Scratches Review

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            Scratches

Review by ScoutMarch 2006

I love horror. Cheap “teens-lost-in-the-old-house” horror, snobby “turn-of-the-screw” Jamesian horror, lurid Lovecraftian odes to the ancient gods at the edges of time and space horror, modernist “the monster-is-us” horror, whatever medium, flavor or mode … as long as it’s dark and disturbing, bring it on. Shirley Jackson’s gothic masterpiece, The Haunting of Hill House, introduced me to horror’s peculiar delights and gave me nightmares for a week. When the movie adaptation came out, I was trembling in the middle section of my local Midwestern theater.  One scene near the end scared me so much I levitated straight out of my seat, spun 180 degrees and landed on the popcorn-littered floor, facing the back of the room. When I got my very first VCR, I combed the local rental shops for horror, ultimately exhausting their supplies of mainstream, foreign and slasher titles along with my live-in girlfriend’s patience. My bookshelves still host old paperback titles by Koja, Straub, Ligotti, Campbell, Oates, and Tem. For years, I read, watched and basically ingested way too much horror. Back in the early nineties, I even published a few pale imitations of horror short stories in now-dead pulp rags. So when Scratches, the long-awaited horror-themed adventure game released by the fledgling Nucleosys, came up for review, I snatched it up. Spooky house, ancient secrets, brooding atmosphere, all wrapped around a puzzle core. And the developers had even built their own engine to run the thing. I had played the demo and, while I found it sparse, I thought it promised a well-done adventure game. So did Nucleosys deliver?

Well … yes and no.

If you stop reading here, no foul, guys. I’m supposed to be telling you whether or not this game is worth your hard-earned $19.99. The thing is, I don’t know, and I’m not going to pretend I do. I’ll tell you my reactions to this game and you can make up your own mind, which you should and will do anyway because you are smart.  I’m giving Scratches a Thumb Up rating, but just barely and with a lot of qualifications. It’s been a while since I’ve gone back and forth so much on a game rating. In fact, it probably took me longer to decide on the rating than it did to play the thing, and it was only the ending that finally pushed it into the second-tier rankings.

Nucleosys is a two-man game developing team out of Argentina. Agustin Cordes handles the programming and design, and Alejandro Graziana does the art direction. They brought in another indie shop, a sound studio called Cellar of Rats, to perform the audio chores. In developing Scratches, Nucleosys did a lot of things right, just not enough of them, and not soon enough or solidly enough, to earn my unqualified validation. Was I ever scared? No. Did I experience an extended shiver of fear? Not really. Sure, once or twice they “stung” me, using the old standby of creepy music interrupted by a sound spike and an unexpected visual to startle me, but anyone with half a brain can do that. That does not a horror moment make, but at least they had to the good sense to use the “sting” sparingly. Otherwise, I was never really in the game, never really convinced. I did find myself getting more enthusiastic at the very end, and the game does deliver some satisfaction if you’re an adventure game fan. I’ll get back to my reaction and explain it in more detail, but first some information about Scratches.

The story premise is tried and tired, yet apparently Nucleosys still considers it serviceable enough to be true. It’s 1976, and Michael Arthate (my spell checker spit this back as “art hate,” for what that’s worth …), a newly successful horror writer, is struggling to finish his follow-up novel. He has commissioned a friend and real estate broker to scout out and purchase an authentic Victorian house so that he might complete the novel in solitude and, I guess, a suitably spooky setting.

The game starts as you, playing as Michael, arrive with a single suitcase, your manual typewriter and a key to the front door. There are no cell phones and no laptops, which is a good thing because the player quickly discovers that there is no electricity either.  In fact, there is no running water or food or heat or much of anything in the way of amenities other than a made bed, a pile of logs in the downstairs fireplace and a big ticking grandfather’s clock in the entry hall.

I fiddled a bit with the interface, as it requires a few extra steps to enter and exit inventory. You right-click to get into inventory, left-click on your item, right-click to return to the game and left-click to use the item. The inventory item becomes your cursor, and it glows when you mouse over a hotspot. Once I got the sequence down, things went smoothly, though I never fully adjusted. I was constantly reversing the sequence, dropping items back into the inventory or leaving the inventory screen before I was ready.

