Momemt of Silence - final impressions (long)

[D.A.Lewis]

Started Early Dec 2004
Endied Mid January 2005

Not really playable unless you have a walk through or you're a superior adventure gamer. Weak and stupid puzzles but excellent prodution values, sound, voice acting and story. Although, now that I 'm finished with the story I can see some logic flaws in the story design.

Okay Final Review

The Moment of Silence

This extensive post is about a game that coulda been a contender. Such a mixed bag of good and bad.

You will marvel at this game you will curse this game. Because the game was intriguing enough, that I felt compelled to complete the adventure I have to give it a nudging thumbs up. Poor adventure games are so easy to quit. Since they usually contain a void sterile atmosphere there is usually no emotional involvement with the game other than the beautiful graphics. However when an adventure game makes the effort to develop an interesting story and interesting characters, well, even when the game is not so well done you still want to stay till the end. Moment of Silence (MOS) has one of the best stories ever in an adventure game but it’s coupled with one of the worst point and click interfaces to ever hit the market.

I’ve always loved adventure games and never gave them up even when they became the passé game of choice. I admit that many of them are tough and about as much fun as those mathematical boxes we learned about in calculus? But a lot of adventure games transcend their play and leave you with a feeling that yes, computer gaming rules. MOS should have reached the plateau but it poor game mechanics, awkward interface and horrendous puzzles make that plateau, a plateau too far.

See, this game has such a marvelous story, that as poorly designed as it is, you just cant give up on it. After playing this game I’m got to thinking that perhaps they didn’t have any real playtesters. They probably relied on their own internal people, which to me is a recipe for disaster. And that just might be a problem with adventure games in general. The hard core adventure gamers have no problem taking that huge leap of logic or painting the screen with their mouse to find the right pixel. MOS is filled, just absolutely filled with such type puzzles. Finding critical objects or people in a dark spaces or character doing things that are out of character are all found in MOS in abundance. Still I have to recommend the game. It’s like an early bad episode of X-files, full of promise and watchable but also winceable.

So what is this great story? Year 2044. Peter Wright witnesses the nighttime abduction of his neighbor by some kind of government swat team (this is not a spoiler it is the opening scene of the game). The game involves Peter trying to solve the mystery of why his neighbor (a man with a lovely wife and cute kid) was kidnapped. During all of this, Peter has to deal with his own personal demons regarding his recent loss. As Peter unravels the mystery of the kidnapping he becomes aware of ????

Peter is not a detective but his job is very interesting. He's a Public Relations designer working for a firm that developes slogans for the government that influences how people think about things

Like X-files, the game has a basis in real world reality. Cell phones and PDA have assumed a central place in technology, completely believable, considering where we are today. And the political landscape of 40 years hence feels about right if we continue on our current track. And basically that is what hooked me on this game.

I got a Euro version from Gogamer but the Adventure Company has agreed to publish in the US sometime in April 2005. Also the Euro version has Starforce.

I gave up on MOS absurd game play and I’m playing the game with walkthrough in hand. The story is that good. How I work it, is if it takes longer then a few minutes to solve a puzzle then I alt/tab to my desktop and check out the walk through. Thus far very few of the puzzles have I said, I could have figured that out. My typical response is ‘Yeah, Right”.

The last puzzle is totally groan inducing in that it is the type of puzzle where you have to run between different locations to solve the puzzle. And the Ending is just way to anit-climatic. Digital Jesters shows some promise with this game. From what I read, this is their second big game (the other one was Night of the Druids), and they are a greatly improved developer. Still, with all the flaws of their current game, MOS, I will have an eye out for their next game.

[JayG]

I'm not a big Digital Jesters fan. They published Beyond Divinity, which messed my system, It's a pity that they a publishing Freedom Force 2, as that was a must buy for me.

As for Moment of Silence, it's sounds a bit disapponting. I would love a first person adventure game, something along the lines of the last Gabriel Knight game, but with different paths and a lot of freedom. WHat I loved about the early Lucusarts games was that there was always so much to do, that you were stuck too long. Looking at the market for the sims, I do think that adventures can be big again, they just need to be re-designed for the modern market. RPGs like Planescape and BG2 contain a lot of adventure game concepts, and they are popular.

