The Experiment

As someone who generally buys his games used, and who often is behind the curve by as much as years, I realized when started writing this blog that I would have to start buying games that people were actually faced with on store shelves. To this end, this week I went to a few electronics stores, and bought a game I saw on the shelves of all of them: The Experiment.

The Experiment, by The Adventure Company, is a game which places you in control of the electronic surveillance systems of a derelict laboratory ship, and gives you the task of helping a woman discover just what the hell happened there.

The entire interface is played out as an all-purpose security and intranet desktop application, which allows you to track the goings-on via multiple cameras, view the personal files of various employees, and turn on and off lights, monitors, and various other electronic doodads. and generally be the ghost in the machine.

Sadly, there's very little I can say good about this game. The voice acting is god-awful, the interface is clumsy at the best of times, and Lea, the woman you're following around, acts with exactly enough independence to make me want to rip my hair out by the roots. And I don't mean that in the "Oh dear, this puzzle is very hard" way, I mean it in the "Fuck's sake, why can't you figure out what I'm trying to tell you to do?" way.

Nearly every line of the script is as wooden as a tobacco shop indian, and from the first spoken line, you know your ears, and your sense of dramatic tension, are in for an abysmal experience. Worse yet, though her face has clearly been animated, when Lea inevitably spends a good long time looking directly at one of your cameras and talking, her mouth and face don't so much move, as fix themselves firmly into the expression of someone who's just spent seventy-two-and-a-half hours in a row watching nothing but sitcoms, and is now sitting in a pile of their own excrement.

Honestly, I didn't get very far into this before I quit. A time came when I was supposed to be finding something with the cameras, and the game wasn't exactly clear on where exactly that thing was, which wouldn't have been a problem, except that Lea kept giving me a reminder prompt that I was supposed to be looking for it, which was played at full volume regardless of which cameras I had activated, and repeated about every ten seconds or so.

Remembering this has me looking at the disc sitting on my desk, and considering microwaving it, so it can't be a bother to anyone else.