You move through the house on rails, using a pointing finger cursor to advance and turn. The hand becomes a magnifying glass when you find an area where you can close in to investigate. By sliding the mouse around, you can look up and down and turn in a 360-degree circle from the major node.

The setup screen gives you a nice set of choices. There is a slide show option I didn’t use, a gamma adjustment with three settings (I turned it up a notch to get a bit of contrast), a hint system I didn’t use and a surround music option I turned on early in the game. Unfortunately, I only have a couple of middling tweeters on my desk and a woofer on the floor, so no doubt I missed some yummy 5.1 effects. You can also adjust camera and text speed.

Gameplay consists of exploring the house, grounds, and outbuildings and occasionally making a trip to the front gate where your car is parked. Some rooms and buildings are locked, of course. What horror adventure game worth its salt would leave all of the keys hanging on a line of hooks in the mudroom? During your exploration, you will run into a few adventure forum in-jokes that will only make sense if you’ve read the adventure game sites for at least a few months. I personally found them stale and not very witty compared to the brilliant self-mockery of, say, the recently released freeware title Jessica Plunkenstein. I was thankful there were few such groan-eliciting moments.

The puzzles are logical, straightforward and realistic. I used a walkthrough a couple of times near the end, not because I was stuck but because, though I knew what needed to be done or acquired, I couldn’t bear yet another trudge through the rooms, another door opening-and-closing sound effect, another node-hopping moment in that damned house. Both times I “cheated,” I was proven right, so I didn’t feel like I spoiled any gameplay.

And this is exactly where the game broke down for me.

For most of the game, exploration and discovery were as much a chore as a delight. Several times, I had to force myself to sit and play until I had advanced my character. There were a few times when I quit the game not because I was stuck or too shaken to continue but because of the tedious repetition, the endless looking in drawers, clicking on paintings, basically moving stuff around on the screen because I could. At one point early in the evolution of the adventure game genre, this activity was part of the fun, this newfound fascination with manipulating a well-constructed virtual world, and I enjoyed it as much as the next person. But I need more now, or maybe less—I don’t know. Whatever, I’m done with the drawers and doors, okay?  For this reviewer, all of this endless wandering, broken up by the occasional phone call, made for excruciating pacing well into the last third of the game.

You advance the game in time segments much like in the Gabriel Knight games, and you can measure your progress by checking the time on the very, very loud grandfather’s clock in the entry hall. The game unfolds over a three-day span, three days in which you, as Michael, find yourself increasingly cut off from the outside world, without lights, without food (and apparently without sanitary facilities) and finally without a simple means of escape.  Sure, it’s a game, and your part of the bargain is to suspend belief as quickly as possible, but a lot of my irritation came from the increasingly dire situation our put-upon hero finds himself in because … well, because he’s an idiot. It’s an old trope in horror that the protagonist finds himself in deep doo-doo because of a spate of especially bad decision-making, better known as the “don’t go in the basement” plot, but Nucleosys really beat on this device, substituting escalating coincidence for clever plotting and an incompetent protagonist for a real, living, breathing character.

And yet, personal peeves aside, the developers did a lot of things right, too, and this is undeniably an impressive first effort. They assessed their situation, accepted their limits and worked within them. They kept it simple, first-person, leaving out the stiff puppets.  The engine, an Open GL homebrew cooked up for this game, is an elegant and engaging solution, though I did experience a few lockups. But hey, so what?

The rooms are beautifully rendered in lush, loving detail, though some of the first- and second-floor walls are covered with really horrid wallpaper, eyeball-assaulting, nightmarish wallpaper from hell. A patina of gray dust seems to lay over everything. The curtains look as if they would crumble if touched, the floors creak if trod upon, the air reek of decay and disuse if actually breathed.

Scratches immediately reminded me of Dark Fall, another solid first effort, and will no doubt be compared to it endlessly. Dark Fall’s developer, Jonathan Boakes, even starred as one of the main voice talents, so the influences and connections are obviously there. The voice work was good, though the voice of Michael seemed wrong somehow. Whether this was the direction or the writing is hard to say. Michael was stilted and off-putting, but then so was much of the dialogue and text. Scratches was released in Europe before Got Game picked it up for U.S.  distribution, and maybe the tone came from the localization, which, impeccable as it is, seems to ring false somehow and feels overly staged.