[D.A.Lewis]

Wow Jay, I never knew Digital Jesters did Beyond Divinity. I guessing it was a different team that did Moment of Silence because I read that it was their second game after Night of the Druids.

BTW, I hated Beyond Divinity. The play mechanics were just about the most tedious I ever encounted in an RPG. And in that, MOS shares the same tendencies. However, as I stated in my initial post, MOS has a tremendous story and I still played it through regardless of how frustrated I got. Beyond Divinity never sucked my in with its story so it was easy to quit about a third of the way.

As far as the market for Adventure games they are known as evergreen products. They don't have to stay state of the art to be purchased because people are alway buying them. Last year alone I bought Broken Arrow #2 and Nocturen both game are well over 4 years old.

So really, they are still somewhat popular but I think the gaming media market considers them casual games and just tends to ignore them. I can think of no Gaming mag that actually likes adventure games. Even the most mature mag, Computer Gaming, typically starts (or contains) a review with a "Dying Genre" type of comment. The genre is not dead at all. As a matter of fact I would bet there are way more adventure games on store shelves right now, than there are single player RPGs.

As far as an open ended adventure game, Hmmmmm. What if there was an adventure game as big and wide open as Morrowind? A whole land to e explore and talk to real people and solve adventure game type of problems. Technology speaking, we might not be to far from such a game.

[JayG]

Digital Jesters were the publisher of the European version of BD. Huge disappointment, in so many ways.

As for adventures, when I was a kid they were huge. I don't think that point and click did them any favours, especially as they became more and more abstract. With the Lucusarts adventures they always made some warped kind of sense. They were never a pixal hunt. Nowadays they are designed only for hardcore adventure players. But they are still a popular genre. On the BBC website they have the classic Hitchhiker's game available to play for free, and the message board is the most popular one they have. Planescape was always praised for it's in depth storyline and thought provoking ideas, interaction with NPCs and it's freeform approach. Very rarely it's combat. Most modern adventures seem to think that including combat and action sequences would widen their appeal, not realising that they are alienating their core audiance. Imagine an adventure where your actions would dictate what occured next, or a multi-player adventure where you play as sherlock holmes, but you are playing against other players who have assigned roles and have to hide their true motives. Or there is 2 dectectives playing against each other in order to uncover what really occured.

Or a 7/silence of the lambs type adventure where you have race against time in order to save future victums. Or a hundred other ideas. Instead we keep getting the same point and click games I used to play on the Amiga. RPGs were considered dead until Fallout and Diablo showed what could be done. Strategy games were old fashioned until Dune 2 and Populus showed what was possible. I reckon that there's still life in the old dog yet.

[Gorath]

Jay, the problem in the adventure genre is that depends on its core audience - more than any other genre. These hardcore adventure players are incredibly conservative when it comes to gameplay. Adventures with 'action elements' in a wide sense just don´t sell. Adventures concentrate on story, characters and brain but not on action and random elements. It´s very hard to be innovative in such an environment.


J.A., I agree with the most things you criticize. I´m just not sure yet how important they are for me. Story and dialogs are stellar, quests and interface more or less mediocre. I have the impression the interface problems influence the quests. How much more smoothly would the game play without the pixel hunting, with flawless pathfinding and less walking?

I don´t want to talk about details yet because I want to keep my options open for the review.

You got the whole developer / publisher thing wrong.
Digital Jesters is the publisher in the UK, a few other European countries and South Africa. They´ve basically risen from the ashes of CDV UK. My experience is that they´re easy to handle and lightning fast. They got my review copies over the Northern Sea in about 3 days.
DTP is the German publisher who revitalized the adventure genre.
House of Tales developed - and also funded, I think- TMoS. Their first game was Mystery of the Druids. Before that they made dozens of edutainment titles. They also released a few adventures for cellphones last year.