Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper
Developer: Frogwares
Publisher: Focus Home Interactive
Platform: Xbox 360 (also PC)
Released: April 27, 2010
Test Freaks’ Freak Score: 8.1/10

Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper plays like a composite of two games: a standard adventure game and an eerily accurate investigation into the Ripper killings. Arriving in London’s East End, Holmes checks in with the police, but Constable Humphries has misplaced an important pouch. Finley the landlord knows where it is, but he’s being troubled by The Captain. And so on. But just as you feel mired down in the “favor trade,” something connects back to the murder. You’ll hear troublesome rumors about a Dr. Tumblety, meet the disquieting Walter Sickert, or listen to complaints about a “Leather Apron” menacing the local streetwalkers.

And that’s before you hit the first crime scene.

Holmes at the crime scene.

Adventure games draw heavily from the mystery genre, but the usual mechanic of collecting inventory items and figuring out where to use them seldom feels like you’re solving a mystery. By the end of Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper, you’ll feel like you’ve solved a mystery. Beyond the Deduction Board mentioned above, you’ll also plot timelines based on eyewitness testimony — which is often conflicting — conduct experiments and rule out red herrings.

Every possibility must be investigated.

The Xbox 360 version is a port of a 2009 PC game so the graphics haven’t aged, but there are apparent budgetary limitations. Luckily the East End of London lends itself to the Silent Hill method of masking draw distances with fog and the reuse of character models allows for a bustling, living London. That said, environments are downright impressive – authentic details (Cat’s Meat, anyone?) have been captured, making the landscape appropriately filthy – and foreign to our modern eyes. Nighttime sections, where dim alleys are lit only by lone bull’s-eye lantern, are chilling.

A grim waterway.

And Then There Were None
Developer: AWE Productions
Publisher: The Adventure Company
Platform: Wii (also PC)
Released: February 8, 2008
Test Freaks’ Freak Score: 6.0/10

This point-and-click adventure game elevates the boatman from the oft-retitled Agatha Christie thriller and makes him the main character. A bit of invented backstory finds Patrick Narracott filling in for his brother Fred, who needs to avoid one of the guests. The subterfuge backfires, stranding Patrick with the others and — as the odd man out — he’s either the perfect person to investigate the mystery of Shipwreck Island or the prime suspect in a growing series of deaths.

As an adaptation, And Then There Were None strikes a balance between preserving the integrity of the original story and muddling it enough to keep Christie fans on their toes. The classic characters are all here, be they judgmental spinster, befuddled general, or alcoholic doctor, while new elements like eve of war intrigue and the house’s history keep things fresh. Unfortunately this attention to narrative can’t overcome poor puzzle design, primitive graphics and frustrating controls, resulting in a subpar adventure.

Easily 75% of the game involves talking to everyone about everything. Whole chapters fly by simply by finding all the characters and clicking on them until they stop talking. This would be fine if the game was dialogue-driven, but progress is only triggered once you’ve exhausted all conversation options. The end result is that you feel like you’re just making small talk while waiting for something to happen. The other 25% of the game is puzzle-based, most of which are designed to make you as annoyed as possible.

I accept that I’m playing a 2008-Wii port of a 2005 PC game, but the puzzles feel like throwbacks to mid-1990s adventuring. You’re the stereotypical adventurer wandering around stealing as much as you can, crafting Rube Goldberg devices and rubbing random objects against each other to see what happens. At one point I had over fifty items in my inventory including a wheel of cheese, a ladder, a raft and a shovel!

So let’s take the turkey baster I have and fill it with flour. Okay, now I have a DIY fingerprinting kit straight from CSI: Culinary School. With this in hand, I’ll enter people’s rooms and dump flour on their stuff looking for prints.

*sigh*

The problem isn’t that this works, it’s that it works and I can’t do anything with the clues. I’ve found some compelling — nay — incriminating prints, but I can’t use them to affect the story. As it turns out, I don’t need to do this at all. This, like so many of the puzzles, is just extraneous padding. At best solving them might squeeze an extra line of dialogue out of a character, but it won’t prevent any murders.

There’s a central confusion surrounding the main character. Are you trying to help your brother, escape the island or stop the unknown Mr. Owen from striking again? This unclear motivation results in a passive experience with Narracott clinging tightly to the story’s rails.

