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Review for Aspectus: Rinascimento Chronicles

Aspectus
Aspectus

It’s the 16th century, and the townsfolk in a small village in the Netherlands are mostly content going about their business. Except, that is, for the crazed creatures oozing dark paint that are haunting the artwork of the wealthy and even coming out to kill them. In Aspectus: Rinascimento Chronicles, players have just one night to help create the perfect painting in time to trap these deadly entities and save the town from death by evil art. Unfortunately, to do so you’ll have to struggle through dimly-lit scenes along the way, finding only a little bit of overly-cumbersome inventory fun, a few repetitive puzzles, and no small amount of dreariness in this lite downloadable adventure.

The debut title by Italian developer DGform casts you as one of the town’s gentlemen, Mr. Bruesen, who has been charged with helping to conquer the evil ‘Destroyers’. You never find out very much about Bruesen, nor learn why the town turns to him for help, or even why these dread creatures are lurking in the town’s art in the first place. Nevertheless, it's quickly decided that the only way to vanquish the monsters is for Bruesen to help create a painting that they won’t be able to resist, luring them all to one canvas where they can be destroyed themselves. This task requires ransacking the town looking for various artistic items, including frames, paints, brushes, and other tools needed for what the town’s art shop owner, Joos, calls the ‘Aspectus’.

Your inventory hunt won’t be easy. In keeping with the game’s artistic motif, the town is rendered in hand-painted watercolors, which is stylish but not particularly functional. The art is awash in murky greys, browns, and the flickering amber of candlelight. Everything seems to be stuck in a permanent fog, with the muddy color palette making it difficult to distinguish between scenes, from the town hall to the artisan street to the cathedral square. It’s equally subdued audibly; you’ll encounter very few ambient sounds as you explore, while the simple harp and piano melodies are low key, at times fading to silence.

Predictable visual cues let you know that you’re in the Netherlands of five hundred years ago, including the requisite windmills in the background, houses topped by thatched roofs, and period character garb. Despite being a game about Renaissance art, however, these scenes disappointingly lack much imagination or detail. Buildings and storefronts are nondescript, the only difference being a few signs with barely legible script indicating an art store here or an antique shop there. This underwhelming vision makes its way to the game’s cinematics as well, which are triggered at random times as you speak with different characters. The rudimentary cutscenes, with cameras panning past 2D images that move stiffly up and down to indicate motion, at times bring to mind a flat, cardboard puppet show.

The dark artwork also makes it extremely difficult to see inventory items, and although the cursor changes as you mouse over hotspots, there is no highlight option to indicate interactive objects. Aspectus consists predominantly of inventory puzzles, so you’ll be doing a lot of screen sweeping to find items that do their best to blend into the background. You’ll left-click to interact with anything you find in your visits to the town square, a riverside, cathedral, and multiple residences. The exits and entrances to these scenes are not clearly marked, so at times you’ll also have to sweep the screen to find entire areas you may have missed. There are eight main locations that you’ll be able to explore, and within these areas you can zoom in on further points of interest. However, even after you’ve exhausted all interactive hotspots in a zoomed-in area, you can still return to it, which can make searching for new items tedious.

You’ll pick up a wide variety of objects and combine many of them to form different items. The game’s inventory menu has a large number of slots and a central area where you can mix multiple objects, much like in Return to Mysterious Island, only far less intuitive. To find out which items can be combined, you’ll need to place each one in the combination area. If it is part of a combination, you’ll see as many as four more slots appear, along with a description of the eventual item that will result. Most combinations make a certain kind of sense – you won’t need to stretch your imagination much in making a picture frame, for instance. However, many items are nonsensical in their combinations, and you may be hard pressed at times to find the right formula for something even as simple as an improvised hook.

What’s worse about this system is that incorrect items aren’t indicated at all, so there’s no immediate way to tell if the current combination is destined for failure, or why. The only way to verify an object’s usefulness is to begin a combination with each and every item. When more than one item yields the same end result, you’ll know they go together. This is a laborious process, especially as the game provides no hints to help you along, though trial-and-error and a little patience will get you through all of these bizarre mixes eventually. There are some items that can be combined and used alone, which makes some of the solutions even more challenging.

You’ll meet a variety of colorful characters in your travels, from a boozy lady of the night to an art shop dealer to a common pickpocket. All are voiced, but what they have to say can be unintentionally hilarious, as the translation seems to have been done with no concern for proper punctuation at times. This will leave you with peculiar remarks like, “What all this is absurd! Keep it in mind,” or “You saw what a shame.” Such conversations, as garbled as they are, are necessary, as supporting characters will only give you help in exchange for assisting them first, such as finding objects or performing certain tasks.

These dialogues are partly recorded in a rather useless journal that doesn’t really provide any backstory, but instead keeps track of the last conversation you’ve had, and only a paragraph at that. The story is not completely linear, however, so you can be working on several puzzles at the same time. If you want to remember what another character said to you previously, you can’t scroll back in the journal if you’ve spoken to someone else in the interim; you’ll have to go back and speak to the original character again, which defeats the purpose of the journal entirely.

The one useful thing about the journal is that it keeps track of the rules for the three types of non-inventory puzzles you’ll encounter. Yes, that’s right: three. The same three puzzles types are repeated over and over again. You’ll confront a lock puzzle, which requires a bit of dexterity as you align several moving tumblers and then click on the lock mechanism before the tumblers become misaligned again, which is not an easy thing to do. The second is an alchemy puzzle, where you’ll channel three colors of liquids along conditional paths to create a final liquid of a determined color. Finally, you’ll wrestle with a puzzle that consists of three gears moving at different speeds. You can slow or speed up each gear and must find the right combination of speeds to align all three gears at once. None are unpleasant the first time you encounter them, but without the benefit of a skip button, the one thing these puzzles all have in common is how monotonous they become when you find yet another variation of the same exact kind, perhaps just to pick up an item that seems totally unrelated to the puzzle you’re being forced to solve.

This seems to be the underlying theme of Aspectus: Rinascimento Chronicles, as there is no apparent rhyme or reason behind many of the design choices. Not only are the repetitive puzzles contrived, often I felt that it was pure serendipity that triggered a cutscene, as I wasn’t aware of doing anything relevant to cause them. And although this particular chronicle fully resolves its storyline, since none of the important background details are ever revealed, you’ll have no better understanding of Mr. Bruesen or the ‘Destroyers of Art’ at the end of the game then you did at the beginning. The premise of creating a masterpiece during a time when artistic genius flourished was a great opportunity, but it’s squandered in this forced march through dreary scenery full of unimaginative, repetitive puzzles. There’s some inherent fun in creating complex inventory combinations, but perfection is ultimately nowhere to be found in this dull and lifeless display.

Our Verdict:

While its goal may be the perfect work of art, Aspectus proves to be far from the perfect lite adventure game.

GAME INFO Aspectus: Rinascimento Chronicles is an adventure game by DGform released in 2011 for PC. It has a Stylized art style and is played in a First-Person perspective.

The Good:

  • An intriguing premise about supernatural art
  • Complex inventory puzzles provide some interest for a while

The Bad:

  • Poorly lit scenes make it hard to find items
  • No hints or help of any kind
  • Unskippable, repetitive puzzles arbitrarily fill out a poorly translated, nonsensical story

The Good:

  • An intriguing premise about supernatural art
  • Complex inventory puzzles provide some interest for a while

The Bad:

  • Poorly lit scenes make it hard to find items
  • No hints or help of any kind
  • Unskippable, repetitive puzzles arbitrarily fill out a poorly translated, nonsensical story
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