Noctropolis

The Good
You are Peter Grey (played by Michael Berger), a huge fan of the Darksheer comics, set in the fictional city of Noctropolis and starring a range of characters including Tophat, Greenthumb, Stiletto, and Darksheer himself. After reading the newest issue, a courier knocks on your door and sends you a mysterious package. Upon opening it, you discovered that you are a winner of the “I Want To Be Darksheer!” sweepstakes that you entered in the past. That package causes you to be transported to Noctropolis as Darksheer, even though the real one disappeared several weeks.

Noctropolis is an adventure game that plays similar to the likes of Tsunami's Blue Force and Sierra's Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. Right-clicking the game's yellow cursor brings up a series of commands that are embedded in an inverted triangle. This is a nice feature. Even I could not fill a triangle with a limited size with many commands. You will spend most of the time talking to characters, usually changing how the way the conversation is going. At times, a piece of honeycomb appears on the screen, with its sections representing people that you can ask about. This feature is also neat. When I previous played adventure games that require you to ask characters about others, you are just given a list of words, so I am glad that the ask box is in form of a graphic.

In Noctropolis, you meet both good and evil characters, both voiced by some of the game's developers as well as outside actors. Owen Richardson, who lends his voice to at least three characters, does a superb job of playing Flux, Dealmer, and one of the coffin movers. Other characters, such as Jim Drake (Thomas Milan), have quite a temper if you happen to say the wrong things. The Elemental (Shaun Mitchell, another of the developers) sounds good, too. One character that I like was the butcher (Gene Ray) with his personality. If you upset him, he will get angry and decide to take it out on an innocent piece of meat.

Noctropolis is mainly aimed at an adult market. There is nudity gore, and violence. An example of this is at the beginning of the game where the player sees a cut-scene that sees Peter watching television when a vampire comes and sits on Peter and undresses. Violence is near the end of the game and involves a character known as Master Macabre (Anthony Russell) being stabbed by Stiletto (Hope Marie Carlton) for revenge against Macabre deciding to cut her finger off. The resulting scream can be terrifying. ELSPA gave this an 18+ rating, which is definitely too much for a game that does not contain sex scenes or over-the-top violence.

Although you can only do this at the start of Noctropolis, I quite enjoyed reading the two issues of Darksheer, one was about the aforementioned characters vowing to end Darksheer's life; the other was about Stiletto giving up her career as Darksheer's sidekick. There is quite some energetic music when one of the action pages kick in. But without reading the comic book, the music in the rest of the game is quite good, and can be described as easy listening or quite smoothing. One sound effect that I liked was the chime when you pick up something.

At the moment that you stepped into the world of Noctropolis, I noticed that some of the scenes look like they have been taken right out of the comic book, and some scenes are more breathtaking than others, with major locations surrounded by skyscrapers that make up the city. At times, I felt that I was actually playing an adventure game set in the future, rather than the present. I like the idea of setting the game only at night, since Noctropolis is only set at night, like in Rise of the Dragon, as well as the games in the Tex Murphy series. What I like more about the graphics is seeing an overhead view of Noctropolis when you are traveling between locations, as well as watching the activity of Main Street (also in bird's-eye view).

There are some puzzles in the game, but they are not too hard for the player to figure out. Most of these puzzles require you to do certain tasks within a strict time limit, and some of them require precise timing on your part. The puzzles can take five minutes or more, depending on your knowledge of it.

The Bad
I prefer playing a decent adventure game without puzzles, especially complicated ones. I do not like to waste my time. There are a couple of hard puzzles, and one of them involves you arranging the pegs in a circle in order to open the door.

The Bottom Line
Noctropolis tells the story of Peter Grey who is transported out of the real world and into the fictional city of Noctropolis after winning the sweepstakes. There, he will meet characters that will go out to kill him, as well as those who are trying to protect him. The music is excellent, especially when reading those action-packed comic books, and the superb graphics look like they have been taken out of a comic book. As I said before, Noctropolis is an adventure game for adults, and it is not recommended for anyone under 15 years.