If you've ever wondered what Miss Marple keeps in that handbag then, going on the evidence of ATTWN, it could well be a basket of apples, a bucket of water, a stepladder, and a telescope. Deep pockets Butler/cook Rogers does a lovely bowl of SuperNoodles. To propel the plot you must solve perverse puzzles, read scattered documents, and plod through fairly tedious dialogue trees. Rather than examining the story and figuring out a clever new game format to fit it, Awe has resorted to all the usual adventure game clichés.
A bigger problem less successfully dealt with is the challenge of inserting interactivity into what is essentially a sequence of scripted deaths. Awe Games have got round this fairly elegantly by having the boatman's brother, Patrick Narracott, stranded on the island along with the guests. With no detective involved, there's no natural avatar for the player. While this story makes for a great book/movie it obviously posed a few problems for the game developers. Naturally there's no way off the island - the boat has been sabotaged - so the increasingly scared guests are forced to sit it out, stewing in their own paranoid juices. The recording accuses each of the visitors and the two house staff of an unsolved murder and sets the scene for a series of bizarre killings. Owen, is not present but has left a macabre greeting in the form of a gramophone record. On arriving they discover that their mysterious host, Mr. Eight people are invited to a house party on a small island off the Devon coast. Island recordsįor those that haven't read the novel or seen one of the many film versions, ATTWN is based on a deliciously intriguing premise. That story is the basis for this unexceptional and disappointingly backward-looking point-and-click adventure. Christie was unrepentant and went on to create murder-mysteries that bent the rules in even more dramatic and devious ways.Īfter fashioning a far-fetched 'multiple killers' plot in Murder on the Orient Express, the Grand-Dame of Crime concocted a virtually unsolvable 'multiple victims, no detective' storyline for her 1939 classic 'And Then There Were None'. This trick broke one of the most revered conventions of the genre and was regarded as a twist too far by many readers and commentators. Back in the mid 1920's book reviewers laid into Agatha Christie for creating a detective novel (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd) in which, unforeseeably, the killer turned out to be the narrator. Game reviewers aren't the first breed of critics to grumble about difficulty.
0 kommentar(er)
