"A great and legitimately scary adventure game"

I was under the impression that adventure games were pretty much dead. Maybe as games and system requirements got bigger and bigger, the appeal of simple point and click games wore off. There a lot of good point and click games out there, but not everyone who is a PC gamer has played them. I could understand it if they thought of them as to slow or something, maybe they're used to action-intensive games, but there's still a good number of games most have probably overlooked.

Now to overlook this game because it's not action-packed would be a big oversight. To be honest I had no idea it existed until about a week ago (that being a week before 4/16/07, not whatever the date on this updated review will be). I definitely don't remember seeing any reviews for it, or hearing anybody talk about it (again, maybe I was part of the wrong crowd, one not up to speed on adventure gaming news). I saw the box at a Target, and when I picked it up and read the back I found out that it was set in a Victorian mansion. Since I had recently set my mom up with an old Gabrielle Knight game to play on her PC (she was always playing Solitaire and I felt kind of bad that it was the only game available to her), this game seemed to fit her interests perfectly (those being slow games, horror, and Victorian mansions). She really liked it so I installed it and checked it out myself. Now that I have played it I'm definitely going to check out Nucleosys' other games soon.

First off the game features a full 360 degree cone of vision. Meaning you're no longer confined to just one view. Usually in adventure games you enter a screen and have no control of the camera angle. In this game you ARE the camera angle. By moving the mouse over the edges of the screen the picture pans in that direction, exactly how you'd experience the situation if you were actually there. And just like if you were there, the graphics are very highly detailed. Since there is little animation I'm guessing the artists got to focus entirely on making the environments look as realistic as possible. I really enjoyed the overall appearance of the game, although I do wish they had made objects you can interact with a little more noticeable. I ended up overlooking a lot of items and had to go back and get them later because they blended into the backgrounds so well. On the other hand, making them too noticeable might take you out of the game. Meaning, seeing a sparkling or glowing item might dampen the experience for some.

The music in the game is, I thought, really well done and adds greatly to the atmosphere. The only thing I don't like about it is that I can't figure out how to rip it from the game disc to listen to it when I'm not playing! Luckily you can buy the official soundtrack off the company's website. There are not many songs in the game, but they are unobtrusive enough to just linger in the background and accentuate the environments. Cellar of Rats is another group I haven't heard of before but they obviously have some talent for sound design. Unfortunately, my setup didn't let me take advantage of the 5.1 channel audio so I didn't really get to experience the full thing, but it was just as good even on two speakers. The other sound effects are also pretty good but in some spots the voice acting wasn't all that great. For the most part it was better than I expected (as was everything else about the game, considering the price was $19.99), so I don't have much to complain about.

Gameplay is pretty standard for point and clicks. Left clicking handles all interactions while right click brings up your inventory. That's basically all the buttons you need. The function keys can enable or disable different options, but you don't need to use them because you can do the same thing through the options menu by pressing Esc. Unless you really need to be able to change options on the fly, that is.

I enjoyed the story in the game a lot. It started off slow but definitely picked up later. You play as a writer who aspired to have a Victorian mansion all to his own to write his horror novels in. For inspiration, I'm guessing. He gets his wish but it comes with a catch he never expected, in the form of a murder mystery/supposed haunting. This was one of the only games (if not the only game period) to scare me not by having a zombie or monster pop out at me but just by the atmosphere, setting, and sound effects. Some parts of the story are a little confusing and the end specifically left some things to be desired but a second play through with the knowledge you gained at the end of the first might help clear up the details.

My only real complaint about this game is the difficulty. Unlike other adventure games, it is not very forgiving even though it has a hint system. These hints do help but usually not nearly as much as you'd like them to. You'll find yourself aimlessly wandering around the mansion often, not knowing where to go or what to do. At first this isn't so bad because of the beautiful graphics, but you can only go through the same series of rooms so many times before you grow tired of them. What also makes the game hard is that solutions to puzzles or problems you may face don't make sense at first. You have to do things and use items in a way you wouldn't think of on your own, although this sort of thing does happen a lot in adventure games, it's almost one of the staples of the genre. So while I was playing I had to turn to guides and stuff for help. This is why I'm going to write a guide myself, partly to help any others who may play this game and also because sometimes I just play through a game, and like it enough to end up writing a review and guide for it.

Like I said before, if you missed some details the first time around you may want to play the game again. The problem with this is you'll already know all of the solutions to the puzzles, you'll always know what's going to happen next, and it just won't be that scary the second time. I really can't see myself playing this game again, even though I scored it highly, unless I somehow forget everything about it or need to go back to confirm some things for my guide. Then again, there might be others who will enjoy the repeated experience. I personally don't think I would, which is why I thought it over and lowered my score a point. For it to really be a ten it'd have to make me want to play it over and over and so far I haven't gotten the urge to do that.

This game was a refreshing take on the adventure/horror genre and it makes me wonder if there are others like it. I know Nucleosys has made another game very similar to this (I saw it on the shelf at Target next to this one) and I'm definitely going to check that one out, but I wonder if all recent adventure games have been like this and I just didn't notice. I hope not because that would mean I probably overlooked a lot of great titles and would have to go back and check out a genre that I had thought was basically abandoned.

Sound: 10/10
Graphics: 10/10
Gameplay: 9/10
Replay Value: 4/10

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 04/16/07, Updated 02/11/08

Game Release: Scratches (US, 03/08/06)