I mentioned the age of the game earlier, but even by 2005 standards the character models are appalling. Hands and clothing show no attention to detail and there’s no effort to lip-synch the dialogue –glaring in a game with so much conversation. And it’s a shame too, because voice acting is rather strong. Philip Clark voicing Judge Wargrave and Carolyn Seymour as Emily Brent particularly stand out.

Where graphics improve is in the house’s décor and surrounding environs. The house has a Frank Lloyd Wright aesthetic and each of its many rooms is distinct. Outside the house the island is ominous, with waves crashing against craggy rocks and grey clouds hovering just overhead. Completing the grim mood are strong ambient sounds which add texture to largely static screens and a haunting melody playing in the background.

What have been changed since the original PC release are the controls. Most of the time, you’re simply moving a cursor around the screen trying to find something to click on. The cursor is context sensitive so you won’t have to switch between PICK UP or LOOK AT prompts. In the inventory menu, Patrick can combine or separate items as needed and he also has a separate collection of notes, books and other clues he’s collected.

However the game takes a huge misstep by implementing motion controls. You don’t just click on a door; you click and twist to open it. And that’s the easiest motion control to figure out – the game thinks it’s fun to make you guess how you should flail about. As someone who has trouble with combination locks in the real world, have to unlock one via wiimote was just painful. Only one motion control gesture came naturally. It helped that I was already doing it mentally.

SAW
Developer: Zombie Studios
Publisher: Konami
Platform: Xbox 360 (also PC and PS3)
Released: October 6, 2009
Test Freaks’ Freak Score: 7.0/10

SAW follows the events of the first movie, with players playing as Detective Tapp, knifed, shot and nursed back to health by the Jigsaw Killer. Tapp’s reckless pursuit of Jigsaw led to his partner’s death and Jigsaw wants him to face this truth, and more. Locked in the asylum, Tapp will have to survive a series of traps and fellow inmates seeking the exit key surgically implanted in Tapp’s chest. Tapp will also face those whose lives he’s impacted, and – ultimately – decide whether to finish his hunt or walk away.

SAW is probably most reminiscent of the Condemned series – dark interiors, unreliable lighting and brutal combat conducted with makeshift weaponry. You’ll be beating inmates with pipes, stomping people to death with your bare feet, or performing quick kills with successful (and graphic) counter attack quicktime events.

Would you like to play a game?

Scattered throughout the asylum are tripwires attached to shotguns. Expect to see your head blown off many many times. It’s hard to call these cheap instakills because the tripwire is visible, but the third-person perspective means your body may block your view. Luckily enemies are never cautious, so disarming and rearming traps works to your advantage.

As the game progresses, you’ll have the ability to create your own traps: stun, gas, and explosion, but at the same time Jigsaw’s tests become more rigorous.

One of the results of Jigsaw sitting the director’s chair is that the game has great pacing. Frequently you’ll be racing against a timer, surrounded by explosives as you try to solve a puzzle – or a room will fill with choking gas giving you less than a minute to find and close the valve. Even the slower moments will have you sticking your arm in a barrel of acid or fishing around a toilet bowl full of syringes looking for a key or puzzle part.

Puzzles. It would be easy to dismiss SAW as a compilation of deadly minigames, especially since three puzzle types keep popping up, but SAW excels with some well designed puzzles based on observing your surroundings, toggling lights around you, or figuring out the right place to stand. I have to admit, some of the puzzles would be worth serious picarats in a Professor Layton game — Obi 5-6 for example, which combines multiple hacking games with explosives, a gas chamber, crushing walls, a brute with a nail bat and a too-short timer.

Tobin Bell returns as the voice of Jigsaw, which is all you need to nail voice acting in a SAW game. Detective Tapp doesn’t sound like Danny Glover, but he doesn’t look like him either – and while his voice should be raspy, there’s little enough dialogue anyway. Ambient noise, effects and music are all reminiscent of the movies and work too damn well in establishing the asylum’s atmosphere.

When it comes to graphics, character models could use an upgrade, but the environments look great. There are some smart touches, like rats running from light sources and dust falling down from footsteps overhead. Corpses in various states of disrepair, pig carcasses and sinister medical devices deliver the expected disturbing visuals.

Disturbing images abound.

