Still Life

The Good
I hadn't really read anything about this game before I picked it up aside from the fact that it was an adventure game with a somewhat mature story. I found it by accident in a bargain bin and decided to have a go at it. Sometimes the games you haven't heard of really surprise you and turn out to be forgotten treasures.

The game is a story-driven old school adventure game, with two separate stories that are strangely connected to one another though a series of murders. You will find out exactly how as you progress through the game, and I feel it'd ruin some of the experience if I gave it away here. One story takes place in present time Chicago, and one in Prague in the 20's. I'll just leave it there and let you play it for yourselves to find out the rest.

After having just finished it with my fiance (we tend to play story-driven games or survival horror games together) basically it comes down to a few good and a few bad things. I'll start by listing the good things and leave the not so good for the next section.

The graphics in the game are really neat, mixing some pre-rendered with real time 3D in a really good way. They are done in a semi-comic book way meaning that the characters, while mostly realistic looking, have some exaggerated features that makes them look like something you'd see in any comic book but moving around in real time. Add to that some really well-directed cut scenes, and you have some real eye-candy. The cut scenes really shot the tempo up in the game when it started to drag along, perfectly balanced to get you revitalized to keep playing and interested in the next turn of events.

The story really sucked you in at times, and you really wanted to know what was to come next in the game. It was well written and very engaging, and you wanted to read every book or scrap of paper you picked up, just to get the full picture of what was going on as you made your way closer to the killers the in the two separate times in history.

I've read (after being done with the game myself) that a lot of people found the Xbox controllers kind of clunky, but I thought they worked really well. They reminded me of the first slew of 3D Lucasarts adventure games, like Monkey Island IV and Grim Fandango. You walk around in the scenes, and as soon as anything of interest shows up you get a little icon next to the item/person/event. I can only assume that the PC-game used the mouse, which obviously is more made for the point-and-click type games, but I can't say I had any complaints about the way they solved it on the Xbox.

And one last positive thing I have to point out is the music, at least at some of the key points in the game where it really shone, with choirs and strings and everything else you'd expect from any high-cost Hollywood movie.

Ok, I think that's enough of the praise... let's move on to the not-so-good parts now.

The Bad
I think you can ask anyone who's ever played this game if they liked the ending and I bet they'd just give you an angry stare. While I can see how an adventure game can be kind of short and since it is, in fact, more about quality than quantity. I can forgive the length of the game... but the ending? I don't know about you, but if you buy a game, wouldn't you like to know beforehand that you're going to shell out whatever a new game costs on what turns out to be basically half a game? I've read that Microids ran low on funds at the end of production, but I'm not sure that is a good excuse to just make what turns out to be a "buy another game for just as much money as you just did to find out how it ends" kind of deal. I read on the official site something along the lines of "fans eagerly await to find out how the story ends". Do they have a choice given the first game? I'll just put this one in the drawer of "disappointing endings that shouldn't even be considered endings" next to Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance I & II.

That was the main gripe about the game, and here are some minor ones, that while not really bad things, kind of just ruined the mood a little from time to time.

If a game is set in Chicago and Prague and both the main characters are american, how come more than half the cast has a very clear Canadian accent? I know this might seem petty, but it kind of ruined the mood a little of the game. It's like having nazis speak french in a WWII movie, but less obvious. I know the studio is based in Canada... but in my mind that's close enough to America to get some actual americans to play the parts instead of the locals.

The puzzles in the game. If you've played enough adventure games you'd be a little turned off by how these are done. They are either of the nature "pick up the only key and use it on the only door"-easy or "figure out this set of 10 characters that we just made up and convert them into numbers and then figure out how to open the safe with them"-impossible. Nothing in between. This made the game laughingly easy at times and "resort to FAQs"-hard at others, leaving it a very uneven game from a gameplay point of view.

And one final little thing. When you read some of the texts and books in the game, they'd made the interface so that you saw a picture of whatever you were reading in the background behind the text. Some of the things you picked up made it totally impossible to read some of the text because it had the same color as the text. While you could figure out most of it, it still felt like a poor design choice.

The Bottom Line
I'd recommend this game to anyone who liked a good story, but who won't mind putting up with the roller coaster easy-hard difficulty and the fact that you're going to have to buy the sequel (which isn't out yet) to see how the story ends. The graphics and music are really good in the game, and so is the writing. So if you can live with the flaws, by any means, pick it up. For the slightly more picky adventure players, there's always the Lucasarts classics to enjoy again (or for the first time for the few who never played them), since nothing ever since they all came out have been able to come close to them in quality.