So the North American release date for Gray Matter (the first adventure game from Jane Jensen since Gabriel Knight III) is still February, 2011. Fair enough, and I think that’s the Xbox 360 and PC release date, both.
But…the game is out in Germany (and I suppose the rest of the EU) as of last week. And, if you’re willing to pay fifty bucks, you can get the download version of the PC game at a German Digital Downloads site called Gamer Unlimited: http://gamerunlimited.gamesplanet.com/kaufen-downloaden-pc-spiele/Gray-Matter-2194-14.html (This is a legit company, it’s Metaboli’s German property for digital game purchases.)
This digital version includes both German and English localizations.
Well and so. As someone who considers himself a total Jane Jensen fanboi, I had to bite. And so now I’m in Chapter 3 of the game, and I have some impressions of it.
This game makes a lousy first impression. In the tutorial section, I found the animations for the first character you control, Samantha, to be horribly overdone. The voice acting for Sam in that tutorial is pretty bad, too, and the fact that they insist on showing a close-up of her face on the side panel (hard to describe…remember how in the first Gabriel Knight game they’d show a close up of Gabe’s face and the face of the person he was talking to? They do something similar here) heightens the bad impression, because at least in English the lip movement doesn’t match well at all with the dialogue.
That was on Saturday. I was bitterly disappointed at having pissed away $55 on a game that I wasn’t sure I wanted to ever boot up again…but I decided to give it a go again on Sunday night. As I wound my way through the first chapter, damned if Jane Jensen didn’t start weaving some of that magic spell she’s got over me, and damned if this game didn’t start to get really good.
It is standard adventure game fare, so if you’re not a fan of the genre, this game won’t make you one. But, if you dig the old school point-and-click adventure game, this is heaven. The game engine itself is something I’ve heard Jensen describe as “2 1/2D”. If you’ve played games like “The Longest Journey” or “Still Life”, you’ll recognize it–basically 2d backgrounds with the character given perspective to move from foreground to background. The nice thing is that they’ve poured a lot of detail into the “diorama” settings, so you see clouds move in the sky, and smoke come out of chimneys. When you journey to Oxford University, you see people you can’t interact with walking through the scene to create the idea that, hey, you’re in the town square in Oxford, and people hang out here.
What I really like about the engine is that you can toggle the interactive “hotspots” on and off with the spacebar…no mo’ pixel hunt. It probably makes the game a little easier than Jane intended it to be, but for me it made the challenges feel like they were fair. Another cool thing is that the game shows you your progress through each chapter of the game. There are “points” of a sort awarded, and for completists you’ll want them all, and the game makes it very easy to see where you’re lacking here. It also has bonus points, and there’s a cool side-story game involving solving a series of magic riddles that so far seems ancillary to the main plot (but we’ll have to see, won’t we?)
Another nice thing is that the animations for Sam are a lot less “busy” after the tutorial. For one thing, the camera is pulled out to a greater distance, and the character 3d modeling looks a lot better like this. Even better than that, either I got used to the mediocre voice acting, or the girl doing Sam’s voice gets tons better after the tutorial. Most of the other characters (game is fully voiced, of course) have very good voice acting, so that’s a plus, too. (There are a couple of exceptions, but nothing game-breaking.)
I guess the best illustration of how pulled into the game I am so far is that the subject matter–which is experimental neuro-biology by a scientist who may or may not be mad and malevolent…or is perhaps just misunderstood, hard to tell yet–just really didn’t interest me much when reading previews of the game, but I’m totally drawn into the story now, completely absorbed. The game oozes spooky atmosphere even though nothing too spooky has happened, and I’m finding I care about the characters and what happens to them and am wildly, almost insatiably curious to see where we’re going here.