The Moment of Silence

[Scrivener]

Longest Journey fans, this is a great month for us. First of all - Myst 4 is out, and it surpasses all expectations. While it uses the node based style of it's earlier predecessors (read: Not URU or RealMYST) - everything is sharp, stunning, and totally ANIMATED in 360 degreees. There's also an awesome depth-of-field focus effect to give it that little bit of added realism. Best of all, there are plenty of characters to actually interact with. Yes, it has more in common with Journeyman Project than anything else. This is great great stuff.

Second, and the bigger topic of this thread, is the new adventure from german developer House of Tales (the germans do all the great games. Damn their antiviolence laws!). The games is called 'The Moment of Silence' and really brings back memories from The Longest Journey - but with more Deus Ex-like subject matter. Currently there's no planned US release (Americans pretty much only like lousy me-too shooters), but you can either order your UK import from GoGamer (starts shipping tomorrow, the 8th) or download the english demo from 3DGamers.com.

It's only achilles heel is that it suffer from lack of feedback. That is, when you are on the right track - the character tells you so. Seasoned adventure gamers probably wont notice - since you will be able to quickly formulate scenario solutions - and just explore/experiment a bit to solve them. I was able to puzzle through the (fantastic) demo in about 3 hours... and that's constantly making some kind of progress. The voice acting is decent, if not as unbelievably fantastic as TLJ - and you quickly begin to accept the characters as real people with real quirks. Even moreso when you start to get bits of story info. And I guarantee that by the end of the demo you will desperately want to know what happens next.

Between Myst4 and Moment of Silence, November is Nirvanna for gamers who love problem solving and fantastic stories.

What are you waiting for? Go get the demos!