The Arrival

The Good
Sound effects and cutscenes are very nicely done and add a lot to the game atmosphere. The game takes place over four separate locations that you can travel between. There is a lot of exploration that can and must be done which is what many adventure gamers love the most, myself included.

The puzzles are challenging but not ridiculously difficult. There is a nice hint system built into the game to help you with solving puzzles. As is often the case, the biggest challenge in solving the puzzles is in figuring out what the objective is. The Arrival takes place in an alien spaceship and there is little in the way of clues in the environment to help you out. The game will give you up to three audio clues to help you solve a puzzle before offering to solve it for you. Optional, of course.

The Bad
Your first glimpse of an alien will most likely leave you laughing .. not filled with suspense. While the other graphics in the game are pretty good the characterization of the aliens is very bad. They come off as cartoon characteristics in a setting that otherwise would be realistic enough to pass the test.

Some of the hot spots needed to identify when an item can be picked up are very small and can only be noticed if looking at the scene from one specific angle. this can be troublesome if you are stuck because you can't find the item you need.

I didn't care for the way that the inventory is handled and manipulated in the game. The inventory screen blocks out everything else and switching between the environment and inventory gets tiresome and detracts from the play.

Be ready to die. It seems the only way to get around some of the obstacles is using trial and error which means you are going to die often. Save regularly!

The Bottom Line
Here you are, walking your dog in the desert and you have to go and get abducted by Aliens. God I hate when that happens! Just as they are ready to insert the old ____ probe the ship starts to shake and the Aliens begin to evacuate. What the heck? Where are you? What are these Aliens up to? This is where the story begins. If you saw the movie by the same name don't expect it to be of any help. The game plot does not follow the movie and, I believe, takes place after the events in the movie.

The object of the game is to escape the Alien craft and make it back to earth to warn mankind of their impending doom. The story of the game unfolds as you progress through it. To accomplish your goal there are many puzzles that must be solved in order to obtain the hardware and knowledge necessary to progress.

The game contains a mixture of inventory based, logic and sensory puzzles. The sensory puzzles (for lack of a better term) are of the old and familiar type of matching (the match game) and remembering tonal sequences and then replaying them. The logic puzzles are of the board variety and range from very simple to dastardly difficult (only one or two). Unfortunately the obligatory maze had to be in there as well. (Man is that ever tired.) The puzzles do fit in nicely with the story.

You move through the game in the Myst style of clicking left, right and forward. You can look up and down but that feature was not particularly useful.

I would recommend this game to anyone that doesn't demand a lot in the way of special effects or groundbreaking technology. It has a story that is acceptably interesting and lots of exploration and gadgets to tinker with.