The Sydney Mystery Review

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The Sydney Mystery

Review by Old RoosterApril 2003

“Wow, It’s Great to Be Home!” —Niece/Narrator

If the Sydney Tourist Board decided to include an adventure game in their promotional/welcoming package, this local, independently produced effort would be the obvious choice. Brendan Reville and his Twilight Software team have presented a game, three years in the making, that is obviously a labor of love—not only for the starving adventure genre, but also for the wonderful community in which they have the pleasure of residing. We’ll come back to this thought a bit later.

The Sydney Mystery presents a kidnapping, of uncle Fred, in a contemporary setting. The faithful niece, and narrator, sets off to find what happened, gathering up clues, discussing her uncle with neighbors and acquaintances, and using acquired inventory items to move her way through a 24-hour period, in four acts. There are 240 scenes, 17 different locations, and 11 characters with whom to interact.

In terms of gameplay mechanics, SM includes only a CD in the delivered package, running directly from that CD (no hard drive space needed, except for saves), and with minimal instructions included by way of a mini-tutorial within the game. It’s a point-and-click, first-person adventure, with you playing the niece/narrator, which couldn’t be simpler to navigate. Indeed, the cursor (left-mouse-button controlled) is rather absurdly large (see accompanying pics), both as to directional arrow and actions that can be performed (open, examine, pick up, chat). Acquired inventory is displayed through a right-click, each item being brought to the screen individually, this being something of a problem, since scrolling through the entire inventory is often necessary. Selected items can be “used” on the desired target by simply placing them on that object or person.

Full-motion video is employed liberally throughout the game, primarily to give scenic overviews of a new area and also to enhance conversations.  Each of the eleven interviewees responds to your questions through the medium of FMV. Static pictures of scenes (240) are used both outside and inside, with movement being very unidirectional and little opportunity for exploration. Indeed, there is no mouse rotation or room examination possible except that which becomes obvious with a highlight from the over-large cursor. Stunning aerial views are employed in a map of the city, which has sections and highlights places to which you can instantly travel. New locations (17 total) become available as you progress through the game, being “locked” until certain preliminary objectives are completed. Loading time is instantaneous, enabling speedy movement from place to place, with a couple of little tricks helping this along. There are 10 save-anywhere slots, though you shouldn’t need more than several.  You can’t die, and there isn’t a nasty “Game-Over” screen!  Finally, the game never crashed or even “hiccuped” once, something of a rarity these days.

“I Can See He Has a Lot More Secrets than I Thought.”  —Niece

One of the trends I really appreciate in current adventure titles is to have puzzles to solve within the context of a mystery to unravel.  Indeed, in a recent interview, Mr. Reville said he had a goal of creating “story-oriented, intuitive puzzles, not contrived, that fit into the game environment.”  His idea is that the resolution of a puzzle “totally makes sense.” In this respect, I think he largely has succeeded.  Mostly, your head-scratching will come from wondering which item(s) of your inventory to apply, with the typical reaction afterwards being: “Well, yes, that’s obviously it!”

As with most adventure games, pick up everything! Of course, our niece must have a very large backpack, given some of the stuff she is lugging around, but we’ll forgive that small lapse of realism, one that is common with inventory-based games.

“I’m Here; Now What Am I Looking For?” —Niece

As indicated, navigation within the game is extremely easy—perhaps too easy. You virtually are drawn to the giant hotspots. Again, side exploration isn’t encouraged—although there are some brief forays possible—so you can’t really get “lost.” In this sense, the game seems quite linear. Even the occasional difficult puzzle typically can be resolved through exploration of the specific area in which it is found. The one at the very end of the game (identity spoiler-protected) comes to mind, with a good deal of hair-pulling on my part (only three are left now), until I simply started wandering the area and found the solution. A new area apparently is not opened (unlocked) for you unless and until you either have what you need from previous locations or can find it at the current location.

“What do you think of the bombings,” is a query voiced by the niece during most of her interviews. It’s clear her uncle was involved in something rather large and unpleasant, and here she thought he was enjoying a quiet semi-retirement! She’s encouraged that she can move more efficiently on her uncle’s disappearance than can the police, and she certainly does get around Sydney very quickly!

