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Casual Friday

Today is part two in the list of games that have outlived their welcome. That is it is a game that started a franchise that produced far more sequels than the original game merited. Today’s game is Grim Facade - Mystery of Venice. It’s another game from ERS Games, a company that has seeminly cornered the market on un-needed sequels.

This game is a little unusual in that sequels usually deteriorate in quality. Unfortunately, Mystery of Venice, the first game in the series, was, itself, a fairly mediochre game. And yet it still managed to spawn eight additional games. Go figure!

The basic story is that there was a plague in Venice that killed, among many others, the Doge’s eldest son. Blaming the son’s death on the sins and debauchery of the Venetian aristocracy, the Doge forms a secret society called the Redemption. Another plague descends on Venice after the Doge’s death, and the general populace rises against the Redemption, which recedes from public view. What happens is that the wife a daughter of a current aristocrat are kidnapped. Presumably by a surviving member of the Redemption. You are hired by the aristocrat to rescue his wife and daughter and to make sure the perpetrator receives his just due.

I can’t tell you when exactly the story takes place. But the first Doge came to power in the early 1540s, and the last Doge died in 1797. So at least it is known that the story must take place sometime between 1540 and the early 1800s.

Which makes it a bit problematic when so many of the hidden objects are so obviously not period appropriate. There are also more that a few problems with bad translations of object definitions.

ERS Games is known for gorgeous graphics, and it does not disappoint here. But it does disappoint on so many other levels. Absolutely horrible voice acting. A musical sound track that, while entertaining, loops at incredibly short time intervals. Hidden objects that don’t disappear from the screen once you click on them. Hidden object “prizes” that are awarded without them being in the hidden object screens.

The puzzles in the game are good, but, with the exception of two, fairly easy.

Bottom line for me is wondering how this game ever made it out of QC and Beta, let alone spark a franchise that currently total nine games. There have been some improvements. Voice acting started to get better in the third game. I would say period-specific objects also improved, but that was a result of moving all subsequent games into the 20th century. Hard to go wrong there. If you were looking for more improvements, sorry, that’s about it.

Somebody is buying this stuff. For those of us that want to improve the image of casual games, this crap gives us all a bad name. Might as well point out the bad as well as the good. I would hate for an adventurer to play this game and think this is the best the genre has to offer.

And thus ends the second chapter. One more to go. I think you will be surprised by the next one.

I agree. Although I think some of the early Midnight Mystery games and the E. A. Poe series from ERS games, try to be historically accurate to the time the stories took place as well as, in the case of the Poe series, as true to the story as possible. The latter I take with a grain of salt. Because if the game was totally true to the story it would be an interactive movie rather than a game.

As for the rest? I doubt much, if any effort is taken to maintain historical accuracy.