And, by the way, why, why, why use computer script font for handwritten letters in adventure games? If you’re serving up a virtual library like Bethesda does in Morrowind or Daggerfall, I can see the point, but when there are only a handful of letters in a game, important, plot-advancing letters, why can’t the artist be bothered to have a real person write them out? (If they did and this is a real person replicating each letter in machine-like perfection, Scratches will have finally and truly frightened me.) The devil in these types of games is in the details, and a few more personal, quirky touches would have made a big difference.

Also, the dozens of clickable paintings scattered throughout the house were a bit generic, as if someone simply scanned them from an Introduction to European Art History textbook. This tendency toward the generic was also evident in the textures and modeling, though I soon overlooked this element. What I’m getting at here is that form can be fudged and abbreviated endlessly, but content needs personality and specificity or it soon grows stale.

Only halfway through the last day did I finally feel drawn into the game and begin to care enough to start to fit together the pieces I had so painstakingly collected over the first two and a half days.  I was just beginning to engage with this beast when it was over and I was sitting in front of my screen, watching the credits roll by. I had to go back and play from my last save three more times before I could see the pattern and receive my payoff. After unlocking all those doors, after countless ascents and descents of those accursed stairs, after scouring, combing, and basically tearing the house and grounds apart to get at its ever-elusive secret, it blurred by so quickly that I blinked and missed it.

Had some of the vitality of the last few hours been introduced during the first two-thirds of the game, had I been rewarded earlier and more often, had the ending been played out with a better sense of rhythm and pacing, I wouldn’t have hesitated to rank this game closer to the top. As it stands, Scratches is more like several courses of bread and water topped off with an immense dessert than a satisfying meal. Maybe Nucleosys was afraid to give too much away too fast, maybe they were too clever for their own good, or maybe the story changed so much over the years that it slipped away from them, but something is missing, that elusive x factor, that “click” you get at the end that tells you that you were in good hands all along.

So I’ll give it a Thumb Up with an asterisk because, in the end, for all the impressive production values and solid puzzles, the game left me cold. Perhaps I’ve seen too many horror movies, read too many horror novels, perhaps the mind-blowing excellence and dread-inducing impact of older titles like Amber, Shivers, Blackstone Chronicles and, to a lesser degree, Sanitarium have set the bar too high. Games like these affected me from the very beginning, shook me, filled me with unease every time I sat down to play them. Scratches, for all its detail and rigor and grand finale fireworks, doesn’t even begin to crowd their ranks. Despite the obvious talent at work here, I felt the devs never really hit their stride. They have an okay game, maybe a good one if you’re not me, but they don’t have a classic, folks, they don’t have one for the books.

This two-man team has talent to burn, though, and if they can bring the writing and direction up to the level of the art, programming and design and put it all together, I’m thinking they can make some waves. They’ve got the chops and a good distributor, and god knows the adventure game field is not exactly bristling with towering competition lately. With an original concept and less cliché-mongering, we could be bearing witness to a rising star. For now, though, it flickers with dim promise on the horizon, catching our eye but not holding us long enough to do much more than raise a finger and point. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Nucleosys Publisher: Got Game Release Date: March 2, 2005

Available for: Windows

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System Requirements

800 MHz CPU (1.6 GHz recommended) 128 MB RAM (256 MB recommended) 16 MB OpenGL-compatible video card (32 MB recommended) 24x CD-ROM drive Sound card (5.1 surround sound card recommended) 450 MB free hard disk space

Where to Find It

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

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14 Responses to Fear Factor

  • Fear Factor | Tap-Repeatedly.com | Reality Topics Blog

    […] nobody@flickr.com (graftedno1) wrote a very interesting post today.   Here’s a quick excerpt:My greatest fear is to be trapped alone in a confined space with a blind human, in total darkness. They have a heightened sense of smell and hearing, and. […]

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Lewis, you made me think of the scariest moments I’ve experienced in gaming, and we’re very similar people.