Deadly Premonition
Developer: Access Games
Publisher: Ignition Entertainment
Platform: Xbox 360
Released: February 23, 2010
Test Freaks’ Freak Score: 6.6/10

One of the joys of PC gaming was that I could buy a game I’d never heard of for $20 and have a fun gaming experience. However, development costs for consoles make budget titles a rarity. When I heard a survival horror game was coming out for the Xbox 360 and it would only cost $19.99, I was sold. Deadly Premonition is a quirky, compelling and scary horror game, held back by PS2-era presentation and a few odd design choices.

Agent York

33% of Deadly Premonition is an adventure game – its strongest element. Greenvale is an open world, letting you explore the town, visiting suspects at work and home – and peeking in the occasional window. Citizens keep to a schedule, so you’ll learn when they go for a morning hike or head home from work. But there’re some nuances: Emily goes to the bar after work, except on rainy nights when she stays in to make dinner. While not Oblivion’s Radiant AI, this system creates a living world.

The core of the adventure element, and Deadly Premonition’s most compelling feature, is its wide cast of characters. There are at least 30 voiced characters and Agent York will have meaningful interactions with all of them – either in scripted events or during one of the optional side quests (which are essential to appreciating the game’s narrative). It’s a small town so everyone knows (or is related) to each other, but what really comes across is how these people are connected to each other – and how, what becomes a series of deaths, truly shocks them.

33% of the game is survival horror. Mirroring Silent Hill, Greenvale takes on a nightmarish façade with red vines suddenly overgrowing parts of the town. Monsters – somewhere between ghosts and zombies – rise up from inky pools, and Agent York can either gun them down (with a growing arsenal) or sneak past them while holding his breath. Greenvale’s undead are disturbing humans who grotesquely contort their body seeking to ram their arms down York’s throat while moaning, “I don’t want to die.” The survival horror sections are eerie, but their effectiveness is undercut by having the best scares take place during cutscenes instead of in-game.

Zombie Attack

To its credit, Deadly Premonition plays like you’re living in this town. With day/night cycles, weather effects and an in-game clock which often feels like it’s real-time, Greenvale has a living, breathing vibe. Speaking of living and breathing, the game throws food and sleep meters at you, so picking up food at the Milk Barn, eating at the A & G Diner, and calling it a night at the Great Deer Yard Hotel becomes part of your daily routine.

Deadly Premonition draws comparisons to Twin Peaks, but I found it Lynchean in a greater sense. The game nails quirk with Agent York, who reads his fortune in mugs of coffee, spouts movie trivia and carries on conversations with his imaginary friend Zach. But the quirkiness is offset by increasingly brutal crimes and nods to small town S&M. The game plays with dreamlike imagery and recurring symbolism, hinting at multiple meanings from something as simple as a red seed.

Wrath of the Empire

Hoth is no different.

You fight a lot of Wampas, but they’re nothing compared to the Rancors the core game threw at you. More challenging are the platforming elements I remember from Super Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back. There’re some nice surprises once you reach the Rebel base — including an Expanded Universe shaking event — but too much time is devoted towards chopping up anonymous Rebels.

Hoth was previously only available in the Ultimate Sith Edition of the game. It arrived on Xbox Live without much fanfare and — the horrors — without Achievements. It’s too short, too easy and too expensive to recommend, especially since so many other games do Hoth so well.

Pinnacle Station

Capture, Survival, Hunt and Time Trial are the four modes of gameplay fought in subterranean, volcanic, tropical and warehouse arenas. Similar to what you might find in a multiplayer game, these simulations are less compelling in a single-player RPG.

Survival – endless waves of enemies – works the best, welcoming different playing styles and combinations of biotic and combat abilities. Hunt and Time Trial – both focused on killing enemies as fast as possible – are less effective, especially since Hunt requires convenient enemy spawns. Capture – hitting three or four checkpoints – is the least well designed since it relies purely on memorizing the map.

I always thought Mass Effect had a crude, but effective, combat engine and Pinnacle Station reinforces this belief. There’s fun to be had here, but sluggish gunplay and teammates who can’t keep up with Shepard’s pace add unwelcome complications. Overall, this expansion seems poorly balanced. I took on Saren in Insane Difficulty, but the basic simulations had me reaching for the “I’m too Young To Die” setting.

Ultimately, it fails to offer an essential Mass Effect experience, but the final simulation and its reward make this expansion worth muscling through for completists.

Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box
Developer: Level-5
Publisher: Nintendo
Platform: Nintendo DS
Released: August 24, 2009
Test Freaks’ Freak Score: 9.6/10

If you’ve played the first game, you’ll recognize the game’s structure. Resembling a point-and-click adventure, you navigate around a map by tapping your stylus on a series of mostly static screens. Populating these screens are villagers who fill-in their locale’s backstory and challenge you with puzzles.

The Professor Layton games collect brain teasers and plug them into a framework of overarching mysteries. Want to find someone’s home? You’ll have to decipher clues they’ve left you. Need to explore a mine? You’ll have to deal with wiring issues. Combine this with a whimsical art style, solid voice acting, beautiful music, and gorgeous animation and you have a charming game.

Which key opens the door?

Even if this game were a retread of Curious Village, I would have no problem recommending it, but Level-5 has added some fun new features. Apprentice Luke creates a sandbox obstacle course for his overweight hamster. Professor Layton brews tea for picky villagers. Building a camera leads to spot-the-difference camera puzzles.

With over 20 hours invested, I’ve completed the story mode and beaten most of the 138 puzzles in the core game. However, I’ve barely touched Layton’s Challenges and haven’t downloaded any of the weekly puzzles. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to figure out how many hops it takes a frog to get to his home.

Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard
Developer: Vicious Cycle Software
Publisher: D3 Publisher
Platform: Xbox 360 (also PS3)
Released: Feb. 26, 2009
Test Freaks’ Freak Score: 5.9/10

Matt Hazard is the legendary Marathon character who hit the big time in the 8-bit days. Since then his career has taken a downward trajectory. Hoping to pull himself up from flops like Haz-Matt Carts, Matt is entering the “next-gen” era, but Marathon owner Wallace “Wally” Wellesley has other ideas. Wally hopes to pull off a twist by killing Matt in his own game setting up Sting Sniperscope as Marathon’s new golden boy.

Eat Lead, Wafferthinn!

While this sounds like Left 4 Dead’s AI Director gone rogue, the end result is that one generic setting is exchanged for another. There are some good set pieces: a multistage sniper sequence finds you providing cover for Bill the Wizard and fighting zombies on a tennis court is original, but most of the levels are unmemorable.

Eat Lead, Cowboy!

Of course the real challenge comes from multiplayer — not that it has multiplayer, but you get an Achievement for it anyway. But this is a game where you earn an Achievement for pressing start. It’s all part of the sense of humor which carries the game. Will Arnett voices Matt Hazard and he does a great job capturing the meta nature of the character. Neil Patrick Harris has less to work with as Wally, but it’s still NPH.

Much like 2004’s The Bard’s Tale, Eat Lead forgets gaming clichés are fun to point out, but annoying to play through. If a little less effort was put into being funny and more effort put into being fun, this would be a game worth recommending.

In terms of length and level design, Tatooine isn’t better than the previous expansion (Jedi Temple). The add-on, once again, only adds 30 minutes of gameplay and you basically run in a straight line until you reach the end. For 800 MS Points ($10), players deserve more – however, there’s a lot to be said for fanboy appeal.

Punting Jawas and choking Gamorrean guards never gets old and the obligatory showdown against Boba Fett works really well. Even if you’re expecting the endboss, you’ll find some surprises. Unlike the boss fights in the core game, the Tatooine add-on makes good use of the camera and provides more interactive settings for the battles. Less impressive is Jabba’s Palace, which seems more like a prison, and the fact that while reaching Mos Eisley should mark the game’s halfway point, it signifies the end.

Shale is so well integrated into the game, it’s impossible to imagine it without him. Bitter after spending years trapped as a statue in the village of Honnleath, Shale brings a loathing of organics not seen in a game since HK-47’s antipathy towards meatbags in Knights of the Old Republic.

Shale, the Stone Prisoner

In addition to getting a fully realized character with the same amount of dialogue — both player prompted and party member interactions — as preexisting characters, Shale is an invaluable part of any Orzammar exploration.

Though $15 is steep, The Stone Prisoner is more than your typical side quest DLC. Shale is one of Dragon Age: Origins most memorable characters and a valuable addition to your party.

Note: According to BioWare, The Stone Prisoner is “not available as a separate download for the Mac version of Dragon Age: Origins.”