Post Mortem Review

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Post Mortem

Review by JenDecember 2002

On more than one occasion I’ve wished that adventure developers would dare attempt a new idea, even if it were only a small change to what we’ve all become accustomed to. Well, Microids has done just that with Post Mortem.

Here we have a straight adventure game, pure first-person point-and-click, with a fairly straight progression through a story from start to finish, only this time the player can take one of two or three possible approaches to many of the puzzles and dialogues, with real differences in gameplay resulting from these choices.

For instance, one of the first puzzles involves gaining access to the murder scene, a hotel room. When you talk to the hotel’s desk man, you can either piss him off, requiring you to find another way in, or sweet-talk him into giving you access. If you do the former, which I did, then you are faced with another choice, how to go about gaining entrance, which will affect yet another part of the game further down the road a bit.

All you RPG and action players probably view this as old hat, but this is a pretty revolutionary concept with regard to adventure games. Even if it had been a complete bust, my hat would’ve been off to Microids for making the attempt. But a failure it wasn’t; in fact Post Mortem was a treat to play.

At first I was overly concerned with making the right choices as they were presented, but then after I realized there were no wrong moves, I relaxed and started doing whatever struck my fancy.  Before too long I was progressing at a pretty good clip, utterly engrossed.

As the game opens, a couple is brutally murdered in a room at the Hotel Orphee. Their decapitated heads are found with ancient gold coins in their mouths. Post Mortem definitely is not a game for the squeamish; this scene plays out in split-second flashes in full gory glory, setting the stage for the rest of the game.

You play as Gustave MacPherson, a struggling American painter in 1920s Paris who has left his former career as a New York Pinkerton detective to pursue his dream of making it in the art world. Sultry, sensuous fellow American Sophia Blake shows up on his, or rather your, doorstep and persuades you with cold, hard francs to come out of your self-imposed detecting retirement long enough to investigate the murders—the victims, she says, were her vacationing sister and her husband, and she, Sophia, does not trust the French police.  She also is concerned about the disappearance of a treasured family heirloom that should have been but was not found at the murder scene.

Little do you realize you have just signed up for a dinner date with the black widow at the center of a web of deceit and lies.  All is not what it seems, and as you are trying to make sense of the whole mystery, the killer strikes again. And again. Who will become the next victim? What lies behind these ritualistic decapitation murders? What is the “family heirloom” that everybody wants? Who controls the secretive Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross? Can you trust the shiftless police captain LeBrun?  Is your client all that she seems?

Much of the puzzling is conversational—you must talk with the various characters to pick up clues to new locations, news of others who might know more, or be given new inventory items or documents. An unfortunate side effect of the various paths through is that sometimes the conversations will seem disjointed, and sometimes you will find yourself learning about something that you already know. Never, though, do you hear about something too early.

The remainder of the puzzling is inventory-related, with the exception of a couple of manipulation puzzles. The inventory puzzles are pretty straightforward; however, due to the multiple paths through the game, you wind up with a lot of useless items that might have come into play had you chosen a different course. And they are there to stay—I found myself wishing more than once that there was somewhere to discard all of these extraneous items.

The inventory is brought up by a right mouse click. You can view five items at once and must scroll through them until you see the one you seek. Invariably and infallibly, the one I wanted was the farthest away, and I got sore tired of cycling through upwards of 20 or 25 items.

Conversations are logged in your notebook, which too is accessible with the right mouse click. You may view the notebook at any time, not only to view transcripts of your interviews but also to access game options, to save your game, or to read the documents you have in your inventory. Next to the notebook is the map; all travel between locations is accomplished by viewing this map and selecting a location.

