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Casual Friday

I often give ERS Game Studios a hard time for beating its various franchises to death. That criticism is justified. But there is another side to the story. ERS is also one of the very few companies that produces casual games without HO scenes.

The above scene is from Reality Show - Fatal Shot. Other HO-free games from ERS include Dark Alleys: Penumbra Motel and two Azada games.

In Fatal Shot you play a police detective. You are contacted by a distraught wife who believes her husband was murdered while he was participating on a reality TV show. She also believes the murder was part of a ratings gimmick not just an unfortunate coincidence as LTV Studios, the producer of the series is saying.

The game supposedly takes place in San Francisco. Although, aside from the opening cut scene that shows the Golden Gate Bridge in all its glory, there is little else in the game that identifies the game’s location. Having lived there for several years, I say that with some authority.

Because there are no HO scenes, you need to acquire your inventory in other ways. Sometimes the items are in plain sight. Sometimes they are hidden, such as underneath a pile of leaves. Sometimes a puzzle requires solving. The puzzles range from relatively easy to difficult. There are, unfortunately, a number of puzzles that are downright tedious. One example is a puzzle that requires you to guide a forklift through a maze of sorts in order to deliver six crates to a loading dock. The solution is readily apparent, but each crate requires approximately 25 moves. That’s 150 moves for all six crates! The Skip button is very tempting after the first 50 or so moves.

The graphics are up to ERS standards. That is they are excellent. Music is good, but repetitive. Voice acting is good, but very familiar. And by familiar I mean the actors have all supplied voices for other ERS games. So your first thought is not to listen to what’s being said, (there are subtitles,) but to try and identify the characters the voice actor played in other games.

It’s a very good game, and there are some surprising, if not predictable, plot twists.

Urban also hinted at a sequel which never arrived. This game did not.

Another similar game, Death on the Silver Screen, is one of the CCPT nominees.