I’m trying to… fix the recharge system of the tram, I suppose? I reached that area, at least.
It seems a pretty competent suspense/scifi adventure game with good visuals, well done atmosphere and writing. Particularly the text descriptions have a nice flavour in them, that brings the setting to life. The brief voice acting seemed also well written.
After playing for an hour, my fears are
-that you delay the main section of the story too much, there is risk for the players to be bored in the game before they get to the “good” part of the plot and therefore don’t have motivation to go on. You need to give them “rewards” (plot advancement) in regular times.
-that the whole game will be… well, typical videogame stuff. What’s that mean? You alone in the dark ship reading logs from time to time, with the main goal of reaching zone X (whatever that is, be an elevator, a new section of the ship, the bridge area, the place where your family is, etc) but you you can’t go directly because shit is broken in the derelict ship, so 95% of the game is you having to fix shit in your way and/or maybe get authorization for some areas (in other words, the puzzles).
The thing is, I don’t like adventures. Not anymore, at least. It reached the point where I noticed I really didn’t like the gameplay, when I played them was to reach the parts I liked of the writing (interesting story, or maybe good jokes). My pet theory is that occurred not to me, but to a lot more people, that’s why the graphic adventure fell off the radar (in comparison with the golden era). Zero gameplay innovation, no one trying to advance the gameplay in the genre.
Imho, I think adventure games should learn a lesson or two of RPG games. I’m not talking of choices & consequences or character stats or combat. But the way that when a problem or challenge is presented to the player, there are two or three solutions (or even more, look at Black Isle/Obsidian but I would conform myself with 2-3 options here) available to the player. Supposing is a good rpg, of course, in others they make the same mistake as adventure games. That way, there would be less chance for the player to be stuck in a puzzle because he can’t find the specific solution thought by the designer (never mind the can think several that the game doesn’t recognize!) and the puzzles would feel less artificial if they would have more than one solution (say using a computer hacking it to open a door, tweaking the options in a menu, or using a crowbar in the door directly, or maybe giving by good several combinations of objects insitead of a single one).
[URL=“http://www.stasisgame.com/”]