Musical themes accompany most of the game, which are fitting in terms of selection but often overly loud, particularly in contrast to the soft-spoken niece/narrator. Unfortunately, there is no option to reduce the music or elevate the spoken word. In that regard, there is also no option for written text, much to the detriment of our hearing-impaired friends. One can manage lip-reading with those being questioned, but we are completely dependent, literally, on hearing what the niece has to say.

Voice acting generally is very good, and better than I had expected, particularly given Mr. Reville’s indication of the amateur status of his cast. Indeed, one of the most appealing is his own 92-year-old Nana, who is a ringer for my English mother-in-law, almost bringing tears to my wife’s eyes. For a production that used relatives and friends, I’m quite impressed by the level of natural thespian talent evident in Australia!

“Now I’ve Got a Sharp Knife; I’d Better Be Careful with That.” —Niece

This utterance typifies a good deal of the often-simplistic script.  It also brings me to the more difficult part of my examination of the game, and I will try to exercise care. In the aforementioned interview, Mr. Reville says of The Sydney Mystery: “It’s a low-budget production, a true independent game; and so I hope everyone manages their expectations accordingly.” Well, now, that perspective, which is valid, does make objective appraisal difficult, particularly when a game enters the competitive marketplace and has a price tag. Nevertheless, let’s look at some of the concerns I have about the title, “indie” or not.

The Sydney Mystery is short. If you’ve played the demo (first of four acts), you’ve played at least one-third of the game.  The last two acts are very brief episodes. Referring to a walkthrough only twice, I was finished within four hours.

Game packaging is rather primitive, with the CD in one of those thinner cases, no manual (even on the CD), and the mailing envelope being a generic padded 83¢ postage affair (from Seattle, not Sydney).

The game is simple. As mentioned, SM is almost linear, pulling you with its giant cursor and hotspot banners scene by scene. You almost can’t go wrong. Conversational trees, sometimes 12 questions long, are often irrelevant until you get to the key, location-unlocking, question and response.

Inventory management sometimes is burdensome, having to bring up every item, rather than having a separate screen where a desired item could be selected. Thank goodness, the last selected item does disappear when moving away from the target area.

The music is too loud. This, accompanied by the soft, flat, rather expressionless rendering from the narrator, becomes a real distraction.

A couple of the puzzles are a bit absurd, in spite of the “realism” goal, but that’s okay. What is a problem is that the story seems to peter out, with an almost anticlimactic ending and a resolution to the “who is doing the bombings” question that’s not completely satisfying. There’s also no logic to some of the requirements to have a conversation or open a new location. This is particularly in evidence during an episode where you are told someone is at lunch and have to perform a number of theoretically time-consuming tasks before you can join him/her.

Production values have some jagged edges. Near the end, a boom microphone is clearly in evidence during an interview. In another, rather critical, ending scene, the actor appears to be glancing down to read his/her lines. There is a windy cliffside scene where the stiff breezes (background noise) clearly interfered with the recording, the kind of thing I might do with my own video camera work.

I said this kind of dissection is hard, especially when it’s not being applied to the product of an abstract and large company, but rather to the work of a nice group of folks who obviously are proud of and care about their game and community. But we do owe it to our readers to be honest and objective.

“Enjoy the New Day in this Wonderful City of Sydney!”  —Last Line of the Game

Having said all that we said in the previous section, The Sydney Mystery still gets a qualified Thumb Up rating from this reviewer.  It’s not fair to compare it with Shadow of Destiny, CSI, Law & Order, and other high-budget titles. If we compare with other independently produced games, it certainly falls in the upper tier. Specifically, in terms of my recent experience, it’s much better than Full Moon in San Francisco but not at the level of Dark Fall (few games are!).

The game engine is most commendable and, with a couple of modifications, could well become the basis for any number of future games using full-motion video. I’d like to see greater opportunity for visual scene exploration (mouse rotation), as well as movement to nonessential locations—particularly when the action takes place somewhere like Sydney!

