By Jim Rossignol on February 26th, 2013 at 3:00 pm.
Do you have a residual fondness for point and click adventures? The creators of Eleusis (it’s a Greek island, vocabulary fans!) certainly do. They’ve gone and made a pointy and clicky spooky adventure, complete with bewildering puzzles and abject mystery, using the magic of the first-person videogame technology magic. Yes, it’s a point and click game made in UDK! And that means real time movement, “DX11″ graphics, and irrelevant physics interactions.
I played the demo to find out something or other.
You might have expected it to be like Amnesia or something, what with the walking about and the gloomy atmospherics. There’s a problem with this, however, as I discovered when I downloaded the demo, is that it’s very clearly an adventure game in the reviewed-by-John-Walker tradition.
The demo doesn’t provide you with the start of the game and that potentially exciting rock/car stuff, however, instead you’re dropped at one of the early puzzles, possibly the first puzzle, where you must get a generator working. It’s a classic of adventure game puzzle motifs: the inventory, the collection of items. Oh, nostalgia.
And hey, there’s a Vespa out the front of the building, and it might have gas in. It does! If only I had some way of getting it out of there. Fortunately, I’ve found a hose, and there are a bunch of gas cans up by the generator. I can use one of those…
Haha, no. Those gas cans aren’t the right gas can. Despite being obvious and convenient, they can only be picked up and waved about until they glitch through the scenery and disappear. Instead I will have to search around for ten minutes, heading further and further from the pile of obviously useful gas cans (and a bucket!) that logic dictates I should be using.
Wait! What’s that in the river? What’s that, under a tree? Why, it’s a container that I can actually use for some reason!
Adventure games: never change. No, I mean do change. Please change.
26/02/2013 at 15:02 Gap Gen says:
Making a game about a Greek island? Quick, arrest them all for national security reasons!
26/02/2013 at 15:07 Lord Custard Smingleigh says:
The third picture looks like the entire Greek military expansion for the year.
Arf, I’m so funny with my topical economic commentary!
Now I’m going to go and cry knowing that the last picture is probably an accurate depiction of my retirement. The boxy wooden shelving at the back, that is. One cubicle per retiree.
26/02/2013 at 15:45 cpt_freakout says:
Retirement: The Dark Descent
26/02/2013 at 15:47 Gap Gen says:
To be fair, you could make a horrifically dark game about old age, or an elderly person living alone.
26/02/2013 at 15:20 Arren says:
This was exactly my experience of the demo.
Amnesia threw me all out of whack — it made me forget how excruciating I find the arbitrary “only the right gascan” game-mechanics of most adventures. Bah.
26/02/2013 at 15:25 Synesthesia says:
yay! It’s good this is starting to get spoken about. Go quinns and leigh catalyst powers!
26/02/2013 at 15:30 Llewyn says:
Yay. Adventure games with puzzles given in text written by people who think that proofreading is a waste of effort. Got to love those.
26/02/2013 at 15:46 Ricc says:
“a rock fell on my car and ruined it”
Made me chuckle. :) Pretty cartoonish for a spooky game.
26/02/2013 at 17:42 Megakoresh says:
Look at the bright side: if you ever have insomnia, you can play this!
26/02/2013 at 18:19 Hodge says:
Reminds me of my attempt to play Anna, where five minutes in I was chastised for trying to use a cigarette lighter to see in a darkened room.
26/02/2013 at 21:19 limbeckd says:
Eleusis is absolutely not an island. It is a suburb of Athens, and is famous as the ancient site of the cleverly named Eleusinian Mysteries.
27/02/2013 at 00:53 Citrus says:
Except for Syberia, other adventure games don’t really bother with trying to make sense of anything you do in the world.
27/02/2013 at 01:50 The Random One says:
And Syberia does? I mean, about half the puzzles are ‘check out how the people in this crazy village read the mail’ and are great, but the other half seem to be left over from when Myst was shot in the same studio.
27/02/2013 at 19:42 Citrus says:
Considering both of your complaints are bull, yeah Syberia does.