TITLE: Still Life
DEVELOPER: Microids
PUBLISHER: Microids
GENRE: Horror - Thriller
OFFICIAL WEBSITE: stilllife-game.com
LOCALIZATION: Italian
PLATFORM: PC - Xbox
Never before has the graphic adventure genre been back in the limelight with a series of truly interesting titles.Microids, for its part, could only continue to have its say for a genre that has always characterized its business line, and with this Still Life also attempts to add something more to the old genre.
The story behind SL is simple but characterized by a very strong plot: Victoria McPherson is a bright young FBI agent who is investigating a serial killer case. The number of victims has grown to 5 and she still has no real leads, nothing, just a mountain of circumstantial evidence and a boss breathing down her neck. This, broadly speaking and without spoiling the surprise of the plot, is basically the line the game follows but it does so in a way quite different from the usual canons of graphic adventures.
First of all, we can consider the game's speech and dialogues as very strong, after all, the adventure has a series of scenes and settings suitable only for a mature audience and not for the casual kid gamer - the title is peppered with strong themes and crude words, as well as the scenes we will witness were certainly not created for fine palates - there will therefore be visions of death and suffering, especially in the environments of the crime scenes: mind you, we are not talking about blood or splatter scenes but precisely about scenes that are crude to the human eye, seasoned with that hint of nastiness that only the mind of a serial killer could process.
As I wrote just above, the title is aimed at a mature audience, and this is best evidenced by the fact that certain puzzles in the game are comparable more to the C.S.I. television series than a potential look-alike of the Myst series, which mixed fantastical settings and themes.
Let's say that the whole first part of the title is a succession of searching for evidence in the crime scene, nothing to take away therefore from the TV series mentioned just above, only that in this case, we will be searching for evidence ourselves and we will have to do it in the right way as possible, without making a mess of the case, as someone before you had already done...you will understand this statement of mine better when you have the game on your hands...I, do not want to reveal anything.
Analyzing (a very apt term) a title like SL is not as simple as it may seem, especially because you have to take into account a very important component for this genre of games and that is the challenge, in strokes of puzzles and riddles that the game is capable of giving: the Microids home creature balances very well, without however fully succeeding in giving excellent satisfactions to the user, if not to the occasional one, those people therefore who do not chew graphic adventures for a living: having said that it is clear that the puzzle sections are well present in the title but not particularly complicated, except for those two or three scenes that literally made me squeeze my brains.
This is not to say that the title is not balanced, solely, the puzzle sections are not totally well balanced, and if some scenes will take a few minutes to complete, others will take little more than a few seconds to complete, that's all.
Curious, on the other hand, how within the game we will be able to witness the carrying out of investigations by an ancestor (the grandfather) of Victoria McPherson herself, and in these sections, we will literally be transported back to 1929, and from here the setting will also change, no longer in modern-day Chicago but in a 1930s Prague. So one cannot but praise Microids for this highly characterful and stylish step. And since we have come to talk about the setting, it seems to me that the second most logical step is to analyze the title from a graphical point of view: leaving aside small and harmless smears, the game gives maniacal care to every environment in which we will happen to move, giving us some real scenic gems as far as the Prague of 1929 is concerned.
The title's graphics engine therefore perfectly renders every setting in which we will happen to move but unfortunately cannot handle the animation of the 3D characters very well, in fact both the movements and the models are too wooden and imperfect - I personally also found anatomical imperfections for some of the second-tier characters.
Lastly, still remaining on the subject of negative items, I point out a discrepancy regarding the gestures and lip-synching of the characters with the vocal audio, leaving aside the Italian localization which, although it exploits some very apt voices, is still not able to compete with more or less recent and much better edited titles than this SL.
Totally positive tone instead for two very important things in this kind of titles: point one, as far as the few sequences made with the help of computer graphics are concerned, those creep out for real, managing to give in addition that touch of macabre and visual spontaneity to the whole game - and the character of the serial killer is very apt and disturbing. Second point, the overall audio of the game, as well as the music, are state of the art for this title, and those with a worthy sound system will definitely have a more than positive all-around sound experience.
A game, therefore, not a foregone conclusion but still far from being considered an absolute masterpiece, precisely because of small distractions that would have deserved more time to be corrected - Still Life is nonetheless a respectable graphic adventure, both in terms of plot and settings as well as playability and stylistic character. Recommended for all lovers of the graphic adventure genre, but also for those who enjoy thriller stories spiced with the ever-present taste for the macabre and horror.
PC CONFIGURATION:
- 400 MHz Pentium 2
- 64 MB RAM
- 64MB graphics card
- 1.30 GB of HD space
Reviewed by Fabiano Zaino
