Glistening: Eleusis Points And Clicks, Demos

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.