July 23, 2007 10:23 am - XBOX, review
Xbox quickie: Still Life
Still Life was a 2005 Adventure Company release developed by Microïds, who are best known for Syberia and Amerzone. It's a whodunit with two playable characters: an FBI agent in Chicago, and the agent's grandfather, a private dick working in Prague in the 1920s.
The game certainly has its strengths. All of its best puzzles revolve around forensic investigation using each character's particular skills and tools, and the investigation itself is pretty satisfying. The story switches gracefully between settings per chapter, and the prerendered backgrounds are all nicely rendered. The leads and a few of the supporting characters are quite well-developed, and the story features many strong female characters (including the FBI agent lead).
But the game falls on its face due to too many design compromises and failures in execution. The voicework is uneven, and the very Canadian actors have a difficult time pulling off the very American - and Czech - characters' accents. This game contains the very worst African American vernacular and Chicano accents I have ever heard - and the characters that use them aren't so hot, either. The puzzles that aren't directly related to investigation tend to ride the line of being irrelevant gadget affairs. While the game plays itself pretty straight and realistic for the majority of the game, the action-suspense-cop-movie cliches and... liberal interpretations of FBI operations pile up so quickly in the last two chapters that it becomes very difficult to take the game seriously.
Still Life is the second in a planned trilogy, and while you don't have to play the prequel Post Mortem to enjoy the game, the story's conclusion is a different matter. See, this is a murder mystery, but the developers thought it'd be a good idea to save the big reveal until the next game. That game has yet to be announced, and it most likely will never be, as Microïds' Canadian branch was bought out by Ubisoft just before the release of Still Life. (Recalls Beyond Good & Evil, doesn't it?) This game has no payoff. You simply don't find out who the killer is, and the game keeps nearly all of its suspects tantalizingly ambiguous. I've heard a lot of complaints about similar cliffhanger endings lately, but this one takes the cake.
I wanted to be able to recommend this, but I just can't, with the way it shoots itself in the foot.
I always heard fairly negative things about Post Mortem's puzzle design and that Still Life was a lot better in that regard. Never knew that Still Life completely lacked a satisfying ending :(
Oh well, I guess I just won't bother firing it up. Truth be told, I still need to play through Syberia II. I loved the first, bought the second on PC but didn't install it because I found out about the starforce, bought both on Xbox, played through the first but never got around to playing the second. Meanwhile my wife has played through both on PC and Xbox. Way to make me feel like a slacker. You've successfully steered her clear of playing Still Life now, too.