Trauma

A creative, inventive, and intelligent experiment ... that ultimately fails.

First off, the price tag is cheeky. I'm sure a lot of effort went into making this game, but the same is true for many independent games that are cheap or free. Some humility is in order here. mix of photography and filfm is gorgeous and very evocative, though calling it "real-time 3D technology" is plain deceptive, because the scenes are all in 2D. The voice acting is good enough, the music forgettable but fitting.

Make no mistake, despite the artistic pretense this is intended to be a playable game. As such, it's a bad one: a very hard hidden-object game with "secrets" instead of puzzles. The game might take a few hours to complete if you play it without a walkthrough, but those would be frustrating hours for most of us.

(Note that I am talking about completing the whole game. You can also breeze through it in 45 minutes without seeing much of the secret content and alternate endings of chapters. When reviews say this game is "short and easy," that's what they mean. The whole game is very hard.)

The problem is that the difficulty of finding the collectible objects (photographs) is due entirely to the incredibly obtuse navigation controls: the player is not otherwise presented with challenges requiring creative thought. The perspective is first person, but your normal sense of direction will confuse rather than guide you, because the photographic angles tell you almost nothing about which direction you will be heading or what exits are available. The map you should be building in your head would be a tree-like structure of locations that has almost nothing to do with the physical layout. You'll miss objects not because you are a bad detective, but because you have no idea how to get to where you want to go.

Even with a walkthrough I cannot recommend this game. The revealed secrets do not cohere into a meaningful narrative or image: it's just a few fragments from the life, memories, and observations of a young, middle-class, female European university student. Despite the poetic pomp, there's nothing deep about her mutterings. There is potential for a deeper meaning, but it is left undeveloped.

I'm happy that developers experiment with video games and try to move beyond our expectations of how they should look and feel. In this case, it didn't work out, and it would be nice if the developers acknowledge this and set a more appropriate price tag.