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Secret Files: Tunguska
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Graphics & Sound:
Secret Files: Tunguska is a good, old-fashioned, third-person, point and click adventure game and, as such, it’s quite nice to get back to this style of gaming. The last really good adventure game of this type was Syberia II, and in my mind that’s just too long to wait for a good adventure game. Benoit Sokal disappointed me with Paradise, a flat, uninteresting, and in my view somewhat self-indulgent divergence from his stellar accomplishment in the Syberia series; so it’s nice to see a solid third-person point and click in Tunguska -- and from The Adventure Company, no less, whose achievements, while relatively prolific, are nonetheless notoriously uneven.
As is often the case with third-person point and clicks, the camera work during gameplay is often a bit dull; there are typically no cuts to close up during conversations and only if the gameplay requires it does the camera close in on an object. This is the case with Tunguska. There are several places where Nina has rather long conversations with other characters that are animated almost exclusively only by the voice acting. I am a film critic as well as a game critic, so I found myself aching for the cut to close up during gameplay.
However, I simply cannot dwell on this limitation, as the cut scenes more than made up for it. The lighting and animation in the cut scenes are on a par with the cut scenes in Lara Croft: Legend -- exciting, energetic, and infused with an exhilarating forward rush that immediately became a great payoff for all of the gameplay work. The cut scenes are well timed – they are not too long and not too short, and they measure out the advancement of the story in perfect parts. Developer Deep Silver’s sense of judgment here is ideal and the mark of a great adventure game designer. Adventure gamers should keep an eye out for Deep Silver games; indeed, the closing credits promise Nina and Max again in another Secret Files episode in 2008.
And I must say something about the closing credits; the credits that roll when gameplay is concluded (not when you choose “Credits” from the main menu) run on the right side of the screen while “bloopers” play on the left side – they are constructed “bloopers,” as though the animated characters are real actors. The whimsy and fun poked at this particular phenomenon in the film industry is a pleasure, and yet another great payoff. While it probably didn’t take an extremely long time to make these little vignettes, they did take some production time, as they had to reanimate the characters in the scenes. It’s these little details and extra efforts – of which there are many others in Tunguska -- that make an adventure game truly good. Quantic Dream offered something similar in Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheit in Europe): reward content consisted not of bloopers but of extended sequences of the characters dancing together, and a bizarre little sequence with the game designer David Cage. Developers like Quantic Dream and Deep Silver understand that “concept art” is not good reward content but rather a shortcut cop-out.
The voice acting and the sound production in Tunguska leave a little to be desired. Principally, some of the voice recordings sound like they were recorded in an echo chamber – and this would be fine if the character were standing in an echo chamber, but sadly that’s not the case. The voice acting is good enough with the main characters, Nina and Max, but some of the supporting players sound like they were done by the same person. Probably most profoundly disappointing is the fact that the localization efforts took a great deal away from the sound production. The English version (which I played) is indeed all in English, but it is all in American English – characters from Cuba, Russia, Berlin, and Ireland all sound as though they are, roughly, from the American Midwest. Tom Brokaw-speak, in other words. The formal components of game design are not discrete, independent phenomena – one can subtract from the other, and in this case the localized sound detracts from the setting construction that the game world designers took great pains to illustrate beautifully.
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Gameplay:
The game centers on the mystery of the Tunguska “event,” which is what you call something when you don’t really know what it is. The Tunguska event is a real historical incident: in 1908, an explosion occurred in Siberia, the origin of which is still debated today. A number of theories have been posited; the one with which Secret Files: Tunguska works is the idea that extraterrestrial, and possibly alien, matter penetrated the earth’s atmosphere and crashed deep in the remote Siberian forests. Nina Kalenkov’s father was working on some secret project having to do with the Tunguska event when he disappears. Gameplay begins when Nina discovers his disappearance.
The Tunguska event has appeared in several forms in popular culture, from Isaac Asimov and Stanislaw Lem novels to Thomas Pynchon’s just-published novel Against the Day. The event also figures in several video games, such as The Call of Cthulhu and Destroy All Humans! 2. And, of course, it isn’t a real mystery if The X-Files didn’t somehow deal with it, so the Tunguska event measures up: Mulder discovers the famous black oil at the site of the impact. The fascination with the Tunguska event is certainly justifiable, since it resists explanation; and while it’s been mined heavily, there’s certainly no danger that Secret Files: Tunguska is overusing it. Tunguska suggests that pieces of material were found at the site that contain powerful and mysterious properties, which, of course, a very dastardly and rich person obtains for his own sinister uses. Nina must undo this ominous plot while looking for her father.
The story is plausible and compelling, and one of Tunguska’s strengths lies in the fact that the Tunguska event is not overused in adventure games; the designers are working with still relatively fresh and intriguing material. If anything, Tunguska’s weakness in the story resides in the way that it’s told rather than the story itself. There are long conversations between Nina and the other characters that unfold key plot events; nothing happens visually while these plot advancements are delivered aurally. A common pitfall in both creative writing and interactive storytelling is the tendency to tell rather than show the story. Creative writers are challenged by the need for descriptive language to transform words into pictures in the reader’s mind. But interactive storytellers have the advantage of the image to show a story; Tunguska makes good use of the cut scenes to show important plot advancements, but perhaps falls just a little short in its reliance on too much talking in places. I found myself getting a little restless in these moments; and while I certainly admit to being prone to a short attention span, nonetheless the full impact of essential plot twists gets a little lost in all the dialogue.