The settings, not only the standard Sydney tourist spots, but also the homes and grounds, are lovely, and they brought my game-cynical wife to the screen on several occasions. “Just look at those gardens, or furniture!” Further, since there is no stated or obvious violence (in spite of the bombing concern), I certainly can envision children over the age of 10 joining with their parents in solving the mystery of Sydney. Again, it’s quite easy and, with the large cursor and relative linearity, would be a good introduction to adventure gaming for the uninitiated.

We earlier spoke of the Tourist Board including this game in their promotional packet. I’ve never been to Sydney, but this game experience certainly sparked an interest in a trip, especially with one of my wife’s relatives living in New Zealand (isn’t that a suburb of Australia?). The Sydney Mystery, in spite of some first-production warts, is a charming reintroduction of FMV, accompanied by a decent story, with a fine acting crew, and placed in a highly photogenic setting. Although leaning toward simplicity and brevity, Brendan Reville and his stalwart team have shown that they know how to make a game. They have done more right than wrong, and I’m encouraged that they are at work on their next title—The Millennium Adventure. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Twilight Software Publisher: Twilight Software Release Date: April 11, 2003

Available for: Windows

Four Fat Chicks Links

Player Feedback

Screenshots

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System Requirements

Pentium (a high-end 486 may be feasible) 16-bit graphics 16-bit audio DirectX 6 or higher

Where to Find It

Twilight Software $24.95 (includes shipping)

Prices/links current as of 04/20/03Links 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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16 Responses to Screw the Internet

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    God damn, Scout, I’d never heard of this Lanier fellow, but that’s pretty profound.

    Information is not a manufacturable item… as you said, we are making less and less. This is either indicative of a larger-scale societal transformation, or a bad thing. I’m afraid I’m inclined to assumed the latter.

    Thanks!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Steerpike, that was exactly the argument Lanier was having with callers on the BBC. Lanier was all fatalistic about society’s drop in real productivity while his opponents claimed that this was a huge transformation and that he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all. If you notice, the web address of that first Lanier link is well.com. I mean, that is old! The Well?

    Lanier’s thoughts were pretty much echoed by David Simon, one of the creators of The Wire. Here he speaks with Bill Moyers about the fate of paid journalism in the face of the web.

  • Spike

    I’ve read many criticisms of Facebook et. al.  I’ve also read contradictions of those criticisms, namely, that social sites are making people more connected than ever.  I think that that connectedness is an illusion.

    For several months at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 my daughter badgered me to join FB.  I could connect with her and some of her friends that I know as well as renew old acquaintances with some of her friend’s mothers.  I finally signed up so she’d quit the badgering. I used to check in every day to see what daughter and friends were saying because if I didn’t she’d ask if I saw her post, or a friend’s post. 

    What I’ve learned is this:

    1.  “Karen Likes John’s photo (or post)” IS NOT communication.

    2.  The reason I lost contact with some of these “friends” in the first place is that we no longer had anything in common.

    3.  I am bombarded with so many ads in so many places that I can do without more.  My policy is to never click on ads on FB or on many other sites. 

    4.  While FB’s original mission was connectedness/communication, I think it has become “Let’s make as much money from these fools as we can.”  “Wanna have gobs of fun playing a free game on FB?”  That game is gonna cost ya big, folks. 

    5.  Social sites are just more places where your personal info can be stolen.  There’s enough risk out there as it is.  Additional risk is not providing any valuable payoff for me.

    6.  Why do I want to “friend” a certain handbag manufacturer?  Why do I want to take a quiz that tells me what my personality is?  FB content providers tell you up front that if you click the link to take their quiz (goes for other types of content as well) you are giving them permission to access your profile info.  That’s ok.  I’ll also give you my SSN, bank account number and the key to my front door.  Not.

    7.  Don’t even get me started on the number of people who start an account in a pet’s name, and even have the pets making friends and posting.

    “…he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all.”

    No, it’s just that most of us get to the age when we demand a bit of wheat with our chaff.

    At 38 my daughter is older than the average demographic of social sites although I know that that demographic is skewing up.  She seems to be cooling on FB.  Some of her 221 friends are as well.  Many of them do want some wheat.  When more cooling has taken place I will unjoin.

    I wonder, though, what new fad will come along when FB, Twitter and others run their course?  MySpace, anyone?