    Bioshock had two moments – the dentist and the flooded room filled with mannequins.

    Thief had Return to the Cathedral, which was terrifying to me. Thief 3 had Shalebridge Cradle, which is so scary it ought to be fined.

    System Shock 2 kept me on the edge of my seat, but it was more lonely panic than true fear.

    Korsakovia was so scary that I uninstalled it.

    And STALKER. Oh, god, the haunted labs in STALKER. The latter two games don’t have scares like that. Few games do.

    It’s especially rare for a game to have more than mere “moments” – for a game to be scary from beginning to end, that’s a triumph.

    Wonderful article. As if Gregg’s review wasn’t enough to convince me that Penumbra is not something I have the courage to play!

  • DPenn

    I’m with you Lewis … I’m a bit of a puss. I just have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea of dread as entertainment.

    Still, I’m drawn to dark stories when they have something interesting to say, whether it’s a game like Thief or a film like, say, Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible. So I’ll push through, sometimes peering through my fingers.

    The trouble with games, though, is that if you look through your fingers, you’re probably just going to have to play through the scenario again. :~)

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    I wanted to play this game. I downloaded the demo but the controls were just too wonky for me to get my head around. I liked the atmospheric vibe a lot. I think I’m a bit desensitized from an overdose of horror movies in my youth so I don’t so much get the dread thing from these games as a nice creepy vibration. If only the controls were better…

  • Lewis B

    @ Mike, what’s wrong with the controls bud? As someone who despises poor control schemes, Penumbra’s is just like any other FPS, except to examine things you right click on them.  To use things you left click.  I’m not sure that can be considered difficult 🙂

  • Gregg B

    @Steerpike: Yeah my greatest shit-scared moments were with those games too. A few spoilers below people, so beware.

    Bioshock – Haha, I remember the dentist. I didn’t really find the game that scary overall but the bit where you go into the wine cellar and notice a mannequin facing the wall and after upgrading your weapon it’s stood directly behind you motionless and quiet just for a moment before attacking you. I shat a brick. I also missed that bit originally until Lew told me about it.

    System Shock 2 – same as you really, more unremitting tension all the way through rather than specific terrifying moments. Oh actually, theres a bit where you call a lift and it breaks then you realise a service droid is coming to fix it… I do remember having sleep issues after my first encounter with the cyborg ninjas though.

    Thief: The Dark Project – The Sword and Return to the Cathedral and Down in the Bonehoard and well, loads of them. The Sword made me break out into goosebumps though because there was a bit where you could hear this creepy giggling which seemed like it was following me about then it suddenly changed to this horrible throaty noise. What made matters worse was that the EAX (bless you Creative) made my foot steps sound like somebody else was there with me. That level was incredible, a bit too incredible as it seems I missed great chunks of it because I was so eager to leave.

    Thief II: The Metal Age – Trail of Blood where you end up in that opening with those damn tree beasts. God the first time I saw one of those hurtling towards me I actually died shortly afterward. Do you remember that Mechanist child walking around on one of the levels? That was a little creepy.

    Then there’s Penumbra: Overture – quite a few bits but I’m not mentioning them here.

    Oh and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – The brain scorcher lab just because it was so damn quiet. My imagination seriously got the better of me there. Those stuffed animals and heads I’d seen in various buildings led me to believe that those creatures were lurking somewhere in the Zone, specifically that lab.

    @Mike: My control setup was perfect after some tweaking (as well as the simple weapon swing fix). If you ever fancy giving it another go, give me a shout and I’ll let you know my setup.

  • Lewis B

    I’m not sure why guys, but one of my starting paragraphs had gone missing, even though I copied it straight from the original source, and It was fine earlier. 

    Incase you missed it due to some technical issue you might want to re-read just after “Well no she wouldn’t in truth, but in Penumbra: Overture you don’t want to move anyway.” at the very start for those who’ve already read the article. Apologies 🙂

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Lewis, it was the weapon swing. It had this terrible, unresponsive feel to it, like trying to hit through molasses. I couldn’t stand using it. I tried the .ini fix as mentioned in the review but it didn’t seem to help. Of course this was the demo…but that shouldn’t have made any difference. I might try the second game instead as I guess they did away with the weapons thing.

