The Daedalus Encounter

The Good
This is a game that tries very hard to be an interactive movie.

You start as an officer in a spaceship in an intergalactic war. Your ship gets hit and you black out. Next thing you know your friends have 'liberated' you from hospital. The war's over and you are a mind inside a tin can. They hook you into the ships systems and together you go off scavenging the galaxy.

The bit about being a 'mind in a tin can' may be a clever dodge to limit the size of the active screen showing the FMV sequences, but it worked for me.

The acting and sound quality are both very good.

There are some fiendish door opening puzzles, a tricky 3D-ish maze that took me an age to map because .... well it just did, a bit of shooting, timed puzzles and a decent story.

You can make wrong choices and as a result you fail / die, but you're not punished unduly for this. In some sequences restart from the beginning of the sequence is automatic.

If you miss clues you won't be able to progress, I'm pretty certain that you can't run into a dead end in this game. (I hate it when you can't complete a game because you didn't do / pick up something really early on.) I certainly cannot remember a situation where had to go back and replay large chunks of this game.

The Bad
Why do aliens need to complete an IQ test just to open a door? I missed some of the clues to the door opening puzzles so I had to resort to a cheat sheet to progress. I don't like being beaten by a game or a puzzle and this one got the better of me.

The Bottom Line
This is a game that tries very hard to be an interactive movie and I think it pulled it off.

It is a good game that I really enjoyed playing, even when I got stuck I kept coming back to try something else. When I could not crack a puzzle I cheated, not proud of that but it shows that the game had me hooked and that I cared enough to want to see what was next, and to me that's the mark of a good game.