I'll just give you this as is. There are some changes made, mostly though, it's my impressions I seem to have got muddled up.
Huh? I Guess I Got It Wrong! ****BASED ON COMPLETED GAME
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
If you haven’t read my review of the CE for this game, please don’t. I don’t know where my head was that day, but clearly it wasn’t on the job! While the facts are correct, some of my responses to the game seem way off, having completed the game!
So. This game starts out with a wedding, but the honeymoon’s not all it could be. The bride is murdered at the altar, and we, the groom, are left unconscious. The graphics are fine, nothing brilliant, but quality. As are all aspects of this game. Except a couple of niggling bits.
SIGHTS & SOUNDS
The graphics are good, but not great, although the artwork is appealing and has that eerie magical ‘ectoplasmic’ green that works so well for anything supernatural. The HOPs are bright and colourful without seeming out of place. One thing I liked, we find a newspaper with a relevant story on the front page. The photo comes “alive” and the narrator tells us some back history, all with the newspaper still encasing the ‘photo’. I thought it was nifty.
The narrator/main character’s voice is used wonderfully. Some of the other voices are not so good, but none are bad. The music has a lot of crashing piano chords and other exciting stuff, orchestral for the most part – always at one extreme or the other. Sometimes, it is beautifully ethereal.
WHAT’S HAPPENING?
Your bride is killed on your wedding day, you are knocked unconscious, and wake with a train ticket in your hand. You just manage to catch it before it leaves the station. On board, the ghost of your bride begins the explanation of what has happened and what you must do.
The train belongs to Charon – the ferryman who takes souls over the Styx. Caught up in a battle between Charon and a gang of evil doers, your wife and the others aboard cannot pass over until these men are lured to the train and disposed of . That’s where you come in. The game is broken up into the capture of 4 of these villains and thereby rescuing your wife.
Another reviewer called the story preposterous, and it is. But it’s also an involving story, that kept me playing. My problem with it is the inconsistencies. From the pronunciation of the name Charon, of which there are 3 variations, to the book referring to the train as the “Phantom (i.e. not the Haunted) train, to the villain who loudly declares he’s going to follow you onto “that train” - the train that he has spent hundreds of years avoiding in order to stay immortal - it seemed like someone else besides me was falling asleep behind the wheel.
GAMEPLAY
There seemed to me to be more adventure tasks than either puzzles or HOPs. Despite the fact that the HOP scenes are visited twice, they feel scarce. They are interactive lists with a greater degree of interaction than the norm, but they are still not all that exciting. There are more puzzles, and they are a problem for me. A lot are very well done original games, which unfortunately had vague or confusing instructions. Others required 5 steps of the same mini-game to open the lock. And some were just plain difficult. And the worst of all, where to me it looked as though the puzzle was solved, even after resetting and doing it all again, the game insisted I hadn’t solved. And without a SG, no way of knowing why/how!
There is a journal, an interesting interactive jump map and directional hint to help you, and 3 degrees of difficulty to confound you.
COMBINED IMPACT
I did like the game. I am not as ecstatic about it as I was for the demo. The weird inconsistencies in story, the difficulty of the puzzles, detracted a bit from my enjoyment of it. But it is still a good game, worthy of an SE price.
I recommend this game!
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