Despite the number of games using 3D graphics, there just aren't very many talented graphic artists out there. Fortunately, about seventeen of the talented ones apparently work for a company called Amazing Media. I base this judgment entirely on the fact that they are responsible for Frankenstein: Through the Eyes of the Monster, an adventure game published through Interplay.
Frankenstein is a goth-fan's wet dream: a lavishly decorated, 3D castle fully rendered in sometimes disgusting detail. (It's the body parts I'm speaking of primarily, here.) I don't know where the artists at Amazing got their textures, but wood looks like wood, stone looks like stone, glowing crystals look like glowing crystals, and blood . . . well, I'll leave that to your imagination. One has only to look at the leaves on a tree to imagine the effort put into making this game look pretty. Furthermore, the use of lighting is not to be believed -- to my untrained eye, it even looks as though they managed to match the lighting in the embedded QuickTime movies, a process that must have been painstaking and laborious.
What else? The acting? Well, it's mostly Tim Curry. What more can you say? Curry skates the edge of hamming it up, as he so often does, though the range of the writing isn't that amazing. Emotionally, the character of Frankenstein has two states -- giddy glee over the level of his own genius, or sullen anger, usually at something you've done. Robert Rothrock, as the voice of the creature (that's you) is also decent, although HIS range is even more limited -- sort of a meandering, unfocused angst. In this version of the classic story, the creature is a former scientist who was hung by the local judge who wrongfully accused him of kidnapping several local children. Unfortunately, he can't seem to decide to be happy about his resurrection, but mopes about complaining what a wretched individual he is, and wondering whether Frankenstein has actually mocked God to give him a chance to clear his name, or whether he is just in Hell and this is his punishment. Folks, it just doesn't get any more Gothic than this. Eventually, it grows a bit tiresome, kind of like listening to a Morrissey CD on "repeat."
All that is well and good, but how, you ask, does the game play? Well, let's put it this way: there are some games you would play even if they had 16-color stick figures for graphics -- they're that much fun to play. Unfortunately, Frankenstein is not among that exalted lot. It's a hard game to play, because you can wander forever without finding anything to do. When you *do* find something to do, it's either A) Incomprehensibly complex, or B) So easy as to be insulting. There's also an annoying thing with locked doors. Certain doors spontaneously unlock when you complete part of the game. You have no way of knowing when this happens, so you've just got to wander randomly, jiggling doorknobs, until something opens. Why do this? Why shoehorn the story into the linear sequence deemed most palatable by the scriptwriter? Who knows. Certainly the designers of Frankenstein are not the first to fall into this particular pitfall, but I wish they had avoided it completely. This game looks SO good, and it's SUCH a compelling concept that I REALLY wanted the game to be lots of fun. I can't begin to tell you how disappointed I am that it isn't.
There's one more thing I've got to crack on the developers for, and that's for not using a more distinct "smart cursor" to show when things could be picked up. I found myself missing grabbable items again and again because I didn't notice them. I'd suggest that the game's creators take a look at The Eleventh Hour -- or Interplay's own Stonekeep -- to see how such a smart cursor is properly done.
I was pleasantly surprised by Stonekeep last month. It wasn't as graphically sophisticated as I'd hoped it would be, but it was tons of fun -- an extremely good game. It's disappointing to see the same publisher turn around only a month later and release this game, which has the exact opposite problem: it's gorgeous, but not terribly involving. I'd really like to see more from Amazing Media (and I'm sure I will; doubtless not everyone is as fussy as I am, so they'll probably sell enough copies of this game to stay in business). Next time, though, I hope they'll spend just as much time on the puzzle design as they did on the graphics.
