While there are a few examples of murder mystery computer games, they are few and far between. Many enthusiasts of the genre probably believe that any new game that falls into that category is a welcome addition. If that's the case, a good dose of The Orion Conspiracy might have them rethinking their priorities.
This is an unusually bad product for Domark and Spectrum HoloByte, but they are not to blame, except for agreeing to distribute the thing. The game was designed by a company called Divide by Zero, which also brought the world Innocent Until Caught and Guilty, neither of which was better than adequate. The Orion Conspiracy certainly had a higher budget than those two games, but the team obviously had no idea where to spend that extra money.
Before I get into a full-fledged gripe, I'd better give you the plot rundown. Several centuries in the future, there's a scientific research station on the edge of a black hole. A young technician named Danny was doing some routine maintenance on the station's exterior, and fell to his death in the crushing gravitational grip of the singularity. The player takes on the role of Danny's father, Devlin McCormack, who has come to the station for Danny's funeral. Just as he is preparing to leave, he is given an anonymous note telling him that Danny's death was not an accident, but ... murder! And so begins the adventure.
One of the first problems I noticed was that the game program itself is highly inefficient in its use of memory space. On my Pentium 60, I was unable to listen to both the music and the voices at the same time, no matter how I arranged my configuration. I was also made to reduce the screen size in order to get the game to play with either one or the other. The sad thing is, if you actually have the equipment to get everything to run at once at full size, I think you will be shocked at how little is going on while using all that available space.
The main thing that differentiates The Orion Conspiracy from other Divide By Zero products is that the graphics are a notch or two better. It seems that the bulk of the extra development money went into a few nicely rendered spaceship cut scenes. But in the case of McCormack's ship arriving at the station, the lovely 3-D craft docks into a very flat, cartoony, 2-D port. This is absolutely typical of the problems that surround this game: some really good ideas that are never carried through properly.
The rest of the graphics in the game are quite serviceable, but hardly inspirational. It's hard to imagine a more dull setting for this game. Everything is gray. There are five floors of gray corridors accessed from a gray elevator. The character sprites are quite smooth looking and do not suffer from the pixelation that is the trademark of adventures from a year of two ago. However, every character is roughly the same height, roughly the same build, and can never be seen from any angle except three-quarter face on. When a character talks, he or she goes through a very short repeated sequence of body language that bears no connection whatsoever to the things being said. There are never any close-ups or change of camera angle. No matter how interesting the story gets (and it's a pretty intense tale), you are never allowed to "get into" the events on board the station. Everything is from the same distancing perspective.
And if you think the visuals are distancing, wait until you hear the voices! While there are a few exceptions, most of the actors are hopelessly inept at conveying their lines in a believable manner. A few sound like they are high school students forced to read poetry out loud, and the main character is apparently a graduate of the William Shatner School of Dramatic Inflection and Awkward Pauses. It's just plain irritating.
On top of these annoying aspects, The Orion Conspiracy has puzzles that go beyond obscure into the realm of the unbelievable. How is anybody supposed to follow this line of reasoning and determine their next course of action? Well, they'd better, because every other course is completely impossible. To call this game linear is like saying Rush Limbaugh has a bit of a weight problem. If you click on a highlighted item before the time you're supposed to interact with it, your character gives you a brilliant bit of insight like, "That controls the temperature," or whatever. Some rooms you can't do anything but listen to Devlin talk to himself. While the interface is easy enough to handle, you'll be lucky if you actually get a chance to do anything with it.
The Orion Conspiracy might conceivably have been made into a pretty harrowing game, if anyone else was doing it. As it stands, it's a frustrating wreck, and no patch will fix that. Rent a copy of Outland instead.
