Adventure Gamers - Forums

Purgatorio

We’re away from “pixel art” this week into the realms of photograph and film for Purgatorio. This is NOT FMV I should hasten to add, the backgrounds are photos/images and the characters are animated from live action film footage. Rotoscoping without the tracing paper and colouring pencils if you will!

As I have said before, I am always wary of freeware games using photos as backgrounds as they are often lazy and terrible, but fortunately this is one to add to the “Good” pile as all photos were taken by the creator (with one exception admittedly) and are consistent stylistically and well used. Think Mudlarks or The Oracle for anyone who has played those.

In terms of the game itself, you play as Frank O’Shea, a soldier on a peacekeeping mission who is injured in the line of duty, blacks out and wakes to find himself in a strange town. Or was that a strangely almost familiar town? How did he get there and can he get away are the questions that provide the premise of the game.

Although there are certainly good things to say about the game, it is a little lacking as a cohesive whole, and that is perhaps because it was made as a portfolio piece nearly 10 years ago by a chap named Jonathan Lynch, who has subsequently gone on to take up development professionally working previously for Popcap and currently DIGIT, who are the largest game designer in Ireland. So sadly not in adventure games then!

It’s an interesting game and certainly worth taking for a test drive at some point.