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    My favorite line from the BBC interview was when Lanier was comparing MySpace and Facebook. He admitted that MySpace had some eye gougingly bad pages but said that he liked the “strangeness” of personalities that you get with it. With Facebook, he claimed that it was like looking at a tax form. A boring, watered down, bland presentation of people.

    I joined Facebook almost exactly a year ago. Apart from sparking up a new friendship with a very dear buddy, I’ve gotten about zero back from it. I sort of read with bemusement the activities of people I hardly know and could care less about. And when you consider how much information the devs harvest there…it’s scary. Lanier claims that the information is so far worthless to the investors and that the whole thing has become a sort useless ritual serving no purpose. He claimed that Google’s ads on the other hand will probably turn out to be the greatest advertising model ever created. He also thinks Google should stop before it’s too late but says they probably won’t. Just a glance at the side bar reveals about 4 ads for advertising agencies. Heh.

  • lokimotive

    Has anybody read Anti-Oedipus? I’m slogging my way through it (the third attempt I believe), and Deleuze and Gauttari’s ideas seem relevant to this in a way that I’m not sure I can articulate. This probably has something to do with a conversation I was eavesdropping on that, coincidentally, mentioned a lot of Deleuze and Gauttari’s theories. Someone was talking about another theorist (whose name I didn’t catch) who was defending “Generation Y” essentially. The argument went that Generation Y is an example of a “de-Oedipalized” cultural group (that’s Anti-Oedipus jargon, just stay with me). Apparently this meant that they made connections in a different manner than other generations, the idea of bricollage was brought up and things were generally mired in a lot of reasons why I don’t have my Masters in English. What I got from it was this Generation Y shoots out connections everywhere and attempts to make up a whole idea with them as opposed to relying on predefined pathways. In Deleuze and Guattari’s language: the schizo as opposed to Oedipus. In language that probably makes sense: Peer to Peer as opposed to client-server.

    So, of course, no one’s really right. I’m skeptical of the idea that Generation Y (full disclosure: I’m 29 so I’m part of that group) has enacted some sort of paradigm shift in how to operate in social systems, but facebook has changed how I connect with people. Then again, it’s not like I don’t value face to face communication.

    The future is somewhere in between. I’m really not cynical enough to believe that we are at the end times of civilized society because of Web 2.0. Instead society will change and stay the same because that’s what it does. Facebook is not the future; it’s probably a rung up the ladder though.

  • kaythomas

    To me, Facebook and Twitter are 0’s. They are not worth my time.  I do not care what someone I know or don’t know did a half hour ago or will do next.  I have met up with people on facebook I had lost contact with.  But, in truth, the reason I had lost contact was I was not that interested in staying in contact.

    I think for many people the Facebook/Twitter world is great.  For me it has nothing to offer. 
    kay

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Tap has an automated device that twits… tweets… whatever whenever someone posts a new article. Just in case it draws some visitors.

    To be honest, though, I’m on Kay’s side of the fence, I don’t understand Twitter and I don’t understand why it’s so popular. I barely care what I’m doing from moment to moment, why should anyone else?

    I don’t get Facebook either, though I’m a member to keep track of all the girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school.

  • Lewis B

    Tweets are great for giving me snippets of news.  If I like what I’ve read in the short paragraph tweets give, then I will visit the main page for that tweet. (Very good for following world news, favourite columnists, etc.)

    However, reading tweets from people such as “Just woke up, Madonna is giving me a massage while I shave my nuts” is not my idea of a good read.

  • Toger

    I use tweets the same way Lewis does. Of the people/things I follow, if the tweet is interesting I’ll follow the link to read the entire article. I follow fairly intelligent people, so I’m not subjected to the idiocy of “Just brushed my teeth while sitting on toilet”.

  • Gregg B

    @loki: I’m afraid I’ve not heard of them. I’m a couple of years below you so that puts me in the same Generation Y as well. I read through a few of those links Scout posted as well as a few more on Lanier’s new book “You Are Not a Gadget” and it took me a fair while to get to the crux of what he is saying and he has a lot to say, most of which I find very confusing.

