What can be the first project of a novice indie studio? Dull – quite, most often it happens. Ingenious – less often, but it happens. However, the most common option is something medium, and usually closer to good than the bad. And, it should be noted, such an average lousy quality is not at all the worst option for a debut. It is possible that novice developers later “sign”, that is, they will be undressed, and they will gradually grow to the masterpiece. Unless, of course, in the initial approach to creating games there is a rational grain.
Here for just such a grain, we will try to analyze the first adventure Turmoil Games called Alpha Polaris.
And what is remarkable: we see the hero sleeping many times, but we never observe his souls. What is hinting.
Horror in the routine
We are thrown away to the Far North, where a small oil exploration station is eating its miserable existence in four employees. The main character, a biologist named Rune, studies the bears here, while others are fiercely looking for new deposits of black gold. Events move slowly and even almost sleepy, until the oldest and most fat of the local inhabitants suddenly suddenly finds a cave with raw oil and strange wall drawings. From this moment on, members of the multinational team of researchers begin to see nightmares, and in the breaks they are trying to kill each other every now and then. And our protege, concerned for the time being only by the fate of the bears, is forced to fight the ancient evil, who want to gobble up all the people at the station.
Of course, the developers clearly got excited with the Horror. This is not a horror movie, the maximum is a mystical thriller. When all the worst thing is shown to us only in the rollers, at a clearly predictable moment (usually-after the main character goes to sleep), and this “terrible” itself pulls the maximum for a third-rate horror film with plasticine monsters, it’s not at all afraid to be afraid at allI want to. Detective intrigue is spent simple, the conjecture about the killer appears much earlier than it cost. The unconditional dignity of the game is a small duration: we simply do not have time to get bored, get lost in the daily duties of Knudsen Rune and miss the finale. But if Advenchur were at least a little longer – perhaps we would not have survived to the end.
Brutforms from the Arctic
Gameplay leaves a slightly double impression. Of course, there are quite pleasant, although by no means revolutionary things: friendly lighting of active points, the ability to skip dialogs, quick transitions between locations and some nonlinearity. Partial.
That is, if the rune is engaged in two tasks at the same time, then it can perform them in any order. But to collect all the necessary items in advance in advance: the biologist does not like to carry excess and takes only what he needs as part of the “for now” task. In a sense, it is logical, but very inconvenient: you have to steal circles around the station to find things that Knudsen rejected only a couple of minutes ago as uninteresting. Since the number of active points per square centimeter goes off scale, and the affordable locations once
or twice are dedicated, such walks are very quickly boring and begin to annoy the damn annoyance.
To some subjects, however, the rune gives witty comments. However, most of what he saw is awarded from him a maximum of a boring description of the functional features in the spirit of “this is a plan, it must be smoked”. In addition, like most of his low -budget colleagues from other Advents, our biologist does not know how to say no in different ways. Whatever the wrong actions the player tried to perform, the reaction will almost always be the same – “no, it will not work”.
And he will hear this very “fail” we will have to do how often. After all, the tasks are mostly rather complicated. What is worth, for example, a problem with the ignition of bones: we need to get magnesium, aluminum and rust to create a termitite mixture capable of burning in cruel frost. Guess which items you need to … scrape for this is very difficult. Partly, we have to act by the “poke” method, because we do not know what, for example, the kitchen utensils are made, which ultimately turns out to be necessary for the extraction of the desired ingredients. In difficult cases, we can get a hint by talking with ourselves, but this hint will always touch only the most general program of further actions.
Separate headache – entering words on the keyboard. The developers obviously wanted to introduce funny innovation: when deciphering mysterious inscriptions, we ourselves must print the possible values of each symbol with handles. Alas, the data that we are supplied for this purpose are completely not enough to guess the desired word correctly the first time. Output – only simple overkill, brutfort.
A beautiful bust will save the world
The game is partly saved by a good atmosphere of the polar station. All this measuredly-closed life to a nightmare, and in one particular case-and quite accurate from the psychological point of view of the metamorphosis in the minds of the station employee, quite well-crushed pseudo-scientific articles about the beliefs of the peoples of the North, legends-yes, it is quite possible to plunge into such things and believein Arctic ice around. Annoying stupid ill -conceived little things like a completely non -polar shift of day and night, but, in the end, this is not so striking.
Scriptwriters Alpha Polaris slightly corrected the legend of Wendigo, adapting it to their needs. So, in the original, the creators of the myth of this terrible creature were Indians from the Ozhibwe tribe, and not at all the outskirts. And the monster itself in the beliefs of Ozibwe is not so much a unique spirit who wants to absorb the world, but one of the many representatives of their “species”. Approximately as in Slavic mythology Leshy or Mermaid.
In the game Wendigo is Wendigo, the very personification of hunger, cold and loneliness. The developers slightly strengthened and sharpened the features of the appearance of the monster: instead of a very thin anthropomorphic creature covered with wool, put a skeleton with deer horns and missing limbs on the battlefield.
By the way, in the MMO World of Warcraft vendigo also exist and in appearance they are no different from the “ordinary” yeti. Which is also wrong, according to Ojibwe.
It is much worse that quite cute, joking, living dialogs since the middle of the game turn into pathos exclamations in the spirit of Brazilian series. Horror to developers are clearly too tough. The sudden erotic scene in the midst of horrors with dismemberment, by the way, also looks very unnatural, does not follow from the development of the plot and, it seems, is inserted specifically for schoolchildren. Well, you know, those hemispheres that rule the world can draw out the rating of any adventure. And then, something like this is usually done in bad Hollywood horror films: there must certainly be a bed before a decisive battle. Even if the hero with the heroine until the sought moment was barely familiar.
About fig sheets
Speaking of beauty. The visual side of the matter looks exactly the way the graphics of low -budget adventure should look with a claim to realism. Three -dimensional models of the characters lazily walking along the motionless asses. In order to somehow cover the shame in the form of a lack of facial expressions, during dialogs, developers slip our comics style under our breath, illustrating the mood of the heroes in the process of conversation. Typically, there is a maximum of one image for one conversation, and two or three such emo ricons are laid for each acting face. Does not contribute to psychologism and depth of sensation of characters too much.
The interiors themselves are not so bad, however. Alas, we spend most of the time at a boring station, and literally two or three screens are dedicated to snow expanses. It would be more useful for the atmosphere the other way around.
This is the most chaste frame of an erotic video. But there are other shots for … amateurs.
Alpha Polaris The players may be interested in due to the unusual surroundings and topics. Vampire-Werewarts-Gravraki have already bored, Ktulhu just a corn wid, but cannibalistic tribes, led by the evil northern spirit of Wendigo, are still relative exotic. Nevertheless, with such gameplay, graphic and scenario data, Advenchur, most likely, would immediately go to garbage if it was devoted to more familiar horrors. So the first pancake Turmoil Games I went out pretty lumpy.
Pros: some atmosphere;unusual theme;In some places good dialogs;Partial nonlinearity.
Cons: banal detective intrigue;discrepancy between the declared genre;tedious gameplay;modest graphics.
