-games, and as I booted up The Awakened, my expectations were high. Graphics are quite ok generally, the designers have spent some time to make most locations look realistic at least on a superficial level. There are many locations to explore, which is a good thing in this game, and some of the locations were quite enjoyable to explore. I liked the fact that they had combined the immersing feeling of FPS-view with a point'n'click adventure system. Looking for clues with a magnifying glass on the very well drawn pictures was one of the most fun parts of the game.
The Bad
Firstly, where on earth is the Lovecraft-element of this game? It advertises itself as Lovecraftian horror adventure, but what I saw was only a superficial rip-off from the mythology. I find it disgusting that game makers only bother to read "Call of Cthulhu" or perhaps not even that before making a Cthulhu-themed game. I guess they just googled up the Wikipedia page and read the first few lines before writing their own script.
Some of the voice acting was
so bad that it almost destroyed both the immersion and my will to live. Seriously, I'd rather have a speech synthesizer voice read out the texts in a monotonous voice than have a complete amateur, sorry,
worse than amateur actor overact them by holding onto his nose and stuffing hot potatoes into his mouth while trying to read his lines. For a reference, it was on par with the worst voice acting in DCotE. Just listen to Becker and Gerda!
A second reason to complain were the overly restricted locations. I could have enjoyed them if there would have been something to interact with except a handful of clues. But as there is so little to interact with the world, the small size of the locations starts to bother even more. I understand that letting the player run loose in a fully modelled open London would be completely futile (but superbly cool!), but forcing the player to run around two small houses in "central London"
until he has found one microscopically small clue is ridiculous. When I try to leave the city block, Holmes stops into an invisible wall and ponders
"Hmm, I'm not finished with my investigation here!". Well, Holmes, how would you know how many clues we still need to collect if you didn't know exactly what you were looking for? And as you apparently do know, why not share the information with me as the game sure as hell doesn't give very logical information on what the player should be looking for or do next. Which brings me to the next problem...
The game fails to balance on the rope of explaining enough and letting player come up with solutions. At times, the game explains way too much of what the player should do next (and usually those are the most obvious and futile hints), causing the game to degrade into simple mechanical following of orders. Collect that item, talk to that person, open that door, etc.. But most of the times, the game assumes that you have complete understanding of what should be done, and doesn't bother to explain anything.
This becomes a grave problem as it accompanied with small levels in which you're always "locked" in until you solve all the game designers want you to makes the game very linear and limited. And as I earlier on mentioned, I would happily jump around searching for clues if there was any bit of
life in the places I'm stuck in, and if every single rock and object would not be glued on the ground. All streets are empty, except for those people that have a few badly acted lines to shout, and it seems that most of the buildings and structures are extremely artificial and
only there to serve a few scripted scenes, such as catching a robber in New Orleans. I have a high tolerance towards lousy game levels, but I have no tolerance whatsoever for meaningless spaces with artificial blocks that force me to run through ridiculous spaces which have the "hey I'm the badly disguised obvious jumping and climbing route" stamped all over. And the most disappointing feature of all: the robber script waits until you reach a certain checkpoint and then shows him running again. So, actually it doesn't matter if it takes 2 days for you to figure out the only route (yes it's a real pipe-run) out of the Chinese quarters, you will still finally "catch" the robber and confront the sheriff.
Another eerie feature is Watson and his behaviour. If you look at him and run around, he just stands there and refuses to follow you, but as soon as you turn your back, he suddenly teleports right behind you. It seems a walking animation and a pathfinder algorithm would have been too much of a high-tech.
And the last big complaint, and the most grave one, about playability: many times in the game I figured out a solution for a certain problem, for example combining some objects to open a door or to make mist with chemicals. Even all the ingredients and tools were there, but as they were either simply background props glued to the table or the wrong tools. Ah, of course Holmes must use the
BLUE POT to take water from the fountain, all other pots, jugs, carafes, cups and bottles are strictly out of the question. And apparently even the tiniest background objects have concrete foundations as they
CAN'T be moved unless it's part of a scripted event. For every single puzzle you need to use exactly the right object, no creative thinking or veering off the very thin path of planned solution is allowed.
One part that made me burst into laughter was the part where Sherlock is supposed to "study" the evidence he has collected from the crime scene. Ok, there are a few small resemblances to real study, heating, reducing and filtering the substances and studying them with a microscope. But for whatever the reason, no
logic applies to when you're supposed to apply acid, spirit or solvent and when to grind and heat it up. You just click randomly on them until Holmes says "Interesting" or "Perhaps i should apply X". Then you just watch this abomination of a steampunk machine to jiggle and wiggle and behold, complete report of the substance appears in your notebook! How exciting, I'm
almost given the chance to study something myself and make my own conclusions...
The final nail in the coffin was the part in every chapter's end where Watson has to answer Sherlock's question. If you were as lost and puzzled as I was during every section, you sure as heck could not guess what Holmes wanted you to answer, especially when the answer needs to be the exactly correct word, using any of the more common synonyms everybody knows is totally out of the question.
The Bottom Line
I hated many things in Dark Corners of the Earth, but also loved many. It was an acceptable Lovecraft-themed game. I had hoped for at least similar quality for this game, and the addition of more dialogue and adventure elements seemed very promising. The result is so unbalanced that every time I start to like one thing in the game, I run into thousand of others that spoil the experience. I didn't enjoy playing this game through, I had to use a walkthrough simply because I didn't have patience to walk slowly through every location and try every object on every person. I don't think that's the point of fun in adventure games. If there is an
obvious solution for a problem the player can come up with, it should be possible to do in the game! The Awakened is like a Rube Goldberg machine, it takes the hardest, most complex and most inconvenient process to solve something trivial, except that building Rube Goldberg machines
is actually fun.
