How many of you remember the good old days of early PC point-and-click adventures? Games like Myst, Dare to Dream, Riven and Post Mortem where the focus wasn’t on fast action and quick reflexes, but rather great storytelling and brain teasing puzzles. Enter Still Life from The Adventure Company, publishers of titles like Syberia and the aforementioned Post Mortem. At the budget price of $19.99, Still Life is an enthralling adventure that will captivate fans of the adventure genre in ways few console titles have been able to do.

Features

Amazing CG and gorgeously lush and detailed in game graphics.

Play as two characters: FBI Agent Victoria McPherson and her grandfather Gus McPherson, of Post Mortem fame.

Very graphic, life-like crime scene investigations

Over 10 hours of thrilling storytelling in two famous locales: Chicago and Prague

Only twenty bucks


Look, Gang! Scooby Found a Clue!

In Still Life, the player assumes the role of Victoria McPherson, an FBI agent hot off of her first closed case in Mississippi. When she returns to her home at Chicago, she finds herself facing another tough case as another serial killer starts a sick game of cat and mouse. After three brutal murders, McPherson has little to go on. This is where you, as the player, come in. The game opens with a gorgeous (and I do mean gorgeous) CG sequence showing our heroine being called away from an art gallery in order to go to the crime scene of what is now the fourth murder of a young woman in downtown Chicago. Arriving at the abandoned apartment complex, with coffee in hand, Victoria must prepare to face what she surely knows will be a mess.

And it is. And developers Microids aren’t shy at all about showing it. Still Life is a game all about detail and the crime scenes are no different. In your first crime scene, you’ll control Victoria around a couple of various rooms using tools like black lights, cotton swabs, and cameras to collect evidence. Evidence collecting is a cinch, but you can feel in the controls that this game was made with the PC in mind. In order to collect evidence, one must move Victoria to a hotspot in the room where a small magnifying glass appears. Once there, clicking the X button make Victoria examine the spot. If you need to use a particular tool, you open your inventory with Y, select the tool, select use, and ta-da! Victoria uses it. The majority of the game progresses in a similar fashion, but you aren’t always using obvious tools in obvious ways. There are many areas where you need to be a little bit clever in using the inventory system to examine and combine various items to achieve desired effects. With the exception of dialogue and some puzzles, this is Still Life. You move from place to place examining clues and analyzing what comes next. Through doing this you’ll slowly begin to narrow down the cast of characters to figure out, on your own, who the killer is. However, you won’t be right.


Anyone up for a little S and M?

In the first level, every spot is obvious so it’s not too difficult to have Victoria wander over to a clue and begin examining it. However, later there are spots in the game where the clue isn’t so obviously placed and she can pass by it a hundred times before the player even realizes she should walk there simply because the visual cue wasn’t triggered. Here is where a mouse would come in handy. It would also come in handy for a few puzzles that involve a lot of moving the cursor from place to place, but overall the translation from PC to Xbox is fairly decent as far as controls. At the very least, they’re extremely simple. The most complicated part of the controls is pulling the left trigger in a conversation to cue a professional response or pulling the right trigger to cue a casual response. As a player, you won’t be forced to rely on quick instincts or gaming mastery at any point during the game. Instead, think of Still Life as a really good interactive movie. You can sit back, relax with a beer (or soda, for the youngsters), and enjoy a thrilling mystery where the only real effort you’ll put forth comes from your noggin. On second thought, maybe the beer wouldn’t be a good idea…