The Experiment

Back in the great days of Infocom text adventure there was an adventure called Suspended, where you played a disembodied individual who depends on computer systems and servant robots as his way to interact with the world. The Experiment by The Adventure Company plays with similar themes, exchanging text for graphics, robots for wall mounted cameras and door controls, and you as protagonist for a female redhead researcher with not much clothing. Unfortunately, bad design decisions, bugs, tedium and lack of inspiration render this new foray into omniscient voyeurism as one of the dullest and most unplayable games this year.

First Impressionsby Tanx - Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher

The first issue that becomes apparent when firing up The Experiment is windows management. Each window represents the view from a camera in one of the rooms of the complex, and you can have three windows open at once. For some reason, each window must be chosen in one of three sizes, two of which are too small, and the third of which conflicts with the position of the permanently opaque map. Each time you click on a new camera on the map (about 48% of the game play is clicking on cameras) a new window automatically opens, meaning that your screen will always be cluttered with extra windows you don’t need and an essential map that blocks your view but can’t be done away with. The map also can’t be resized, making the act of opening and closing doors and turning lights on and off a difficult task, as the exceedingly small buttons to operate them take the steady hands of a neurosurgeon to hit reliably (this is another 48% of the game play… the remaining 4% involves typing in passwords.)

But maybe these obtuse controls and frustrating repetition are worth it to save our perky, likeable protagonist? Alas, Ms. Lea Nichols is neither perky nor likeable, but more akin to someone who has undergone recent lobotomy. Nichols speaks with a flat affect, laconically expositing with no sense of interest, awareness or personality. She reminds me of some of my students before they have their morning coffee… “Hey, what’s new?” I might ask with enthusiasm. “nothing.” intones the bleary eyed child. “Guess, what, tomorrow is Saturday and I’ve decided to give you no homework to celebrate!” “uhn.” sighs the kid in obligatory affirmation.

Worse, Nichols has the temerity to spend most of her few lines of dialogue complaining about you! Here she is, newly awakened in a dark and destroyed military lab complex with not much memory and her only hope a mysterious person she can’t see who is watching her every move on security cameras. I can think of a whole spectrum of responses to this situation, but L’s is to tacitly assume you live to serve. Any time you take more than a few seconds trying to get your mouse over a miniscule door control or reading her colleagues’ mostly gibberish personal files, Lea starts in with, “come on, let’s get moving” rapidly followed by “I knew I was wrong to trust you” or “why are you so slow?” It doesn’t take long for you to start to hope that a chance encounter with a crocodile or rabid dogs or something would dispose of your charge for you, so you can just go home and not deal with her any further. In addition to being devoid of personality, monotone, whiny and frozen, Nichols walks about as fast as a zombie from Night of the Living Dead. At least if she shambled like a zombie that would be something to watch, but Nichols insists on a trance-like, robotic and unhurried stroll, regardless of the situation. There is nothing like the crushing despair this game delivers when you realize that you need to lead Nichols from one side of the ship to another. If you’d like to have the experience, just using your scanner to make jpegs of every page of your telephone book… that simulates the experience fairly accurately.

So most of the time you spend switching windows and turning lights on and off to indicate where Nichols should explore next. It is the same sequence over and over again… click light on and off, wait for zombie-gal to sleepwalk over to the location, pray she finds something interesting to report so you don’t feel you wasted your time. The game is sort of like a one-button slot machine which takes two minutes for each spin and pays nothing but pennies on an infrequent win. Worse, Nichols sometimes doesn’t notice stuff even if you have led her to the right place… this can happen if the program is experiencing any slowdown, or if you are impatient and click another light before she has fully settled at the previously indicated position, or if she hasn’t been led to some other plot point previously, or perhaps even due to some malevolent whim of the programmers, who clearly hate you. So now you have a game that requires constant revisiting of every damn room in the complex, over and over again, as you try to guess what the story needs you to do next.

As a final insult to injury, saving the game does not reliably save all your progress. When you open a save game, it reverts to an arbitrarily chosen position a few rooms previous to where you last were. This means that you have to repeat anything you did after that point every single time you return to the game. The heck with that!

Played For: 6 hours.

Will I play it more: What could I do to warrant such punishment?