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The
Arrangement
Developer:
Michael B. Clark To
be fair, The Arrangement warns
you pretty early on that it is likely to be a short game.
It starts out with a series of flashbacks introducing the character
of Annie, a new bride with some sort of bizarre secret in her past.
Once the gameplay begins, you discover that five years have passed
since Annie’s wedding and you are playing the character of Annie’s
husband, Richard Sullivan, a number-crunching attorney.
It’s your fifth wedding anniversary and you have to finish off a
report before meeting Annie at the new house you intend to purchase and
then whisking her off for an anniversary retreat to your cabin in the
woods. Upon arriving at the
house, you get a phone call from the mysterious and menacing Fortrey, who
informs you that he has taken Annie, that she came with him willingly, and
that if you ever want to see your wife again you must complete a series of
puzzles and challenges within one hour or she will disappear forever.
In an odd bit of self-consciousness, Fortrey admonishes you,
“Don’t worry. This is an
adventure game… your hour is limitless.”
It turns out that his warning is more actual fact than plot
mechanism. Not
that there isn’t much to enjoy in The
Arrangement. The plot
alone may be worth the purchase price to some jaded gamers.
It is original, bizarre and twisted, combining elements of horror,
science fiction and psychological thrillers.
The only thing I’ve run across even remotely like it in the
adventure game world is the online game snippet Sofia's
Debt, which may have been inspired by some of The
puzzles are also generally fun, if not terribly taxing.
They include a trivia quiz, a “Concentration” game, a
cryptogram, a put-the-pictures-in-the-right-order puzzle and other
standard fare, along with a couple of interesting and original puzzles.
None of them will stump the average adventure game player (or even
make him sweat), but they are generally well-presented and entertaining.
The toughest and most time-consuming puzzle involves matching a
series of floor plans to the actual layout of a museum-like room.
I spent about fifteen minutes on this puzzle, easily making it the
game’s “stumper.” Despite
the easy- to mid-level challenge of the puzzles, I did
find myself hitting the walkthrough a couple of times and this also
contributed to my short playing time.
Why glance at a walkthrough if the puzzles didn’t stump me?
Because Let’s
leave off talking about the value of The
Arrangement for a minute and look at the meat and potatoes… the
intrinsic gameplay features that matter to gamers regardless of how long a
game lasts. Graphically, The
Arrangement is a mixed bag. It
uses the time-tested first-person node-based movement system.
Panning is not available at the nodes.
Some of the artwork was quite attractive… even striking in
places. There are a series of
close-ups of Annie’s father that really caught my eye and made me say,
“Cool!” The spider motif
that runs through the game was quite well presented.
In other places, the graphics are, frankly, amateurish; blocky and
unrealistically simplistic. I
was reminded at times of the worst of the screenshots from Lighthouse
or even earlier Sierra games. And
the “jabbering jaw” when characters speak was cartoonish enough to
make me laugh. It is easy to
say that Clark is an entirely one-man operation and it is unfair to expect
top-notch (or even medium-notch) graphical presentation given the
financial and technical limitations of such a “garage” product.
However, when a game is released by a major publisher and priced
the same as other major new releases, that is the standard one must judge
against, and The Arrangement
certainly doesn’t stack up. With
the one-man-production bar having been raised by such games as Dark
Fall and Alida, I
hesitate to get into the voice acting because, frankly, I don’t want to
be burned at the stake. At
least one of the voices was performed by someone who is well-known and
much-beloved in the adventure game community.
And… well… she stank. The
voice acting in general through the game was laughably poor.
It didn’t reach the depths of Black
Mirror or The Watchmaker,
but it was pretty awful; largely toneless and uninflected.
John Bell provides most of the male voices and he is the one
shining spot. His characters
were at least passable, and his portrayal of the evil Fortrey was right on
target and actually quite delightful.
Got Game may want to consider spending a little of their own money
to re-record the other voices before the game’s release, however.
The rest of the sound effects were very well done, and the music
was generally quite good, unobtrusively creating an atmosphere of slow
suspense without ever being noticeable for its own sake. The
game mechanics were generally fair to good.
Movement and manipulation were accomplished by the standard arrow
cursor that turns into a pointing hand when you pass it over a hotspot and
a direction arrow when you are near the edge of the screen, indicating
which directions you can turn. The
Save/Load/Options menu is accessed by a right-click, and there are
unlimited save slots. A red
box in the upper left of the screen holds your inventory; rolling the
cursor over it makes your inventory items drop down from the top of the
screen. You click-and-drag an
item to drop it on a “use” spot.
(This is an annoyance in one location where the hotspot is so high
on the screen that it nearly overlaps your inventory item box.)
There was one serious flaw with the navigation interface: in a few
locations it is necessary to move diagonally.
The arrow cursor to let you know this isn’t near the edge of the
screen like the standard right and left arrows, but is usually inset well
into the screen area. Thus
the only way to know that such diagonal movement is possible in some
places is to do the old “scan the cursor back-and-forth over the entire
screen” trick. There is
also one and only one item
which can be rotated in close-up view by finding this non-intuitive
movement cursor. One
aspect of The Arrangement
guaranteed to please the TLJ-haters is the absence of conversation trees.
Though there are numerous conversations, you have no choice in your
dialogue. A character speaks
to Richard and then the text of what he will say in response appears
beside the picture of the character to which Richard is speaking.
Clicking on the text makes the character go on with their next bit
of dialogue. “You” have
no voice yourself, your dialogue being presented only in the text.
You can “click through” the shorter bits of character dialogue
if you are replaying a portion of the game. [Ed.: This review has been revised slightly from its original version. The revision was made due to revised information provided by the publisher and solely in our desire to correct any factual errors on our part.] |