Gray Matter

[toblix]

I'm leaning towards buying it online, and then installing it from TPB.

[lobotomy42]

For what it's worth, I bought the disc-based version from Amazon.com and didn't have any issues. If there was DRM beyond "Is the CD in the drive?" I didn't notice it.

[syntheticgerbil]

Thanks for the write up Lobotomy. I'm not completely interested in this game, and somehow I feel like it'll be mediocre, but I'm still wanting to play it soon.

When I have money to burn, I'm probably going to order the UK boxed version.

[Tanukitsune]

I'm resurrecting this thread to say the game is 50% at the Adventure Shop until New Year.

[syntheticgerbil]

Rereading and resurrecting this thread because I finally played through this game over a month ago. I feel so mixed, the game could have been amazing, a lot of what was holding it back was the production values, which I guess I expected in 2010. I'm a little surprised that I was so negative about Samantha's look in my first post, because she's actually very pretty. Maybe I have since developed a thing for the goth look again, like in middle school, I don't know. But her look was very snazzy and also well suited to being a magician. Although I guess I didn't realize this game starred a magician either. I also didn't realize I spend half the game playing as sad phantom of the opera dude.

 

Anyway, I like the story a lot and the music is great as well. The pacing was a bit slow, but I was constantly intrigued, so it worked well with that. I don't think any of it felt rushed as sometimes happens in mysteries except for the reveal of

obsessed girl

at the end. I don't know what the fuck was going on with that but it was just stupid. I mean I am completely on board with

the character being creepy and obsessed with the doctor but the supernatural powers came out of nowhere, were not explained, and just reeked of Deus Ex Machina. They weren't even incredibly necessary to the story anyway, so it's just a bout of bad writing on Jensen's part. I don't know if that plot point even belonged or if it was just executed badly on the game maker's part. A lot of it was just how stupid and underwhelming that little face off at the end looked and played. The effects work was pitiful and it just seemed like amateur Akira time. At least the cutscene afterwards saved it and it didn't become some kind of David Cage bullshit. It was only that little section, so I'm accept that shortcoming in the end.

 

I must give a lot of credit to the fleshing out of the David character. The dumb mask was a bit jarring at first, but I liked the style. I felt so bad for this guy and the loss of his wife. Once you play as him and just click around on things, you really start getting more in depth on his pain and sympathizing. I imagine someone who has actually experienced that kind of loss would find this hard to play.

 

Puzzles were all fine until the last big area with the strange gaudy underground area. Most of the clues did not make sense and I was often solving puzzles before knowing why or how. I had to cheat a few times because you couldn't get items until you knew what to do with them and since there was such a deluge of crap in each room that you could not take, I didn't think to come back to certain items. This was the only time I cheated in the game. Gray Matter did have a habit the whole way through of not letting you pick up things or do things until you knew about them, but since you go through the same areas the whole game before the last chapter, I had everything pretty well mapped out in my head. It's hard for me to say whether this is bad adventure game design or good adventure game design, because I've heard criticism both ways. On one hand it can be frustrating that you can't do something you need to do because you missed some bit of dialogue and you are a step ahead of the game, but on the other hand a lot of people get annoyed when you are just randomly able to go around solving puzzles without even knowing why or what your goal is. Either way I didn't really feel the game was overall unfair in that manner.

 

The magic book was a bit awkward because all of the tricks are written for specific situations that would never really be in an actual magic book. The book makes it seem like being a magician is about using slight of hand and pandering for the purpose of stealing, pranking, and manipulating because the point where a performing magician reveals that everything is fine is not a part of Samantha's trick instructions. I mean most magicians aren't using magic tricks as a means to solve mysteries, so the tricks are pretty much tailored to alleviate confusion within the game. I suppose writing in a bunch of extra tricks you never use but pad out the book could help (much like Kyrandia 2), but I can imagine that would make the game a bit too hard.

 

So here it is, the big negative: the production values. They really fuck up the game and tone in so many parts. I had no problem with the painted animatic style cutscenes like some reviews, but I hated how inconsistent they tended to be. Sometimes an artist would paint a beautiful scene with well constructed characters and then it might switch to another scene that is painted by someone incredibly unskilled, with ugly characters, sloppy brush strokes, and bad anatomy. I'm assuming there was at least one or two artists that were really good and the rest were just painted by amateurs. I could usually tell by the hair rendering, where some scenes I'd see detailed brush strokes on the hair arrangement with bounced light and everything and other scenes someone just shit some shitty blotches on the top of a character's head. What the fuck? Such bad quality control. Unfortunately this ended up harming some of the most emotional cutscenes as I was being taken out of the game by being angry at bad drawings. I can't even imagine why they would ever assign the crappy artists to the essential scenes of David at the lake house.

 

The backgrounds and most of the character models were very pretty, but everything was so poorly animated that I can't imagine why some reviewers would have rather had the cutscenes done with the real time models. Everyone tended to move slow and flail around in idiotic awkward gestures. The animation during conversations was either dull or had people mindlessly waving around. No one was syncing up to what they were saying one bit. The little POV box of Samantha's face on the bottom left had the wrong lens applied to it, so she looked warped and awkward down there the whole game.

 

And the last cherry on top is the problem with nearly every modern adventure developed by studios that aren't Telltale: shitty voice acting. I don't know where these companies find these people but so many lines tended to be delivered awkwardly that it often made me feel like the dialogue was subpar even though it wasn't necessarily written that way. At least David's actor was fine, but Samantha's voice actress had so many cringe worthy moments of peppy dialogue that sounded like it was being read by a girl scout. This didn't really match here and she was often loud and not following the tone of the dialogue. Many of the accents were just shit and to make things worse, characters were often not mixed at the same volume, meaning I had to turn it up loud to listen to someone soft while Samantha screamed all of her replies. Ugh. Adventure games are so dependent on story and dialogue and I wish companies would budget to hire the most professional voice actors out there, because fucking it up with a bunch of amateurs seriously detracts from the game experience.