    I’m see your first paragraph just fine. It’s the dialogue, right?

  • jdeuel

    I like the argument that weapons can remove fear, but even loaded to the teeth with ammo in AVP’99 the Marine missions were frightful because the enemy was anywhere at any time.

    As for Penumbra Overture, if the controls are anything like the original Penumbra they need to hack in some Wii-Remote 3d controls. I did not like using my mouse for 3d movements.

  • Gregg B

    @Mike: I’ve read that many people avoided conflict altogether in Overture which incidentally is something forced upon you in Black Plague. As somebody who has been renovating a house over the last 6 months with no DIY experience I can safely say that swinging a hammer is significantly easier in real life than it is in Overture without the fix. The fix balanced that for me.

    I’d highly recommend completing the first Penumbra because it’s one big build up to Black Plague which spoils the ending to Overture in the intro. And it’s a great ending too. Just so you know!

  • Lewis B

    @ Steerpike, those moments you mention are all my worst too!!  Do you remember the Robot labs in SS2? Absolutely terrifying, waiting for robots to burst out on you! 🙁 oh and have you ever player Condemned?

    @ Mike, The use of weapons in Penumbra is different to say HL2, where the player is physically holding the weapon, as in Penumbra it floats slightly infront of you.  However, if you change the control method to normal weapon swing, it’s no different!  Speak to Greggi and he’ll tell you what to do 🙂

    @ jdeuel, AVP the original and its sequal were scary however what type of fear do you think it is? I don’t think it’s anything more than sheer tension.  Having a Smart Gun makes you feel incredibly powerful.  I can honestly say in Penumbra the fear is sheer unrivalled terror, where you actually have to force yourself to play on.  It genuinly is that scary! 🙂

  • Jason Dobry

    It’s so true, an arsenal of weapons and ammo rapidly deflates any sense of horror or uneasiness in any game for reasons you already mentioned. Sakey, I thought Bioshock was more “lonely panic,” while I was pretty much always terrified in System Shock 2. I really, really, REALLY did not want to enter The Many’s nursery, and my weapons were so unreliable and ammo so scarce that I never felt safe.

    Silent Hill was terrifying for the same reasons. Ammo was rare and I frequently had to rely on my pipe for self-defense.  Even when I had ammo, the game mechanics prevented my character from being anything other than marginal with any firearm.

    Fear had one moment for me: I was climbing up a ladder, and as I reached the upper platform, my guy briefly looked down as he climbed off. As my perspective looked up again, that Ring-esque little girl was RIGHT THERE, reaching for me. I screamed and she was gone.

    What else…the original Aliens vs. Predator sent me into a locker room and I could only hear the facehuggers scurrying about somewhere within. I had to go in there. I advanced about three steps before the damn thing screamed and filled up my screen with its repulsive underside as it implanted me with its spawn. My roommate made fun of me for weeks for screaming like a girl child.

    Korsakovia–meh.  I was too annoyed and frustrated by the box rearrangement/jumping puzzles to be scared. I uninstalled it after an hour of play, I think. Maybe the scary parts were later, but I doubt it.

    As for Penumbra, I did play through about half of it before other games distracted me. I remember unease and creepiness, but no sweaty fear. I think I’m to blame here, or, more precisely, my daughter, who was still an infant at the time and generally allowed me only to play during the day for 45 minutes at a time. I was denied total immersion and the fear effect suffered. Maybe I should give it another go after I finish Call of Pripyat since she sleeps through the night now. With any luck, Penumbra will keep me from doing the same.

  • Gregg B

    I played the demo of F.E.A.R. but that ladder scare is the only bit I remember. Christ, that made me jump. I’m not too good with cat scares.

    Also I felt exactly the same about Korsakovia. It was creepy at first but then it began to irritate me far too much and it just soured the experience. I stopped playing as a result. Not to mention, when I realised I could bash those smoke-things with my crowbar they didn’t bother me nearly as much.

  • Online Up

    Great article. I look forward to reading more in the future.

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