Sinking Island

The Good
Sinking Island is the second adventure title by the French company White Birds Production. In this murder mystery game, you play a police detective named Jack Norm who arrives by helicopter on a remote tropical island in the middle of a nasty tropical storm. Jack was sent there to check out the accidental death of wealthy billionaire Walter Jones. The task at hand changes into a homicide investigation when Jack discovers evidence of foul play. Because passage off of the island is impossible, everyone currently staying in Mr. Jones' towering hotel, as well as natives living nearby, are suspect.

What we have here is another take on a story used many times before. Other games have had similar plots, the most recent being one or more Agatha Christie games, so you're probably asking "What makes this one different?" I hope to answer that question in this review.

When you start, you have no preconceived idea about Walter Jones other than he is a billionaire and died under questionable circumstances. You eventually learn the true nature of Mr. Jones. He was an obese, cynical miser who has no affection for his family. The 3 grandchildren, the architect, the lawyer, an island girl and her father, plus the 2 wives and a girlfriend are all suspects. It is your job to question everyone and get to the bottom of their possible reasons for disliking (and possibly murdering) Jones. Plus, of course, you must find clues and physical evidence to prove your theories.

The game as a whole is built around conversation, and there is a lot of it. Everyone who could have committed the crime is in close proximity and stuck in one location, so it would seem that you wouldn't have much ground to cover. Unfortunately that's really not the case since there are 11 floors in the tower with multiple rooms and several other locations outside the hotel to visit multiple times. Talk to people about themselves and then about each other, and then again when a new piece of evidence is found. You'll constantly be hunting each person down to find out what they know about one thing or another.

The most different feature of this game is the PPA (Personal Police Assistant). The PPA acts as your main tool for solving all of the different stages ("mandates" in the game) of the investigation. It collects all of the evidence you find in one spot, including the nitty-gritty of all important "declarations" from the suspects. Inside is a comparison tool that combines two pieces of evidence to prove the point. In this way, items are combined for use in solving the mandates and during conversations. I liked the PPA which made me feel like a real detective.

Otherwise, the game installed and ran well. There is really no learning curve, except in using the PPA. Icons are straightforward, and the interface is clean and simple. The Encore US release included a well written and informative manual.

The graphical environment is well-drawn and pleasing to the eye. The motion of the palm trees bent against the raging winds and the movement of the ocean are all very realistic. (Other graphics aren't as well done, as I will explain below.) Some have complained about "pixel hunting". Well, this all depends upon how observant you are. Scanning every section of the scene is important since objects blend very well into their surroundings.

The music during the introduction is great, but not much other music of that quality can be heard while playing the game. Not that I missed it very much. It is nice that it didn't interfere at all with the gameplay. There aren't very many sound effects, but those that I noticed are subdued and appropriate. The most obvious sound effects are of the storm outside (crashing waves, rushing water, howling wind).

Other little things were to my liking including: subtitles, titles for all objects, plenty of game-save slots, "double click" to run and "right click" to skip through conversations. The "profile" lets more than one person play their separate game on the same system with their own game saves and so forth. The choice of "Adventure" or "Race Against Time" offers an replay opportunity, although I only played "Adventure".

Adventure Gamers said that "Translation issues range from somewhat quirky to unforgivably awful." I didn't find that to be the case in my game. In my opinion, the English voice acting sounded perfectly fine in the US release. I thought the actors and actresses voiced their parts very well and sounded well-suited to their individual characters.

The story may be "ordinary", "clichéd", "predictable" and "forgettable", as other reviewers have said, but I liked it. The characters' personalities, motivations and life stories came to light slowly. The identity of the murderer is obscured until the very last. It does have a few surprises as it goes along.

The Bad
As I stated above, the overall look of the island and all of the locations is very good. In contrast, the character modelling is so horrible it makes me wonder what happened during development. I was expecting to find characters that look at least as good as in Paradise, but these are not even close. Although their "head shots" inside the PPA are very nice, what you see while interacting with them is utterly unattractive - jagged edges around their faces, hair and bodies. They had over-exaggerated and awkward movements as well. This made the game seem five years older.

Along those same lines, the designers didn't even try to include lip sync. In fact, the mouths don't move at all. (This didn't bother me much, though, since I tend to read the subtitles while listening.)

What's the point in having a DVD when the whole thing is installed onto your hard drive?

There is some mild "adult" language, so parents be aware.

The Bottom Line
I was utterly disappointed with White Birds' Paradise and didn't have high hopes for Sinking Island at the onset. But when I was asked to play and review this game by Encore, I didn't see any reason not to play it.

What I discovered was a fun game, but one that doesn't outshine any of the others in its class. In fact, it is a notch or two below others we compare to it, especially in the character graphics department. Gamers who love traditional point-and-click games thick with character interaction will like this one if they can overlook its shortcomings. Gameplay lasts about as long as the story itself (3 days), so it is a decent weekend jaunt that may satisfy your detective sweet tooth.

The Good
"Sinking Island" is a classic murder story in the style of Agatha Christie. You play as a detective landing on an island where a wealthy jerk has built a huge tower for some reason. Only this rich jerk is now dead, and it's your job to find out whether it was a murder and if so, who is the murderer. All potential suspects have motives (as always in these kind of stories) and some of them quite unlikeable. All of them are clichés, which is OK in this type of very stylized game.

The gameplay is simple. Just walk around (this is painfully slow and clumsy, unfortunately) and click on things that are click-able to gather clues and talk to people. You then compare statements, fingerprints, photographs and other clues and try to solve the different parts of the puzzle that is this game.

The story is simple and direct, and it's not hard to know what to do, since all you do is talk to people and look around the tower for clues. For the experienced adventurer this game won't provide much challenge. This doesn't matter, though. The fun of the game is to just follow the clues and see where they take you.

The story is by no means especially good, but since you are doing all the detective work, it still is quite fun to see the story unfold. Had it been a movie, it would have sucked badly, since the characters are weak, the dialogue laughable and the mystery itself far from satisfying. The only redeeming quality of this game is that it is in fact a game. The simple fact that it is you who are trying to solve the case and not some bad actor on the tv-screen, makes all the difference.

The graphics are both good and bad. The environment are beautifully designed and most locations really convey a good Agatha Christie-atmosphere. The characters does not look as good, unfortunately.

The sound is good. The music is atmospheric and the dialogues are easy to hear, even if they are often badly acted. And the ambient sounds are good as well.

The Bad
This is a game where you have a very simple and good goal, to solve a mystery. The problem is that the solution is almost never satisfying, and this game is no exception. The ending is by far one of the most unsatisfying I have ever encountered. When I had finished the game I immediately uninstalled the game and I will never play it again. Ever.

The characters' looks are atrocious. They are stiff, horribly designed (the main character looks like a drunk designed by a drunken three year old son of a drunkard) and seems to consist of about three polygons. And they all have horrid hair. This is a giant flaw in a character-based game such as this. No character is believable since they all look so weird.

The acting is sub-par, as in almost all (serious) adventure games ever made. Why is it that the comedic adventure games generally do a much better work at providing funny actors. It is painfully obvious at times that the actors does not act against each other and that they have no idea what they are saying. They just read the words in an arbitrary manner, which sometimes makes the result comedic, in the wrong way.

The Bottom Line
In short, the flaws of this game are many and in the end they outweigh the good parts of this game. But to be fair I had fun all the way up until the very last parts of the game. With a better ending I could have overlooked the weaker parts of the game and maybe even played it again instead of just selling it as quickly as possible on e-bay.