    As a graphic designer the whole “everything is becoming advertising” thing has been bothering me for years. The incessant barrage of advertising is like fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul, which sort of makes me a hypocrite. After all the years of tuning my art and design skillz my creative abilities have amounted to nothing more than crafting pretty ads that sell things. Non of it speaks any truth or has any sort of ‘beauty’; it’s just stone cold mechanical capitalism. Granted there are ads out there that are beautiful, clever and visionary but the front line stuff is as dull as it gets. I’m sure this isn’t strictly what he’s getting at but it’s definitely something that irks me in relation to Scout’s last remark.

    Anyway, I remember Twitter just exploding in what seemed like the space of a week and I still can’t fathom the allure of it aside from providing a direct stream of consciousness from famous folk to their ravenous fans. I wish I’d thought of it to be honest. I can see the creators sitting around a table staring at Facebook and then saying “I know! We make a website that’s just about status updates! You can even update them with your mobile phone!”.

    With regards to Twitter news snippets, unless it’s for a phone, I don’t see the point because RSS feeds do a great job. At present too great; I simply can’t keep up with my subscriptions. There’s too much information on this super highway.

  • Jen

    Twitter is officially the dumbest thing ever.

    That said, it looks like I will have to be the official “tweeter” for my day job before too long. I can’t wait! (roll eyes)

  • xtal

    I’m with everyone else here. I’m glad to say I’ve never signed up for Facebook; I fear that if I ever had I would have long ago died from loss of brain cells due to reading moronic status updates. It’s as Kay said: ninety-five per cent of people with whom you lose contact are probably no longer in your life because you have nothing left in common. And echoing Steerpike’s comment, me eating toast and jam on a Sunday morning watching Fawlty Towers is not interesting, not to me. Why the hell would anyone else give a shit?

    Twitter I signed up for about a year ago, not really understanding what it was. I now understand it…but don’t care to use it often. I have made 58 tweets over that year. I suspect for some that is a daily or weekly average. It’s just Facebook status updates without all the drunken photographs. I admit it can be mildly useful for following, say, a news site. Usually when I hop on my twitter (once every two weeks??) it reminds me that I should read The Onion more often. That’s about it.

    Let’s see… looking at the actual humans I follow, um… Wil Wheaton is happy that the LA Kings have won 9 games in a row, my sister-in-law thought our dinner tonight was “delicious,” and Kevin Smith’s batteries are recharged … or something.

    Wow, my life is already getting better!

    p.s.  <—– Gen Y'er (can we call ourselves that?) and proud that when I Google my own name a real estate company pops up.

  • Fraser

    Twitter is exactly as useless as the person who’s writing it. If someone is telling you boring shit over Twitter, it’s the person wasting your time, not the delivery channel.

    MySpace is the same, but it seems more intrinsically garbage because for some reason almost everyone who used it was an intellectual embryo with a fetish for unreadable hyperneon text on top of garish uninteresting photos. Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.

    That’s the argument against the whole of this post: the internet isn’t evil, but the people who use it might be. It’s people who make business models successful; people who make money flow to advertisers instead of artists, by buying into the advertising.

    This has been a pretty didactic post, so let me compensate by saying VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOOO!!!

  • Gregg B

    Good point about not blaming the delivery channel Fraser. I seem to recall Lanier saying that he preferred the personality that MySpace has over Facebook despite its Craptastic Pages of Illegibility. I’m trying to think of something intelligent to follow that up with but my brain is failing me at the moment, so…

    VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOO!!!

  • Jason Venter

    Fraser, I really loved your following comment:

    “Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.”

    I think that may just be one of the most hilariously true comments I’ve read in a comments area on any video game web site ever.  That sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I actually mean it.  Kudos to you!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Yeah but don’t you miss all the ugliness of MySpace? All those hideous pages at least had personality or what Lanier called the “strangeness of the person” to them.

    I actually don’t agree with a lot of what Lanier says esp “the hive mind must die” stuff. But I do think he is right about the spirit shriveling blandness of Facebook.

    I also suspect that Twitter is going to be around for a while. It will be more and more influential. People are simply not as willing to ingest huge amounts of information in the form of pages of text anymore. The delivery systems that succeed will be those that can communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time. Most days we want “glimpses” or “snapshots” not total immersion. Lewis, Toger and Fraser are correct in that you get out of it what you decide to follow.

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