John Saul's BLACKSTONE CHRONICLES

                 Reviewed by Stefan Herber

I snapped this up when I saw it on bargain offer because it holds
a record - the lowest ever score (3%) in a certain PC Games
magazine (the one that models itself on the Daily Star.) To be
fair not all the reviews were that bad and I think someone
reviewing it in SynTax quite liked it. It's that most "hated" of
genres - the interactive movie. As such I was surprised it only
came on two CDs and I was even more surprised to find I had
finished it without ever using the second CD. Closer inspection
revealed that the second CD was a graphically enhanced version,
which I suppose I should have used to begin with.

Now five years ago I would have panned this to the skies. A
ridiculous plot, poor acting, no atmosphere (it's not in the
slightest bit spine-chilling), puzzles that are either blatantly
obvious or impossible (and never the twain shall meet) but now
with adventure games being as rare as they are, one has to
consider the good points. These mostly resolve about what you
learn about the early days and treatments used in dealing with the
mentally ill.  Talk about butchery..

Effectively the game is set in a spooky mansion that was once an
asylum. Your father, a doyen of the medical science was once
superintendent there and, of course, was mad as a hatter. His
ghost has kidnapped your son in an attempt to turn him into the
thing he was never able to turn you into (there are some clues
about your past near the end which would have been intriguing to
say the least if they had been developed) and you have till
morning to find and rescue him. This involves solving puzzles.
Getting clues from the ghosts of past inmates and solving a number
of problems with a time limit. If you die before solving them the
game lets you skip the sequence or try it again. It's very linear
so these sequences don't occur unless you have all the necessary
clues and inventory. It's based on a series of books by an author
unknown to me, John Saul - I found them for sale on the Amazon US
site but wasn't tempted.

For die-hards, students of psychiatry and desperate adventurers
only, I'm afraid.

















                              - o -