Two or three of the puzzles are not very well realized. For instance, in one puzzle you must draw a sketch of the suspect based on a witness’s description. You call up your sketchbook (remember, you are an artist!) and must cycle through and apply various preset facial features, similar to a modern-day Identikit. However, there are several features in many of the categories that fit the description equally well, which leads to an inordinate number of appropriate combinations. You must then commit your choices to paper and show the finished product to another witness to obtain his yea or nay.  Or really a seemingly neverending stream of “Nah”s.  This puzzle was an exercise in excruciating tedium—I probably showed the guy 75 different mug shots before I finally hit paydirt.

Another reason why this particular puzzle was so painful is that there is no skipping dialogue even if already heard. I had to give my three-sentence request for him to view the picture those same 75 times.

There was one puzzle that was just plain unfair in my opinion—on the left side of the screen was the clue required to solve the puzzle on the right side of the screen, but the printing was too indistinct, on my 19-inch monitor, even with my glasses on, to make out the diagram. A little visual clarity here would have helped immensely.

Other than that, most of Post Mortem’s puzzles were of medium difficulty—all were fair in that you can obtain all of the clues you need to solve them and it is a mere matter of putting together the information properly. There was one puzzle involving alchemy that really tickled my fancy—it was perplexing but so very satisfying when I finally hit on the solution. I had to resort to a walkthrough twice, once for an item overlooked due to insufficient cursoring and the second to look up what the figures in the illegible diagram were.

There are no mazes, there is no dying, there are no timed puzzles, there are no sliding tile puzzles. There are only a couple of instances of insane pixel hunting … I think that’s about it for the usual suspects among the adventure gaming uglies.

Between me and Skinny Minnie, who finished the game shortly before I began, we came up with three different endings. I only got two because of a bad choice I made about halfway through the game, but Minnie was able to see all three. The pivotal point is just before the finale, so you can restore your last save and see all of the endings yourself with only minimal repetition.

Cutscenes and backgrounds are beautiful. They are in color but muted enough to lend a noirish feel in keeping with the dark themes.  The 3D characters, on the other hand, aren’t the greatest—their movements are repetitive, their appearance frequently is blocky, and many times they have distinct lines in their necks between where their bodies stay still as their heads are moving about.  They’re by no means terrible, but I do wish the designers had taken a little bit more time with them to bring them up to the same level of quality as the rest of the visuals.

The music by Robert Marchand was very authentic-sounding for the game’s setting—it was mainly smooth, light, understated jazzy stuff—but the loops were too short. There was one piece in particular that drove me to distraction; it was a regular sort of soundtrack but with periodic bursts of something that sounded like statical swing straight from some 1930s radio broadcast.  About three-quarters of the way through the game, I finally had enough and turned off the music altogether. In fact it was so jarring that I wondered whether it was a bug in the music programming.

Voice acting is sometimes very good and sometimes sort of flat.  Your character, Gus MacPherson, is so low-key as to seemingly lack personality. The actor who plays the character Hellouin is a pleasure to hear, as is the police inspector LeBrun, but the actors playing a couple of the more insignificant characters sound as if they’re reading. There is an option for subtitles.

All in all, though, Post Mortem is a far cry from an experiment gone awry—while there were some ideas that could stand some serious rethinking, they were more than compensated for by the parts that were exquisitely realized. I always appreciate it when a game treats its players as if they were intelligent adults, and Post Mortem does that in spades. The experimental multipath, multiple-solution aspects, on balance, worked surprisingly well and could certainly be refined by the developers into something magnificent for their next game.

I played on my 733 MHz PIII with a full install under Windows 2000 with no trouble whatsoever.

For all that it is and for all that it tries to be, I give Post Mortem a Gold Star. It certainly is not for everyone, but it certainly was for me! It is one of those rare games that will remain in my consciousness for a long time, like a good book. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Microids Publisher: Microids Release Date: November 2002

Available for: Windows

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Screenshots

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System Requirements

PII 300 MHz (PIII 500 MHz recommended) 64 MB RAM (128 MB recommended) 16X CD-ROM drive (24X recommended) 470 MB free hard disk space 16 MB Direct3D compatible video card (32 MB recommended) DirectX 7 compatible sound card

Where to Find It

Gogamer.com 19.90

Prices/links current as of 12/08/02Links provided for informational purposes only.  FFC makes no warranty with regard to any transaction entered into by any party(ies).

