Post Mortem

The Good
Well I have been playing adventures for a very long time (cut my teeth on late 80's sierra stuff). I have had a hankering for an adventure with todays tech and finally found one I could get into.

Post Mortem has all the great stuff a Dark Adventure trip needs. Murder, a tough smart detective, scary moments, deep plots. Like about a million books before it Post Mortem uses the out of work police detective that was shamed\fired\ect. The feel of the game was great, the designers did a great job making sure everything was dark and deep.

The Bad
Unfortunately Post Mortem suffers from some fatal problems.

1. Character animation is just terrible. The trouble is not in the graphics themselves but in the way the characters move and act during conversation. I would never in a million years think real people would act that way. (well unless they were on some sort of drug, perhaps)

2. Voice acting. This problem isnt as bad as I have read some reviewers say. Yes there are some places that the lines are drop down bad (some horrible writing) and even more instances of terrible performance of lines (especially the women). But overall I think its ok.

3. Your character knows things he shouldnt.
   There were some moments that the character had found something out (in what way I never understood) that wasnt revealed in a note or object that was found. He would just blurt it out. There was some real problems with story maping in this game.

4. Overall Game feel This game just felt incomplete, it was like someone designed a A++ game but then didnt do the basic QA needed to polish it up to the same level he designed it for.
   
   The Bottom Line
   Overall I think the game had great potential but just failed to pull it all together. If I was on the QA team for this game I would have purchased a copy of a Tex Murphy Game and gave it to the writers and designers. That way they could see a better example of how to pull together an excellent story.

Overall I give it a rating of a C Could have easily been A++, but they dropped the ball

The Good
This game has good story and easy to play. A couple has been killed by a strange man (he looks like Jack the Ripper) in a hotel room in Paris. The story then becomes strange but we can still understand it.

The Bad
Average graphics and bad ending. This game was built in 2003, so the 3D graphics aren't interesting. The ending is too short for a long-period game like Post Mortem, but thanks to Microids because they made three possible endings for this game.

The Bottom Line
Well, the game is good enough for me as I finished it on November 2007 in just 5 days. This game is good for adventure game lovers and it has simple gameplay, just point-and-click something on the screen to play. However, it isn't recommended for children because there is some blood, violence and sexual activities included in this game.

The Good
This review concerns the English version of the original Microids release. The Adventure Company's version (for US & Canada) may be different.

The internet was flooded with previews, interviews and screenshots, so naturally anticipation was high when the game was finally available. I, too, was swayed by all the excitement and it was added to my "wanted list" as soon as the first few reviews came out. Now that I've played it, I wonder what caused all the hubbub.

My opinions about Post Mortem are so mixed, it's hard to differentiate between likes and dislikes.

The entire game is decidedly French. It takes place in Paris, but don't think you will get an opportunity to see the sights. The closest thing you'll see is a bistro which really looks no different than any ordinary bar and grill. All of the NPCs have French names, but very few actually speak with an accent (in the English version). The voices were well-matched to the look of the character they were portraying. But, on the minus side, some of their tones and inflections were unrealistic (especially that of the main character, MacPherson). Also, whoever typed the English subtitles made many mistakes so that what you were hearing wasn't exactly as it was printed on-screen.

The overall interface is easy to use, although scrolling through your large inventory can become tedious. If you have the proper inventory item, new topics of conversation are available with the one person on whom you can use it (a little bit different). The game includes a great navigation map on which new places are added as you learn about them. There also seems to be no limit to the number of games you can save.

The graphics seemed realistic enough for my taste, but no new ground was broken here. Panning around in 3D is nice ... and necessary for finding important "hot spots". Brightening your screen and/or adjusting gamma lightens up the darkest areas - and there are plenty of those. Finding important objects is easy without the "pixel-hunting" problems of some other games.

Post Mortem's saving grace is its puzzles. Even though the theme of the game reminded me of Black Dahlia, 90% of this game's puzzles are new, fresh and well integrated into the plot. The most memorable one for me is the Lockpick puzzle in which you must actually decide which picks to insert, where as well as figuring out how to jiggle them around in the proper way. Ingenious! Those of you familiar with a "Magic Box" will recognize those math-related problems. Otherwise, you'll be making a sketch of a suspect based upon interrogations, finding the differences in two pieces of artwork (and marking them), deciphering an alchemical formula, and otherwise reading documents and finding objects to solve others.

Post Mortem is not a short game and it'll take you more than a weekend to finish, even using a walkthrough.

The Bad
I mentioned some of the quirks in the above paragraphs, but below are the things that irritated me most about Post Mortem.