The Experiment

"Innovation is not always good."

One of my favorite hobbies is to visit the bargain rack at Best Buy/Wal-Mart/Target/whatever. Usually on said rack you find average games; not all that great but certainly glad you didn't pass them up. You also find unexpected gems there once in a great while, like From Dusk Till Dawn. And then you find the games that are bargain games because they were junk to begin with, and even 10 bucks was too much.

The Experiment falls firmly into the third grouping. I'll admit a weakness for both heroines and redheads, so this game struck those chords instantly and I picked it up. Beautiful cover art, I mean really. Makes the game look like it could be an intriguing experience. The installation was quite a painless procedure... no Securom, or Safedisc or whatnot complaining about my imagedrive. In fact, I didn't even need to have the CD in the drive to play. I guess they weren't all that concerned about piracy. Flipping through the sparse manual had me smiling, as I was beginning to expect an experience much like Hacker and Hacker 2 on the Commodore 64. Controlling cameras, working systems, clearing obstacles so your agent can do your bidding. Sounds like a lot of fun. The added bonus was instead of a robot with a giant claw, said agent was going to be a gorgeous redhead.

The game begins with a very drawn out cinema of a seagull flying around. Seriously, like a pretentious French art film. Complete with soft and floofy music, wide spinning pan shots, the whole nine yards. And the game said "Bonjour" to me. Hmmm. Moving right along we meet our redhead. The voice actress behind her reads everything in an utterly emotionless monotone. If I woke up all bandaged and nearly nude and some camera was staring at me, I'd be a little freaked out. Actually, I'd ignore the camera.. sort of wondering what her motivation is for caring so dang much. Regardless, I'd be panicking just a smidgen. The redhead teaches you how to get logged in and then spends the next 10 minutes explaining how to work the camera and lighting systems. She also begins to teach you how to move her around. The immersion sort of fails here... I'd say something like "I'm kinda gonna do my own thing here, try to keep it lit for me. If you spot anything I didn't notice, flick the lights near it or something. Sound good?" And therein comes one of this game's largest failures. Said redhead actually stands around complaining if you aren't guiding her from spot to spot in a timely fashion... and in the same non emotional voice. She's EXACTLY like the robots in the game I mentioned earlier, except with a complaining chip built in. The game promised autonomy of her actions; there are none. Maybe if I'd have gotten far enough, I would found out she WAS a robot. I'll never know, because comes up problem number 2.

The game is sloppy, unplayable, and boring. You have an overhead map of the area, and you manually activate cameras, which you then must control or set to auto track her. This doesn't sound so bad, except for every camera a new window is opened. Why is this so bad? Well the answer is because your entire interface is like a sloppy KDE setup. You literally open and close and resize windows. If you suspend disbelief long enough, you actually can feel like you're connected to real events due to this, I suppose. But this game's hook is also it's problem. I work with a frickin' GUI all day, to do mundane boring tasks. Why would I want one in my game? Constantly tabbing around, opening and resizing windows, moving them around... I really don't want more of it. The game would be far better served by having one window for camera, and you just change which you see from. Or just letting you control her directly. This whole incommunicado buddy thing is stupid.

The game progressed, there was something of a story, but I quickly realized I didn't care. The GUI was sloppy and annoying, the woman was not believable, the whole thing was a clever idea put together very poorly. The voice acting makes that opening cinema from Resident Evil look like high drama. However, it IS rather pretty. The environments are detailed enough that you'll take notice. That's why this game got a 2 instead of a negative several thousand. You can tell the developers spent some time making a realistic world to wander around in. Well, force your robot to wander in, anyway.

Rent/Buy/Whatnot: Don't buy it. Don't borrow it from a friend. Don't even download it from a pirate site. It's just a waste of hard drive space. It's not the kind of bad that's "so horrible you HAVE to see it" (Star Wars Holiday Special, anyone?) It's the kind of bad that I played it for 2 hours, just to give it a chance, then ended it as abruptly as I'm ending this review.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 03/24/08

Game Release: The Experiment (US, 02/05/08)