The Huz Experience

We’ve established that I own too many games. What better excuse to play them than to review them for this site?

Of course, when some of my games are as high-calibre as those in The Adventure Collection - three games for a fiver, folks, there’s nothing suspicious about that! - I don’t want to commit myself to playing them all the way through.

With that in mind, I present the first in a potentially regular column: the half-OOUR review. The concept is simple: a game has half a f**king OOUR either to impress me, or make me think it was MORE FOOL ME for tainting my computer with such gash. The time it takes to install doesn’t count.

Without further ado, the first candidate: Journey to the Centre of the Earth, one of the games in the fine Adventure Collection.

I didn’t have high hopes.

12:35 am

Installation went well enough. Actually, what am I on? Of course it did. This is sounding like a JA+ review already, scrambling for compliments like a pig scouring marshland for truffles. But still, it’s true: there was even an installation splash screen that didn’t burn my eyes.

Of course, as soon as the game began, I found myself making allowances for it. Good cutscene, I thought, for an adventure game. In reality it’s amateurish in the extreme and looks about as visually stunning as a Blue Peter competition entry. One unconvincing rockfall and a crashed helicopter later, and our sexy female protagonist (I’m sure that’s the look they were going for, anyway) is stranded in the middle of nowhere.

What does the game smack me with first? Terrible pathfinding? Naturally. A character who has to turn laboriously on the spot before she sets off in a new direction? Of course! Tiny hotspots? Yep.

The interface is unresponsive, to the point that it only does something when you try something you’re allowed to do. Objects you can interact with - but not necessarily pick up without manipulating them first, for reasons the game does not offer - are highlighted with an icon. There are no descriptions or even text labels, so if you can’t make out what an object is or why you can’t pick it up immediately from the illustration alone, you’re out of luck. Oh man.

What’s outside the helicopter? A vast expanse. What happens if I click on the footprints icon that appears over this tiny, tiny piece of land?

Oh, I see. It’s slipping. Thanks for that. As you can see, no expense has been spent on the visuals, nor on the protagonist’s dialogue.

At this point, I’d picked up everything possible from the downed helicopter. I’d found a crevice in a rock, only to be dropped what felt like a heavy hint, “there might be a way out over there”. I located the tiny hotspot for ‘over there’ and found a panoramic view over the sea, at which point my spunky heroine proclaimed that she “should tell the office about the accident”. Well, yeah.

12:45 am

Ok, enough blind stumbling around. I decided I must have missed something about the interface. It couldn’t really be this bad, could it?

Sadly, it could and it is. There really is no way to tell what an object is other than by sight. There is no feedback when something doesn’t work, only when it does.

Thanks to a walkthrough in the manual, I found I had missed some objects in the helicopter cockpit - a medical box that I initially couldn’t pick up (the game couldn’t tell me it was screwed to the wall, natch), and some wires I had to cut loose.

12:50 am

At this point I decided to screw wandering around the same three screens of the crash site, searching for new ways to pit myself against the interface in battle, and went back to the walkthrough from the manual. It transpired that “telling the office” equates to “sending an email from your laptop”. Sending an email from a laptop while stranded in a remote spot in Iceland, of course, makes perfect sense, but only when you have a panoramic view over the sea!

Email sent. I was no further forward.

12:53 am

Walkthrough again.

You see her there, brazenly saying “over there”? She means here. There’s a way out here, where she’s standing. Getting rid of the rock I didn’t even know was a problem - no feedback, y’see - had me on my way.

1:00 am

Only five minutes left, thank God. It was set to be a telling five minutes, though.

Play any number of ‘fan games’, amateur efforts generally created as a labour of love by one person, and you’ll find one common thread running through most of them: pointless player missions. You know the sort of thing: find the shaven llama and take it to The Insidious Overweight Moon God before Mars is in the eighth house. Usually there’s no plausible reason for these missions, because the amateur adventure maker can’t be bothered with a plot or a cohesive storyline or any of that nonsense, but you have to do them to progress through the game.

Guess what? Journey to the Centre of the Earth has one of those.

Mmm, so I have to find a crystal and polish it? Like you polish your ‘wand’? Sounds intriguing, do tell me more.

Naturally it isn’t intriguing at all, it’s boring and rubbish. I found the crystal, and the game wouldn’t let me pick it up. How do I pick it up?, I wondered. Do I use everything in my inventory with it? Go out and find more inventory and then try that? Tinker with this fusebox - with no feedback - in a vain attempt to repair it?

Or did I just Alt-F4 the hell outta there?

Admittedly, by this stage the game was beginning to show at least a smattering of potential. If I was interested enough in adventure games not to mind the bad gameplay (see signature), I might have persisted for, ooh, five minutes. But as it turned out, my time was up.

1:05 am

Half an OOUR? Seemed more like three. Just out of interest, I decided to take a look at how JA+ reviewed it. I’ll give you a clue: it scores more highly than Monkey Island 2.

Next up in the series, the demo of Al Emmo: The Lost Dutchman’s Mine. I might have to steel myself first, though.