June 28, 2005 - I remember when adventure gaming simply involved rescuing my friends in Maniac Mansion or helping Guybrush Threepwood on Monkey Island (and romance Elaine Marley at the same time). Wow, how times have changed. As most of us have matured, so have our adventure games. Gone are the colorful 8 bit graphics and midi-like songs that repeated over and over, the mind-numbing puzzles that involved produce and plants, the odd characters who were bent on world domination. Nowadays, adventure gaming has become so realistic and mature that it feels like a good book or an involving TV show. The characters have histories and motives, the plots are dark and twisted and the graphics look so realistic that sometimes you wonder if they’re actually real. At the same time though, adventure games have been on a steady decline. Who wants to play CSI when they can just sit back and watch it? And all that reading. And those puzzles. Luckily, the Myst games have come out like clockwork (although their sales are not as high as the original) and The Adventure Company and Microids have released enough games to keep the genre alive and healthy. You’ll also note that Ubisoft (publishers of Myst) have recently aquired Microids Canada, so the bittersweet news does leave hope for a bright future. As it stands, Still Life is a wonderful Swan Song.

Still Life follows a very high pedigree of Adventure Games; Microids is responsible for Post Mortem as well as the two wonderful Syberia games. In this outing however, it’s clearly the Post Mortem world that is at play. The story follows FBI agent Victoria McPherson as she investigates a grisly serial murder case involving slain women. As the story begins, she is arriving on the scene of the fifth victim and it is obvious that the evidence is still not revealing any useful clues. With nothing to go on, a boss who doesn’t like her and the Holiday Season upon her, she takes a break at her father’s house and discovers a chest of old case notes by her grandfather, Gustav McPherson, a private investigator. Some of you will immediately recognize the name and rightfully so, Gus was the hero of the PC’s Post Mortem game. If the name is new to you, fear not, the previous game is in no way mandatory to play or enjoy this one. From this point on, we travel 75 years back in time, in Prague no less, to also assist Gus on a series of increasingly familiar killings. And so, with each consecutive chapter, the game will focus on Victoria and her grandfather alternatively.

If Still Life has one trump card over all others, it’s the story. So much so, that the rest of the game actually suffers because of it. Not only is the story so ambitious and well thought out that you’ll be anxious to find what happens next, but Gus and Victoria’s journals are filled with so much pertinent information that you’ll want to read every last bit of them. Unfortunately, when the game throws a puzzle at you (this is an adventure game, right?), no matter how well conceived and logically placed it may be, it detracts from the story-telling to the point of annoyance. It doesn’t help matters that some of the twelve puzzles in the games (particularly the lock pick puzzle) are so time-consuming in their logic that you’ll get mad at the simple inability to further the story along quicker.

For the most part, the game is your typical point and click affair with a cursor that changes form when a “hot spot” is being perused. The characters are easy to control and the loading between scenes are extremely short. The game is a high quality build that is very proficient at doing everything right, but as all games do, suffers from a few problems along the way: The text in the journals, while larger in print then Syberia’s, is sometimes hampered by a picture in the background that makes reading very difficult. Some locations are hard to navigate because a distinction in paths isn’t always obvious. The “picture” puzzles are harder than they need to be because of the angle differences. The game is not overly long to complete and holds no replay value. There’s no shooting (not that you’d need it in an adventure game). There is a lot of reading required which may throw off a few.