Richard's Online Journal

[07/09/07] Blackwell Unbound

A rare sighting of Lauren Blackwell without a glowing cigarette between her lips.

You can’t go far wrong with a £5 adventure game, especially if it’s the latest from Dave Gilbert. You probably don’t know the name, unless you follow the indie adventure scene, but along with Yahtzee, he’s one of the ones to keep an eye on.

A while ago, he set himself to making commercial indie adventure games out of his flat, moving on from freebies like Bestowers of Eternity and Two of A Kind, to produce one of the few AGS (Adventure Game Studio) games both with and worth a price-tag - the Jewish themed mystery The Shivah.

Fun as it was, that was largely a practice run for his first major project, supernatural adventure series The Blackwell Legacy. It’s nominally a remake of Bestowers of Eternity, but in practice shares little more than a concept. The Blackwell family, or parts of it, are mediums and psychopomps, charged with helping trapped ghosts realise their situation and move into the next world.

It’s a clever premise for an episodic series, but more than that, a pretty uplifting one. No matter how bitter the Blackwell women, or how dark the consequences for failure (which adds a certain edge to the second game especially), the basic mission is altruistic and noble. And certainly a refreshing change from simply smiting the supernatural.

Along with a cloud of pure cancer.

Unlike most AGS games, Gilbert doesn’t make his games as a one-man show, but brings in artists, musicians, and most notably, a full voiceover cast. The result: so-called amateur adventures, professionally made. Unbound especially pushes lots of the smaller details; little animation sequences like Lauren flicking her cigarette ash around, or the evocative jazz music of a saxophone player down on the New York Pier.

There’s a real charm to the world; understated, yet bursting with character, and helped along by some excellent dialogue and snappy set-pieces. Unbound gets a special bonus to that with its jazzy backgrounds and glittery night-time setting, not to mention more confidence in the acting and general design, but both stand up pretty well.

However, that’s not what I really like about the Blackwell games. Ever since Roberta Williams made her one genuinely good game (The Colonel’s Bequest, fact-fans, with a few bonus points for King’s Quest VI), I’ve wanted to see more investigative games… let you investigate. You’d think that would be obvious, but no. Detective games are almost invariably about solving puzzles until someone outright tells you what’s going on. Usually with a lot of really, really weak inventory puzzles thrown in for bad measure.

Not here, however.

The world’s first investigator’s notebook without pages and pages of doodles. And to think, I almost bought into her…

Blackwell takes a leaf out of Discworld Noir’s book, turning the clues themselves into objects. Combine them to draw conclusions. Use them against suspects to force the truth out of them. It doesn’t work quite as well as it could, but only because the difficulty is very, very low. There’s enough to make it feel satisfying to work through, especially on one of the observational puzzles, but not for very long - a couple of hours at most, I’d estimate. There aren’t any red-herrings, extra-leads, or sub-plots, and it’s usually pretty obvious what goes where. The advantage is that there’s very little random-clicking frustration either, and no tedious pixel-hunting.

In any event, for the price, there’s not a whole lot to complain about. I can’t say I don’t have a few quibbles - probably the biggest in Unbound being the ending, which seems… out of character for the series. Even so, after finishing up, I’m already looking forward to the next episode proper. Worst case scenario, you support your not-very-local adventure developers, and they don’t break into your house using a coat-hanger/newspaper combo to murder you in your sleep with unsold copies of Inherit The Earth.

Unless you live in New York, in which case delete as appropriate.