"Creeptastic clicking fun for everyone... or not."

Still Life is a point-and-click game that follows the eerie story of a Jack the Ripper-esque murder case in modern day Chicago, and how the case starts to become strangely parallel to a similar case back in the 1920s. It contains plenty of blood and carefully rendered dead bodies, so it's not for the faint-hearted.

Gameplay - (7/10)

This is a point-and-click game, so the entire game consists of you clicking on various places on the screen, hoping to find a clue to advance in the game. Fortunately, you are helped by the fact that the cursor changes when you hover over a possible item of interest within the background. Similarly, you click on the places you want the character to move to, and they move there. A single click means the character will slowwwwwly stroll towards the targeted area, while a double-click will make them slowwwwwly jog there. Either way, progress is slow. But since the maps are usually not very large, the movement pace is enough to cover the available ground within a reasonable time perimeter.

The puzzles in this game can be challenging yet fun, which is a positive aspect. However, sometimes the game is very vague and you might be stuck on one puzzle because of lack of instructions. I know that's happened to me a few times before. When you solve these problems you'll most likely have a 'D'oh!' moment because the answer was just so obvious. So depending on how careful a person you are, you may or may not have success without a FAQ for this game.

Story - (8/10)

Convincing enough story, but there's a lack of twist to the plot so that deducted some points from the score. The story is about a young FBI agent named Victoria McPherson who encounters a very puzzling murder case that has everyone stumped. She's frustrated and annoyed, until she goes back home and finds her grandfather Gustav's report of a similar case back in the late 1920s. As she reads the report (and while she does so, you get to play as Gustav for 3 out of the 7 sections of the game), she discovers a disturbing parallelness to both cases that makes her think someone is trying to re-enact the murders from before.

The story is quite interesting, though for some reason I always liked Gustav's story better than Victoria's, as his had more shocking twists (but still not much). A pretty decent story for such a short game.

Graphics - (10/10)

When I first saw screenshots of this game, I was literally speechless. The amount of detail paid to every background is just amazing. The buildings all look so real, and the cutscenes are also quite well done, with a grainyness that makes the scene look more realistic. The actual characters themselves during gameplay are not quite as well done but nevertheless they are still top-standard.

There is a healthy - OK, more than healthy amount of blood and gore in this game, and they are always very realistically depicted, especially the dead bodies. You can view most of the corpses close-up, and they are pre-tty freaky, mostly because they look so darn real.

Sound - (8/10)

People complain that the voice acting for this game is bad, but personally I think it's alright. The characters sound almost natural, and they actually crack jokes and speak sarcastically, which the voice-overs do quite well. Sometimes the humor is a little forced, and the mood of the speech isn't fitting, but it's quite tolerable. It only gets annoying when you have to listen to them repeatedly, which can happen if you're trying to figure out what goes where and the character's saying something like 'That's not gonna work' over and over again due to your incompetence.

The background music is awesome, very fitting to the mood of the game. True, there's not much of it, but it would be really weird if there were tunes belting out in the background every minute of the game. This isn't an RPG, for goodness sakes. The music gets more frantic when the tension in the game is high, and sometimes there is only silence apart from the click-clacking of your shoes connecting with the ground. It's all very suitable and contributes to the atmosphere nicely.

Replay Value - (4/10)

To be honest there's no reason you'd want to play this game over and over again. I, for one, personally do not want to repeat some of the more tedious puzzles again and anyway, the game has a Cinematic Viewer which shows you all the cutscenes that you've encountered so far.

Final Score - (7/10)

The actual score was closer to 7.5, but since I can only give a no-decimal-place score I rounded it down to 7. So, the big questions. Is this game worth playing? Yes, it certainly is worth a few hours of your time, drooling over the amazing graphics and trying not to look at the mutilated corpses. Is it worth buying? Well... that's up to you. I'd recommend you borrow it and play through it first, and if you find that you really like it, then by all means buy it.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 07/02/07