Yeah, that I was after five sense was not immediately clear, by any means.
Out on The Adventure Shop! Don’t know if it’s available on any other store, but at least it’s about 40% cheaper than from the German site that had it until now.
Hmm, it’s certainly tempting. I somehow missed this thread, so I had no idea Gray Matter was already out! I checked GamersGate but they don’t have it yet… would prefer buying from them since I already have an account.
An email I received, dateline February 23rd, 2011:
"Dear Customer,
Greetings from Amazon.co.uk,
We are writing to let you know that the following item has been sent
to:
Jarmo
Finland
using Royal Mail.
Your order #xxx (received August 09, 2010)
1 Gray Matter (PC DVD)
Dispatched via Royal Mail (estimated arrival date: March 02, 2011)."
Can’t wait.
And it’s $29.99 too! That’s it, I’m in for this one.
Why is this getting such tepid reviews? It sounds great just from reading this thread.
It is great. Adventures games rarely get great reviews regardless of how great they actual are.
I think there’s a natural divide between reviewers and fans of the genre (of which I am one) about the use of game mechanics from the 90s.
I received the game today. What joy it is to hold it in my hands after all those years of waiting! I feel a little reverent. Just a tiny bit.
I did too when I finally downloaded it, even though there was no box to hold. Enjoy!
Wendelius
Now they need to release it on the iPad.
Got my copy in the mail from Amazon.com yesterday, because Viva Media apparently thinks that ‘North America’ and ‘United States’ are synonyms. Really enjoying the story so far, but I can understand the mediocre reviews. I’m an adventure game fan and there’s still quite a lot that I find off-putting about it, most of which is due to the awkward engine. It’s very much a Black Mirror/Still Life/Longest Journey kind of affair, so the characters very obviously float above the backgrounds, forever looking like MODOK without the chair. The engine also has serious problems recognizing clicks, hotspot labeling looks awful, and the game generally has that Syberia sort of feeling of moving through molasses. On the plus side, it does have that wonderful ability to skip the walking animation when moving between locations, which helps speed things up a bit.
That said, I’m enjoying what I’ve played of it so far in spite of the lack of polish. I’m only halfway through the first chapter, but so far all of the story beats have a great Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers sort of feel to them and I haven’t had to make any cat-hair mustaches. I do hope Harvey dies quickly, though. That voice acting! That personality! That model!
My short review:
A very good classical adventure game, with an interesting story, and my main problem with it is actually that it ended too soon (after some 12 hours).
I enjoyed the setting, voice acting, mystery and even the mini games, so I definitely got my money’s worth. If you’re a fan of adventure games, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. The progress bars and the highlighting of clickable areas was a good way, I thought, of alleviating pixel-hunting and figuring out in a general sense what you were supposed to be doing without leading you by the hand.
I also liked the choice of using slide-show animation for the cutscenes.
Sadly, the in-game graphics felt a bit Longest Journey-era, and the fade-in, fade-out even for something as simple as getting rid of characters seemed out of place. The character models did the classical “3d-model in a 2d-environment” flailing in the general direction of an item to pick it up.
The game itself suffered somewhat because of a recurring problem where I didn’t quite feel that I knew what the playable characters were thinking, making me a bit baffled at how they went about certain things. In addition, there were some glaring cases where doing things in the wrong order led to conversations that shouldn’t have been possible.
All in all, a classic adventure game both in the good and bad sense, with a solid story and some glaring mechanical flaws. But again, what I really wanted was to keep investigating for a few more days in-game. There were still several days of experiment left, after all.
It had some parts where the plot was engrossing and some of the puzzles were interesting, but in the end, the game was… underwhelming. Perhaps i had too much hope in Jensen.
I liked it, and wished I could easily find more adventure games of similar quality. While it was far from perfect other recent adventure games I’ve played have been worse. I haven’t followed adventure games very closesly since the Sierra days, so maybe I’ve simply missed a lot of “traditional” adventure games that were better than Grey Matter.
Currently $4.99 at Amazon…
I thought as I kickstarted Jane for $16 I should at least play the last one she actually got out.
Nice heads up.
Definitely a good buy for anyone into classic point-and-click adventure games at that price point.
Somehow I missed this one, downloading now for $4.99.
It’s only distantly related to adventure games, but some of you may not be aware of the existence of a huge genre of “room escape” games, mostly Japanese, mostly in Flash. Sometimes including a narrative frame or some kind of drama, sometimes not, you find yourself stuck in a room filled with simple puzzles that must be solved to get out. While the average instance of this game is not all that memorable, there are some very clever and amusing examples here and there, and even the average ones are OK for a few minutes break between doing work.
I’ve got this game installed, and have had, for quite a few months. Been meaning to get around to playing, it just keeps getting bumped to the bottom of the list. I’m not really enjoying Gemini Rue anyway.
Awesome, been interested in Gray Matter. Bought.
Loved Gemini Rue and am eagerly awaiting Resonance hoping it can match the experience. What turns you off in Gemini Rue?