MINI-REVIEW: The Lost Crown
Andrew Plotkin
(Review copyright 2008, Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com>)
I prepared for this review by -- well, by playing _The Lost Crown_, but then
by watching a whole bunch of Zero Punctuation reviews in a row. So please
imagine that I am typing at 180 words per minute.
I have a problem -- no, two problems -- with _The Lost Crown_. It is a
fantastic third-person adventure game which is scarred by a very few
interface design errors. And my problem is that, one, these errors turn what
should be a fantastic adventure experience into a dragging chore. And, two,
*every one* of these errors is an absolutely standard error made by *dozens*
of third-person adventure games over the years. I mean *seriously damn it*,
why I am writing these reviews? I could copy and paste chunks of my _Next
Life_ review in here and you'd be left with a pretty accurate impression of
what went wrong with _The Lost Crown_. Except that Jonathan Boakes doesn't
have the excuse of being Czech.
Jump back.
_The Lost Crown_ is a fantastic third-person adventure game. It is long and
broad and plot-rich and twisty. It has a bunch of characters to interact
with and plenty of locations to explore. Boakes's visual design sense is as
brilliant as ever; the world is rendered in black-and-white photography
touched with color, like hand-colored postcards, further embellished by
touches of animation and the 3D characters. The audio design is even better,
matching in turn the desolate, claustrophobic, or theatening landscapes of
the game with densely mixed soundscapes.
Boakes continues to explore the territory he staked out with _Dark Fall_:
scientific investigation into the supernatural. _TLC_ begins with your
flight from a shady electronics job into the tiny British town of Saxton.
Your ex-boss ambivalently threatens you and aids you, sending over a batch
of "ghost-hunting gadgets" which form the backbone of the game -- audio and
video recorders that can bring out supernatural detail in scenes. This is
not to say they're the *whole* game. You get symbol puzzles, dialogue
interactions, searching for physical evidence, fixing machinery, researching
in books -- the entire spectrum of adventure puzzle design, deftly
implemented. But the gadgets are what tie the gameplay together, as they're
used in their varying ways.
More subtly, _TLC_ has excellent pacing. The town starts out as a merely
eccentric place, with just a few inexplicable touches and quickly-explained
scares. Then, over the course of several days (and nights) of storyline...
Saxton gets stranger.
Your course of exploration is managed with equal facility. You begin
restricted to a few parts of the town. The rest opens up as you enter the
main storyline; and then you reach the more distant parts of the landscape,
one at a time, as they become relevant to the story. (Quite often, as you'd
expect, you have to revisit a locale at night... when things are different.
One way or another.) The game is pretty good at pointing you at these
locations, and blocking off the irrelevant ones, so that you're always
looking for plot in all the right places.
Usually.
Which brings me to the first of the serious design problems.
It's the slow walking issue. Or, really, the issue of slow animations in
general. _Next Life_ had it. Okay, _Next Life_ had it worse. In _TLC_, you
can double-click on an exit to jump to the next room -- hallelujiah. But it
still animates you walking *into* the next room. If you click to examine an
object, it animates you walking over to it and bending down. In a slow...
deliberate... series... of motions. Sometimes you turn your head. Turning
your head takes at least five seconds. Every time you turn your head, I want
to *scream*. Because I know the designers were thrilled at their clever,
distinctive, story-conveying character animations... and all I wanted was a
way to skip them.
Did I note that _TLC_ is a large game? It's pretty huge. Walking across it
takes *forever*. Several seconds per room. Double-click... new room...
carefully designed walk-in animation... maybe a dragonfly fluttering by...
and then you can double-click again.
And the thing is, _Next Life_ had this problem. _Syberia_ had it. I can
scarcely think of a third-person adventure game which *didn't* have tedious
navigation. The new _Sam and Max_ series doesn't, and that makes Telltale
some kind of damn geniuses, because they got it so right that I didn't even
notice the hole where the problem used to be.
(In retrospect, the _Sam and Max_ games survive by having cartoon characters
that run unrealistically fast -- and by being tiny. Off the top of my cuff,
no two locations in the latest S&M episode are more than seven rooms apart.
In _TLC_, seven rooms barely gets you from your home base to the center of
town -- and then you're much less than halfway to the outlying districts.)
To be fair, the designers of _TLC_ clearly saw the problem. Character motion
has been sped up by a factor of two, I think -- it's out of sync with the
walking *animation*, so that everybody looks like they're ice-skating. And
the double-click-to-exit scheme makes the game... mostly tolerable. Usually.
Except when you want to go check a location on the other side of the game,
to see if anything has changed there, or if your current puzzle can be
solved there. And then the tedium strikes. When you're trying to solve a
puzzle! _TLC_ is a game that punishes you for thinking outside the box. By
the end of the game, I was reading a walkthrough frequently, because trying
out my solution ideas was *too painful to think about* sometimes. Walking
three rooms away just wasn't worth the wait.
It gets worse. You can't click to skip lines of dialogue. (Nor hit space, or
escape, or return... believe me, I tried everything.)
Does that sound trivial? When you walk into the rented room that serves as
your home base, the voiceover says "Home sweet home... for the time being."
*Every single time.* You can't interrupt it. (Nor the
walk-in-and-hang-up-coat animation.) You have to sit through it. You are
trying to *go advance the plot* and the game is just *yammering* at you.
Same deal when you start a conversation with an NPC. You get the same little
hello speech for that character, or the same tired joke -- they're *all*
tired after the tenth time -- and you can't interrupt it. When you end the
conversation, the same little goodbye speech. And, as with most
dialogue-menu games, this is an unavoidable part of gameplay. When you're
stuck, you have to go talk to everybody to discover the next clue. Or ask
them about a bunch of topics you've already raised, in order to see if they
say something new. (They typically won't, but can you afford not to try?)