      Copyright © Electric Eye Productions.  All rights reserved.  No reproduction in whole or in part without express written permission.

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17 Responses to First Impressions: Heavy Rain

  • Toger

    I hate QTEs, but Heavy Rain is sitting in my Amazon cart waiting for me to push the button. I don’t even own a PS3, but I plan on buying the game anyway. I do have a good friend who’ll let me play at his house. Of course, I’ll have to drive 100 miles, one way, through the snow to get to his house. His chat-happy birds will cheerfully chirp thereby completely disrupting any atmosphere, but I can play.

  • David

    What!?  Heavy Rain is full of QTEs?  I totally did not see that coming.

    The whole dad experience thing sounds intriguing.  I’m already getting odd looks from my girlfriend for exclaiming over cute kids on the bus or at the mall, something like what you described might send my biological clock over the edge.

  • Lewis B

    My sentiments exactly David!

    Mat has been playing the Heavy Rain demo for a while now, and although he admits he is intrigued by the story, he does constantly complain about the control method.

    R2 + Analogue stick to run? *scoff*

  • Gregg B

    @Lew: DEMO?! PS3 DEMO?! *runs off to PS3*

    That sounds like the Batman: Arkham Asylum controls – Crazy Bonkers Design. The sort of design that puts pull handles on push doors.

    @Steerpike: “I despise children. They are disgusting and annoying. They knock things over. They interfere with everything. They’re not useful until they’re at least 13, when you can get them to mow the lawn and stuff. But you can pay a service to do that for just a few hundred bucks a year and the service won’t vomit on you, shit in its diapers, grow up to resent you, or otherwise suck. Don’t flame me and don’t post comments to the contrary: kids are repulsive. Why anyone would want them is beyond my feeble imaginings.”

    HAHAhahaha- I er, – hahahaha – you’re as outspoken as me about demon spawn children.

  • Lewis B

    Yeah its been on the internet for weeks and weeks Greggi.  I think you have to do a couple of online puzzles etc to get the appropriate code or something.

    Search on Kotaku, they first ran with it IIRC.

  • Mat

    The puzzle code was for early access before it hit the PSN Store. It’s been available to all since last week.

    Regarding the demo, it took me around 3 or 4 attempts at it to appreciate it. First time around I couldn’t have been more dissapointed by it, but after the 3rd or 4th I decided I wanted to stick with it. I don’t think the demo is a particularly great example of what the game supposedly does best either – choice. I also HATE the control scheme and some of the voice acting is so wooden. Creating an immersive, realistic game is fine but having characters stumbling into tables and fridges because of the ham fisted controls, and listening to French voice actors impersonate Americans does remove that realism a little!

    Still, I rushed out to buy it this morning and will rush home from work to play it in about an hour!

  • xtal

    @ Toger: I don’t own a PS3 either, and it’s not like Heavy Rain seems to be “that” game which makes you run out and buy one– like Bioshock made me run out and get a 360– and it’s also not like this game looks groundbreaking in any way, because it really doesn’t. It’s just got me curious…and people tend to do crazy things the week after they get their yearly bonus. Soooooo yeah, who knows; maybe I’ll own a PS3 soon, but like hell I would admit that it was for Heavy Rain. Psh. I’d tell people it was because I wanted to watch BSG on blu-ray; though anyone who knows me would see right through that lie since I am an avid non-format-upgrader: I’ll switch my BSG collection from DVD to blu-ray the day I upgrade my copy of Jurassic Park from VHS to DVD. (Hint: never)

  • Toger

    @xtal: I’m in no hurry to upgrade my meagre DVD collection to blu-ray either, but I have to say the movies I’ve watched on my friend’s PS3 are absolutely stunning. Blade Runner was simply breath-taking in blu-ray and it made me want a PS3. I don’t think Heavy Rain will be a system seller for me, but I’m betting the game from the Ico team will.

