Review of Overclocked: A History of Violence by emric

I guess I’m still kinda used to the old days of adventure gaming where almost everything was fantasy, sci-fi or comic. But playing a modern adventure thriller like overclocked, exposed me to a whole new cerebral level of engagement in gaming. I felt something quite similar when i played the even greater investigative thriller “Still Life”. But Overclocked is still a fantastic achievement from German production house “House of Tales”.

It’s a unique type of gameplay where as a leading psychiatrist you are called in to reconstruct memories of 5 recently admitted amnesiac youths. You work with these patients by trying to find the right stimuli to trigger their recent memories and then as they begin to recount them, you play out the memory scenes as the patient. Mostly, these scenes/memories are provided in the order of most recent and then proceed backwards. So the experience is sometimes like piecing together events, kinda like in Christopher Nolan’s film ‘Memento’.

What gives the game even greater depth is how the main character’s (psychiatrist David McNamara) work relates to his personal life and his own dark issues. So on many levels i thought this game was extremely well executed.

In the middle it began to feel slightly monotonous, but this drop in pace didn’t last long at all.

The game is very linear, but I don’t mind this style at all. I never needed to consult a walk-thru as all puzzles were quite logical. The number of locations is less than in most adventure games and overall it felt marginally on the short side.

Voice acting, interface, music, quality of writing and cutscenes were all great. Visually, the game environments didn’t lend themselves to be stunning, but they were nevertheless quite adequate.

Read the review »

Time Played: 10-20 hours