It’s the only thing I’ve played since my last post (well, aside from the usual iPhone trio of Words with Friends, Carcassonne, and THPS2), and somehow over the weekend and today I plugged enough hours into it in order to finish it last night. I was convinced there was only an hour or two left, so started at 8:30 this evening and – well – it was almost midnight when I’d read the end credits.
As with CiNG’s other titles (e.g. the original Another Code and Hotel Dusk), the game’s “win” is in the story. Particularly in this case, the pacing of the story – how little side stories end up becoming parts of other stories, how bits of information are dropped here and there throughout the course of the game, and how some connections are just left to you to make yourself. The “game” is secondary to the plot, and it kind of shows in that it consists of little more than a few puzzles. Very few puzzles, when you think about it – especially since it took 16 hours to play through.
Some of those puzzles are great, though. The starting-the-clock-tower one was an excellent, more traditional, puzzle, whereas the item-in-the-box puzzle from the game’s final chapter was outside-the-box genius. The TAS door lock puzzles, however, started to grate near the end of the game (especially since the last few hours has so damn many of them), and when they started needing you to rotate the Wii remote in addition to button presses, they just got frustrating rather than hard.
As I said though, story is everything here, and it really makes you want to progress. Just don’t be afraid of a lot of reading!
