Title Overclocked: A History of Violence Date 05.04.2008 Genre Adventure Platform PC Developer House of Tales Publisher Lighthouse Interactive

The makers of the fairly popular "Moment of Silence" Adventure game bring us Overclocked, subtitled "A Story about Violence" in its domestic release here in Germany. It shares the game mechanics of classical Point & Click Adventures, but introduces an innovative way of telling the story: you play as a psychologist who helps his patients rebuild their memories, and the player takes control of them in flashbacks.

Story
Former army psychologist David McNamara's help is requested by the government when 5 traumatized, gun-wielding teenagers of unknown identity are found by the police nearby Manhattan within a time-span of a few hours. All 5 suffer from amnesia, so David's job is to help them remember who they are and what happened to them. They're hospitalized in the (fictive) Staten Island Mental Hospital, where David works with Detective Joe Moretti from the NYPD and the less helpful Dr. Young and his female assistant. During his stay in New York, David finds himself getting into deep trouble with his enemies acting from behind the scenes. That trouble peaks in him being handcuffed and thrown from the Staten Island ferry dock.

Over the course of events, David's character slowly evolves from being a professional, respected psychologist to a mentally unstable man with a dark, violent past and a hair-trigger temper.

The story is interesting and makes you want to progress further, but suffers from a few problems. First, although the player gets answers to the bigger questions, the main plot is missing the detail to make it more believable. Secondly, the main character starting to act irrational is badly timed, being placed before the player really gets attached to the likable characters in a game: when you overcome hurdles. That leads us to the third problem: there's no lack of problems for David in the story, but they're rarely being actually resolved. There's too little feeling of success, but more trouble keeps coming all the time. You'll eventually be more glad that you're not in David's shoes than feeling sorry for him.

Gameplay
You control the character you're currently playing as by clicking the mouse on the spot where you want him or her to go. You hover the cursor over the objects placed on the scenes to find things you can interact with. There's a context sensitive action menu when you click objects, allowing you to perform various things like picking something up, pushing it, examining it and more. We've seen that in many Adventure games, "Full Throttle" being a good example.

In Overclocked, only the objects that are relevant to your progress are clickable, allowing you to focus on what's really important. Of course some people enjoy being able to look at everything and hear funny descriptions from the player character, but in Overclocked, the lack thereof keeps the game's pace smooth. I especially liked how seamless the transition was from being an observer in non-interactive scenes to actively taking control again.

While you play as David, you'll talk to your patients and record audio files of all sessions on your PDA. You often have to play a recording to other patients to give them an anchor in their memories to start from.

When one of them remembers a past event, you control them in their memories. You solve some trivial problems, like finding the right numbers to enter into a combination lock or connect wires in the right order to make a radio transmitter work again. You'll probably spend more time finding out which recording David has to play to which patient than solving those would-be puzzles. Of course it's nice not to get stuck somewhere in the game, but Overclocked is really too easy.

Maybe people who're totally new to Adventure games will welcome it as frustration-free introduction to the genre. But I think people who've played even just a few other titles will yearn for more complexity. Nothing as complex as the Myst puzzles of course, that wouldn't fit Overclocked and its cinematic presentation at all. But, for example in the beginning of the game, you have to use a gun to blow loose bricks out of a wall to get past it. If you just keep shooting you get through no matter how clumsy you aim your shots. If there would be limited ammo and you had to shoot bricks in a logical order, now that would've fit in so well!

Overall the gameplay is quite nice though. The controls are solid and it's fun to play the game, which is the most important anyways. But it's fair to subtract 2 points in this category for being way too easy.

Graphics
Overclocked relies heavily on its cinematic presentation and the atmosphere benefits greatly from it. Real-time rendered characters move on pre-rendered backgrounds. The characters look alright, and great texture detail can be observed during face shots. The character animations were motion-captured, but apparently got put together badly sometimes. Especially some characters turning around looks nothing like the otherwise realistic movements.

Also, the backgrounds aren't very memorable and some look rather simplistic, considering that there are no limitations in possible detail with pre-rendered graphics.

Some motion is put into the otherwise rather static graphics when the camera zooms in or the screen gets split during phone calls or during flashbacks, where one shot shows the present and right next to it you see the memory of the past. There are also some effects like rain and reflective surfaces like wet floors or the glass facade of David's hotel. The stencil shadows look alright, falling into multiple directions depending on how the light sources are positioned.

There are a few bugs, but really nothing major. Sometimes the shadows fall through solid objects. With the girl from cell 4 I was able to walk through the kitchen table (stand on the other side of the table, then click on the kitchen sink). Once when I skipped a phone call (because I had seen the scene before), David got stuck in his pose where he holds the PDA to his ear. I was still able to go to other places, but David wouldn't move, standing still in his phone call pose. But unless you pay special attention, those things aren't going to bother you.

Sound
The voice-overs are pretty nice, definitely better than most I've heard. They're not as top notch as say, Black Mirror's (the German version), but they work quite well. As for the music, I liked what was there, but it stays in the background most of the time and doesn't get lots of attention.

There are some sound effects, but I'm a bit disappointed overall. Sometimes the characters talk of creepy noises they hear, but I don't get to hear them myself. Sounds of opening doors etc. are non-existent, and the only ones that did stick with me are the beeps that the combination locks did. Oh, and the background noise in the surveillance room was nice, too.

Play time
There's no play-time counter in the game, so I'm not quite sure how long it took me to beat the game, but I say roughly around 8 or 10 hours. That's an OK time for an Adventure game, but I took my time. A faster-paced player may complete it even faster. It's not too short, but not a long game either. Being an Adventure game, you'll probably not replay this one. Maybe after a few years when you want to refresh the memory.

Overall
When I played the demo I got really high expectations for Overclocked. I thought "this is going to be something really different". But now that I've beaten the full game, I'm a bit disappointed. The difficulty didn't rise throughout the course of the game, and the story isn't as mind-boggling as I was hoping it would be.

But still, despite my personal impression, Overclocked is a really fine Adventure game that satisfies in most categories. It has a great presentation and, well, it's really something different.  If you like serious Adventure games with an interesting story, or you want to get into the genre, Overclocked may be just the right game for you.

Game Score

B

Reviewed By: Yu