But I grouse: the gameplay is decidedly fun. There is a lot of inventory work in Tunguska. Some adventure game reviewers have complained that inventory work that responds to random hunting (i.e., picking up an item and randomly checking other items for combinations, or pixel hunting where no logical problem solving is required) is cheap and boring. I disagree. The inventory work in Tunguska is logical, but it does respond to random searching when you’re all out of ideas. And while it’s not problem-solving within the story, it is nevertheless adventure game problem solving. And frankly, if I were in Nina’s situation and I had a piece of thread, a wrench, a lighter, and a tube of caulk, I would probably try any number of random combinations to get out of trouble – so in a way, it really is inside the story. And after I figured out the solution with random guesses, it turned out to be perfectly logical and I had just totally missed it.
At various points in the game, the player can switch from Nina to Max; at a point, Nina and Max must trade off inventory items in order to facilitate Nina's escape from imprisonment. This feature is clever, challenging, and fun. At another juncture, the player can switch from Nina in one location to Max in another; in this sequence, it doesn't matter particularly in what order you play the characters. The key point for me is that when I ran out of ideas playing Nina, I was able to switch to Max and work on a separate set of problems in an entirely different area of the world. This is a good feature and, as with many of life's problems, when I left one character to go play the other, I thought of a solution to the first character by virtue of getting away from it for a few minutes. |
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Difficulty:
Secret Files: Tunguska shines in the area of difficulty. Deep Silver again shows a great deal of good judgment and thoughtful conceptualization in balancing challenge against ease. Tunguska is a classic point and click, so the goals are clear: search each scene for objects and clues, then combine objects with other objects and locations in order to advance the story. The game is challenging, but it is designed for players of multiple levels of skill and patience.
There is a “Search Scene” feature: click on this icon at the bottom of the screen and all the areas in the scene with which you may interact are highlighted. You can choose to use this help feature or not – so if you want the greatest challenge, don’t use “Search Scene.” If on the other hand you get frustrated and want to move on, click on “Search Scene” and you will find the things in the scene you have missed. You still have to solve the puzzles – “Search Scene” does not give everything away. The feature is merely a leg up if you want it.
There is also a “Riddle Clues” feature. At certain points in the game, you will be provided with clues – not solutions – to various puzzles. Again, you do not have to look at these clues if you prefer to figure it out yourself. The “Riddle Clues” are located in the game journal when they are available, so you will not see them unless you intend deliberately to seek them out. And as the name suggests, the “Riddle Clues” are not solutions but rather a helpful hint about where to look or what to do.
I most recently reviewed Evidence: The Last Ritual, which stands quite possibly as the most difficult adventure/mystery game ever made; my gratitude, therefore, for Tunguska’s carefully designed hint system may seem a little excessive. I consider myself a hardcore adventure gamer – I will at least install and look at every adventure game that is released, and usually play them all through, unless they’re just bad or silly. But I do not attach difficulty to being a hard core gamer. An especially difficult game does not make it a good game or even a game worth playing. A good game is a combination of story, world design, voice characterization, programming, testing, animation, and art as well as challenge and difficulty. Tunguska’s greatest strength is its reasoned, thoughtful balance between all of these fundamental components.
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Game Mechanics:
The mechanics of Secret Files: Tunguska, in keeping with the care of its design, are exceptional. The game menu works perfectly, and there are ample save game slots. The inventory and the cursor are entirely intuitive. The cursor includes an icon that indicates which mouse buttons should be pressed when an action is available; an eye is displayed when an object may be viewed and a hand is displayed when an interaction may occur. I never once experienced a glitch or bug throughout the entirety of the game; while gamers certainly expect and hope for bug-free gameplay, it is nonetheless difficult to achieve. The team at Deep Silver obviously cares deeply about producing quality work; it shows in every aspect of the game's design and execution. Secret Files: Tunguska has just a few shortcomings that are easy to look past because it is an absolutely fun, engaging, challenging classic adventure game and entirely worth the 15 or so hours of gameplay that it provides. My only regret is that, as usual with fine game series, we will have to wait over a year for the sequel.
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-Doc Holliday, GameVortex Communications AKA Valerie Holliday |
Minimum System Requirements:
Windows 2000/XP; 500 MHz Pentium 3 Processor; 128 MB RAM; 2 GB hard disk space; 16-bit DirectX 9.0c Compatible sound card; 16X CD/DVD-ROM; 16 MB DirectX 9.0c Compatible video card; mouse, keyboard, and speakers |
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Test System:
Microsoft Windows XP Professional; 1.8 GHz AMD processor; 1 GB RAM; NVidia GeForce 7800 video card with 256 MB DirectX Compatible; Creative Audigy 2 Sound Card DirectX Compatible; 52X CD-ROM; mouse, keyboard, speakers |
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