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Zero Critical

But it doesn't always work out. Some games aren't so bad that you can really slam them, and you wind up just kind of feeling ... well ... pity for them. Poor little game; it wanted to make us all happy, but it just couldn't do it. And you just feel kind of melancholy.

Although perhaps it's not the thought of giving Zero Critical a negative review that's making me melancholy. Maybe this is just the natural reaction to playing a game with no colors in it. I mean, I liked the look at first. It's that computer-animated look, you know, where everyone looks rounded and kind of shiny, like they're made out of plastic. It's a kind of nice look, better than some. It starts out with a nice little animation showing the incident that starts off the adventure. I thought, this is nice looking.

But the color scheme is basically gray, with some muted blues and browns, and a little red here and there, and it just wears on you. It's kind of the color scheme of the old action game Doom, which always seemed too drab for me. But it's certainly better looking than Monkey Island 1 and 2, after all, and if the game itself hadn't been so muted then the visuals would have bothered me less.

Designed by Istvan Pely, and apparently previously released as "Satin Rift" (that's what I read, anyway), this is a very easy game. I feel silly saying that, because the first time I played I got stuck and gave up very early on. Then I read it was an easy game, tried again and still was stuck, so I looked at a walkthrough and found that I just had to go to sleep! The game takes place over four days, so after playing for awhile you have to click on your bed, and when you wake up there will be new stuff to do. There's no indication within the game that you should do this: unlike Gateway you don't start feeling sleepy, and it's not as though anyone else in the game is going to sleep (the first night someone does say good night to you, but since you can't sleep until you've done everything you can possibly do for the day you can't necessarily go to sleep after she says good night, anyway). Maybe the manual, which I didn't read, says "go to bed when you're stuck." I don't know, but that's what held me up.

After that the game was easy. The game structure is basically, find things, ask everyone you meet about the things, use the things if possible, find more things. A couple of times, in my impatient way, I felt like cheating, but my internet connection was down so I couldn't get back to the walkthrough, and then I figured it out on my own. The thing that stuck me the longest was just not realizing there was a room off of another room. "Zero Critical" is one of those games where there can be an invisible door downstage that you can enter if you click your mouse near the bottom of the picture, something that has always irked me. The puzzles require only the basics of following a logical train of thought, and most of the work is spent in going up to all the characters in the game over and over to ask them questions, as they tell you most of what you need to know, but only at certain points in the game. The game is incredibly linear: you seem to have to solve each puzzle in order to proceed to the next, as opposed to a game like Day of the Tentacle where you can work on all sorts of puzzles, hoping from one area to another.

I read a review of this game (it's a pretty obscure game, but there are a couple of reviews floating around) that said the game sucks but the story is first rate. This is one of those times where the fair part of you wants to say, well, we all have different concepts of good storytelling and the unfair part of you wants to say, oh come on it sucked. It's really not much of a story. Someone loses his mind and goes berserk on a scientific site on some planet, and you have to investigate. There's a mysterious project no one will tell you about, people are getting headaches, everyone hates the head of research. Eventually it's all made clear. It's a pretty trite and hokey bit of sci-fi puffery and looks good only when compared with really badly plotted games like Dig, The.

It's playable. It doesn't waste much of your time: I probably spent about five hours on the game from beginning to end. It's a way to kill time. It doesn't make me angry, bitter, pissed off, suicidal or homicidal.

Just sad.

-- Charles Herold -1999