It's just like the puzzles; after a while, I could not face the prospect of
talking to people. I found myself arranging alternate plans: I'll click on
the professor and then *go get a drink of water*, so that he'll be done
greeting me before I get back from the kitchen. More and more, the plans
became "read walkthrough". No, not every time -- not even at the end of the
game, when I was *really* tired of slow dialogue -- but plenty often enough.
You think I'm kidding, but if this one issue were fixed, I would have
enjoyed _The Lost Crown_ instead of suffering through it for the good parts.
Did I mention that the voiceovers are *slow*? Your character talks like...
like he moves. One... phrase... at a... time. "I should accept... the
station master's invite... a possible lead." "Three... crowns... a link to
the mystery." "Can I ask you about... something else?"
I'm pretty sure that a lot of these lines are *literally* stitched together
out of separate sound files. "A link to the mystery" turned up a lot. So did
"Can I ask you about..." You can hear the periods between the chunks. Other
characters' dialogue had less repetition -- simply because the bulk of the
game information comes in the protagonist's voice -- but even for them, some
lines were reused in multiple situations.
I imagine it saved disk space... but it was a bad, bad decision. Nothing
slaughters the sense of story development like getting the same half-clever
banter repeated, by the same characters, two story-days after you first
heard it. With exactly the same phrasing and intonation. Do you *care*, Mr.
Protagonist? Have you learned anything about your new friend? Have you any
shared experiences to draw on or refer to? No, you are repeating lines like
a robot. Oy.
One may raise two objections to my objection to this use of the voice
talent.
First: _Sam and Max_ does it! (Yes, S&M has become my first counterexample
to all sorts of things. That's because S&M is the first third-person
adventure game which doesn't get anything wrong.) In fact every adventure
game with voice talent repeats lines. If you repeat a (useless) action, or
retry a dialogue topic, the game plays the same sound bite you heard before.
True! But, nearly always, this is an explicit signal of failure. The game is
communicating that your action did not change the game state. (*And* you can
click to interrupt, so it's not boring.)
_TLC_ uses this convention. But then it also repeats lines when the state
*has* changed. For example, the scene where you're working with a partner
with an energy sensor, locating ghost activity in four rooms. All four
times, your partner begins, "I'm picking something up, but it's very
mild..." I'm not saying that this is confusing; just that it wrecks the
sense of a narrative advancing.
Second objection: text adventures repeat lines! (In other words, *I* do it,
whaddaya think of that?) All of the failure cases I mentioned above, and
*also* room descriptions, default success messages ("Taken"), action
responses... Text adventures are full of re-used chunks of text.
To which I respond, true -- but voice has a lot more bandwidth. Play a sound
file twice, and it's excruciatingly obvious that the intonation is
identical. Read a printed sentence twice, and you are free to imagine that
the speaker is wearier, more excited, or simply aware of having said it
before. The intonation is in your head, and so context can creep in.
Plus, text adventures can easily tweak the flow of words. If the designer
thinks his text is getting repetitive, he can drop in a conditional word
("I'm *still* picking something up...") or have a phrase be randomly
substituted. Furthermore, he can do this at any point in development or
testing. With voice acting, changing one line is a big old nuisance.
I have to compare _The Lost Crown_ to _Barrow Hill_, a game which uses many
of the same voice actors. _Barrow Hill_ does not have dialogue menus; the
plot is carried by NPC voices, but they occur on the radio or the phone or
behind doors. You cannot respond. Nonetheless -- or because of this -- the
voice work in _Barrow Hill_ is delightful, perhaps my favorite aspect of the
game. It's natural and engaging; it conveys the characters with great
immediacy. _TLC_ manages to take the same voices and throttle all the life
out of them.
(I'm particularly dismayed that the protagonist of _TLC_ is voiced by
Jonathan Boakes himself. One day I'm going to meet him, and I'm going to
stammer something incoherent about how I'm a big fan and I enjoy his work so
much. And he'll start to respond "Thank you--" and then I will reflexively
punch him in the throat. Because, having finished _TLC_, I am *so sick* of
his voice.)
(Emma Harry, on the other hand, can talk at me all day long.)
So do I *recommend* this game? Well -- hang on, I have a couple more
nitpicks in the notes file. Like apostrophes. I noted about _Dark Fall_ that
Boakes's spelling and punctuation are lousy. He's using a spell-checker now,
but he still seems to think that apostrophes are magic pixie dust which make
words happy. Work on it.
Also, the game crashed on me twice, each time blowing an hour or so of
progress. Which took at least 45 minutes to replay, because you can't skip
any dialogue or animation. Save often, folks.
So, do I recommend _The Lost Crown_? Reluctantly, and with the warning that
it may drive you nuts -- yes, I recommend it. The environments, the
soundscapes, the deep and detailed storyline, the sense of history, the
skillful construction of puzzles and interactions out of the game elements:
these are worth the effort of barging through the game's shortcomings.
Anyhow, there's room for a sequel -- which I want to play, because Boakes
just has to fix a few things in his game engine. And that'll be great.
(I also see an upcoming _Dark Fall 3_. I want that too.)
(This review, and my reviews of other adventure games, are at
http://eblong.com/zarf/gamerev/index.html)
--Z
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
Bush's biggest lie is his claim that it's okay to disagree with him. As soon as
you *actually* disagree with him, he sadly explains that you're undermining
America, that you're giving comfort to the enemy. That you need to be silent.
S. John Ross
Groovy review! Fun, informative, evocative, and it definitely piques
my interest about the game ...
... but if that's your idea of a _MINI_ review, well ... well, we have
different ideas :)