Gord@k Review

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Gord@k

Review by Orb

Play Mysty for Me

This game, produced by H+a, was obviously meant to ride in the wake of the first-person graphic adventure success created by the release of Myst. It did, however, appear to die a quick death, slipping into obscurity right after release. It does have some merit, although there are many design weaknesses that limit the gamer’s full enjoyment of these, which fully explains its lack of longevity in the big book of adventure games recorded somewhere in that big gamers’ sky. It is not unpleasant to play, and it is a good lesson on what to include and what to leave out when creating a graphic adventure title.

The game begins with a mission briefing that bears a similarity to Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time. This is the only area of the game where there is the slightest voice acting, and this bit definitely has the “talking in a tomato soup can” syndrome. You are the fourth and final agent sent out to halt an unleashed computer virus named Gord@k, which has begun to spread out on its own, creating its own world that you must journey into to vanquish it. This is actually a clever premise and allows some fun surreal graphics and landscapes.

The game itself uses Quicktime VR technology, which I have always enjoyed, as I like the idea of the 360-degree panning to explore the environment and look for hotspots. This give the landscape, which is stylishly designed, an interesting immersiveness. You start by finding yourself in a garden, with trees cut into spirals and circles. The design is reminiscent of Chaos or The Castle, or the early silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari mixed with Dr. Seuss, which was one of my favorite things about the game. The gameplay itself is great, the design is weird, my kind of stuff.

The music is lilting and pleasurable, and despite looping, it does not get redundant or tiring. There were points when the music cut out a bit, but this was a minor complaint. The sound effects are extremely well-done, and there are no points to the game where the player notices the omission of a sound that should be naturally present, which is always something I am piqued about when left out. In fact, this game has a feature that I have not seen elsewhere, which I was actually delighted by and found myself laughing out loud over. When moving along, down a path clicked on, the game makes the player run hard, with heavy footfalls, and heavy panting as though it’s a bit of a strain for the armchair commando you are. You get the feeling there’s someone back there whipping you to go faster, and there’s the sensation that the designer isn’t interested in making a meal out of getting to the next locale like so many other games, but with the sound effects making it humorous, which I found very pleasurable. So I jogged through the whole game panting like a madman.

There is actually a nice mix of puzzles here—most are inventory-based, and there are three straight puzzles that are well-designed, difficult but not unsolvable. Inventory is nicely organized. Items are listed by name; when an item is scrolled to and selected, it appears in the lower left of the screen. To use it, you simply click on a hot spot, and if you are correct, you are rewarded with a small animation of it working. No clicking and dragging, and I thought this was a much cleaner, smoother way to accomplish interaction with inventory items. One problem is that there are key inventory items collected right at the beginning that are a necessity, and there are no hotspots for them. You must hold down the spacebar and click to get them, and this is not covered in the game booklet but only in the fine print in the documentation on the disk. This could easily be missed by the novice, making the game a quick dead end for the newbie. The three straight puzzles actually give the player the puzzle objective and directions in the lower right corner of the interface, which I thought was a nice touch.

There is a maze. My son, the shooter and strategy fan, had come in to watch a bit and cheer Mom on. When I hit the maze, he tried to run out of the room. Apparently, there are no types of gamers fond of mazes. The maze, however, is one of the best I’ve experienced.  It is small enough that you can just wander around in it and not get lost, it’s easy to get back out, plus there are two hot spots where using an inventory magnifier gives you a map, a great design feature.

There are, unfortunately, a large number of serious design flaws.  There is only one saved game slot. Want to keep an extra saved game? Sure! Just start the game over from the beginning, buddy.  What were they thinking? This is particularly putrid at the very end, where you are given the very first timed puzzle of the whole game, inexplicably, and instructions you have no time to read, and it is designed so that if you fail the game and Gord@k wins, it dumps your saved game and you have to start over from the beginning.  Almost an unbelievably bad design choice, just about the worst I’ve ever seen. The only good thing about it at all is that the save feature is extremely easy to use, and it does not push you out of the environment to save. Because this feature is built this way, it seems the game would be much more frustrating to a beginner, someone who would not know what to look for and do, who would have to reexplore or retrace steps.

It also dumped out on me after the lengthy mission briefing, so I had to sit through that again after allocating more memory.  There are tokens to be used at the beginning, and if you use them incorrectly, the game unbelievably dead ends and you have to start over. (Luckily, if this does occur, it’s near the beginning of the game.) Volume control in the game wouldn’t work properly and had to be run manually. Also, a zooming interface was buggy—it would zoom in and not unzoom, which made it useless. I got a script error at one point that made the game quit and erase my saved game. I tried it twice to check and both times had the same response, but it only occurred when the spacebar was held and the mouse clicked on that particular spot, so if that was not done, the game ran fine. But where were the beta testers? This was a big and easy bug to find! Also, any time you restart, you must sit through the whole soup can mission briefing again.

The overall pleasure in the game was brought down considerably just because of the overwhelming design flaws. One wonders if the designers ever played a graphic adventure title themselves because there are so many glaring omissions in the interface, etc. I can recommend playing this only because it’s a very inexpensive diversion, and if you’re experienced enough, you can work around the design flaws and still get quite a bit of enjoyment from it. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: H+a Publisher: H+a Release Date: 1996

Available for: MacintoshWindows

Four Fat Chicks Links

WalkthroughPlayer Feedback

Screenshots

Click to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge

System Requirements

Mac:System 7.5 Minimum Quadra, Power PC preferred 16 MB RAM 256 colors (thousands preferred) 2X ROM drive

PC: Win 3.1, DOS 5.0 Pentium 16 MB RAM 256 colors (thousands preferred) 2X ROM drive 8-bit SoundBlaster or compatible sound card

Where to Find It

      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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