  • xtal

    A game from the Ico team, you say? Hmmm. I’ve been making rounds on Kijiji and Craigslist looking for a copy of Ico (eBay prices are so shudder-inducing) for a few days now. I really need to play that game after my experience with the indescribable Shadow of the Colossus.

    It’s good to know they haven’t died some Interplay-esque death in the meantime.

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Nope, they’re a small team that works within Sony. Fumito Ueda is the lead and he’s got like ten or so people who’ve worked with him on all his games. Sony pretty much lets them do what they want.

    The Last Guardian is the game that’s coming up from them. It looks more like Ico and less like Shadow of the Colossus to me, which is to say it appears to be focused on platform elements. If I didn’t already have a PS3, it’d be the game that sells it.

  • Gregg B

    @Toger: Ooh, Blade Runner on Blu-ray, gorgeous in all its gorgeosity. In 5.1 it sounds incredible too.

    I bought my PS3 for Team Ico’s unnamed-at-the-time game, Heavy Rain (back when it was just a teaser), LittleBig Planet (yes, yes, I know), Dead Space and Motor Storm: Pacific Rift which sort of pushed me off the fence.

  • Toger

    Gregg, oh yes. The surround sound was spectacular. Did I mention my friend’s HDTV is 72″ (obscene, isn’t it)? It’s like being at a high-class theatre: better food, pauses for bathroom breaks and no one talking through the movie.

    Is Trine up on PSN, yet? If so, that might be my tipping point: Last Guardian, Heavy Rain and Trine.

  • Gregg B

    *spits tea out, despite not drinking any*

    O_O

    72″?! I’m speechless. I can only imagine how awesome that is. Size does matter.

    Not so sure about Trine… hang on. I think it is.

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    I think it is too, Toger. I’ll check.

    To be honest, though, I doubt you’d be disappointed with the purchase even if Trine’s not there yet. I’ve been way happier with my PS3 than with my 360. Demon’s Souls, Valkyria Chronicles, Uncharted, Folklore, even little games like Flower – I’ve had more concentrated fun with the PS3 than with Microsoft’s console, which tends to gather dust for months between game releases.

    72″???? I thought size didn’t matter!

  • Toger

    Size doesn’t matter. 😀

    In my friend’s defense, it was a great deal: opened box, itty-bitty scratch on the case, not a dead pixel to be seen and it was less $$ than the 60″ he originally wanted.

    Thanks for checking guys. I’ve played a tiny bit of Uncharted, but I’m horrible at the combat. Flower intrigues me. As does Demon’s Souls, but I know that game will crush my soul.

  • Gregg B

    There were certain moments in Flower where it just totally succeeded in conveying a feeling that I can’t say I’ve had in many other games, usually when rushing across a field through the grass or through a canyon or just skimming a pond, but it was never anything to do with collecting bloody petals or fulfilling some rudimentary puzzle. I think my problem with it was that it felt like it was trying to be this deeply emotional piece but in the end there seemed to be too many concessions to being a game rather than just running with the emotive side of the experience. One thing I am sure about though, is the trophies. Don’t get me started on the fucking trophies…

    One of my favourite little games on the PS3 is Everyday Shooter. It’s got a brilliant soundtrack that suits its raw visual style and I love how each level requires a certain tactic or strategy to survive it. It’s a very satisfying game in small bursts.

  • Hanover

    Unfortunately Cage mucked up the ending yet again.  The problem is that the mechanic of the game forced them to have to cheat in order to prevent spoiling the mystery of the game.

    There is also a red herring that makes no sense and is obviously put there to misdirect the player.

    90% of the game is awesome, the last 10% while not as bad as the indigo prophecy, is still sloppy.

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