The Stack

Just another pro forma post because I played The Watchmaker a little more but didn’t get anywhere. My basic problem is that the explorable area of the game is large enough, and full of enough pointless furniture, that you really need some sort of guidance as to what to do, at least in the early part, and the game just doesn’t provide that guidance. That is, it provides some guidance, but not the guidance you need.

Right now, there are two things telling me what needs doing. First, there’s a list of pending tasks in my PDA, along with a summary of discoveries. I do like this feature — it even highlights newly-added entries! Right now, my task list contains two items: gaining access to the old wing of the castle, which is closed to the public, and checking out the bottom of a dry well in case there’s a secret chamber down there or something. But I can’t actually do either of them. The listing for the well specifically notes that I’ll have to wait for the gardener to leave the area so I can sneak in unobserved. Time in this game only advances in response to plot events, so it’s basically telling me that I’ll have to get some other arbitrary unrelated thing to happen first. I guess this is the main purpose of the list: to let the player know that they should try things again later.

The other thing telling me where to direct my attention is the camera. When I leave the mausoleum, it first zooms in on that chessboard, just in case I didn’t notice it. “Look at the chessboard! It’s important!”

Now here’s the kicker. I didn’t want to resort to hints this early in the game, but I also didn’t want to spend another few hours wandering around aimlessly, so I’ve looked up a walkthrough, and it turns out that my next step is actually to check out some areas I hadn’t found yet because they’re only accessible via a service lift that wasn’t working before. Presumably it gets fixed when you advance time by observing the greenhouse explosion, but I hadn’t tried it again. Because I had no particular reason to think it had been fixed, and the game was pretty firmly directing my attention elsewhere.

I’m thinking that this game suffers for being played out of its time. This sort of design makes a lot more sense if the player is expected to want to prolong the experience of just walking around in a fully 3D-rendered environment, randomly opening cupboards and things. This may not even have been a realistic expectation back in 2001 — certainly, I myself gave up on it pretty quickly at the time. But at least it was closer to true then than it is now.

Not much progress in The Watchmker today. I keep exploring the castle and its grounds, and I keep on finding not much of importance or interest. It’s like the game doesn’t want me to play. Not that it’s hostile to the idea and puts up intractable obstacles, but that it’s totally indifferent to whether I play or not. It just gives us a large collection of rooms to explore, and no reason to explore any of them. The rooms are full of a vast array of furniture items with utterly generic descriptions. Occasionally there’s a locked door, or an NPC who won’t let us search their room, which provides some hope that there’s something interesting that the game isn’t letting me see yet. But I won’t be surprised if at some future point I manage to unlock a door and find it conceals just another roomful of generic furniture.

The NPC dialogue, too, is mostly fairly bland and uninformative. You can ask everyone about their relationships to each other, but you can’t ask them about the cultists or the doomsday machine you’re looking for. I suppose part of the problem here is that this is a mystery in which the crime hasn’t happened yet, giving you nothing in particular to interrogate people about. But also, part of the problem is just that the game is trying to take itself seriously. I’m thinking that there’s a reason that the best-beloved point-and-click adventures have been the ones built around wacky humor. If every line of dialogue is likely to produce a punch line, that in itself provides a motivation to ask everyone about everything.

Just one thing of real interest has happened: On first exiting to the castle’s grounds, a greenhouse vibrates oddly, then blows out two holes on opposite sides, as if shot through by an invisible cannonball. The player characters observe the direction that the glass fell on the side “towards the mausoleum”, which I suppose is a hint to explore the mausoleum, although left to myself I think I’d feel like checking out the direction the shot came from is more likely to yield answers about how it happened. At any rate, the mausoleum contains what appears to be a genuine adventure-game puzzle, involving a chessboard whose squares make clicking sound when pressed. Perhaps I’ll feel better about this game once I’ve solved that and been put on the track to more puzzles.

I thought I’d continue with the point-and-click adventures, but this time do one that’s on the Stack proper. My first attempt was Jazz and Faust, a game that I’ve heard nothing good about, but picked up anyway when it hit the bargain bins, because decent games of its type were still kind of sparse on the ground even in 2002. I played it a bit back then, but got very stuck early on. I’ll have more to say about it if I ever get it running properly, but for now, it’s going onto my expanding sub-stack of games to try again if and when I get a Windows 98 machine working.

Some notes about it for my future self: On my main gaming machine, it installed without problems, but the FMV video sequences played very badly, essentially alternating between playing a brief bit of video without sound and playing sound while the video was either frozen or playing very slowly. The video are right there in the install directory in .bik format, and played without any hitches under VLC. (A lot of the other game assets are simply installed uncompressed to the hard drive, too. All the character textures, for example. This game could be very easily modded if anyone wanted to.) From what I’ve peeked at, it looks like the videos may be an important part of the game, so I don’t want to just ignore the problem. So I tried installing the game on a cast-off Windows 10 laptop that I recently obtained from a neighbor for cheap, and it plays the videos in-game just fine. I don’t know what the relevant difference is between the two machines. However, on both, the framerate in the game proper is low enough to make it unplayable. How it manages to run slower on a modern machine than it did on 2002 hardware, I don’t know. This is after installing a patch, which was necessary to keep the game from crashing.

Also, Windows 10 puts a window border around the game, even though it’s playing full-screen. It did the same for Kao. I don’t know why. Both games run at a rather low resolution by today’s standards, of course, but I don’t remember this happening before.

Anyway, after abandoning that, I picked another game of similar stature from the Stack: The Watchmaker, a very cheesy mystery about searching an opulent Austrian castle for a device that some cultists are planning to use to end the world by overloading the ley lines. This game was made by the same people as Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy, although the passage of years between games means that they’re now working in fully 3D-modeled environments that don’t look nearly as good as Nightlong‘s pixel art. The English localization (from Italian) is awkward, and isn’t helped by the voice acting, which sounds not so much like acting as just reciting words off a page without regard to their meaning or context. Still, unlike Nightlong, it runs on modern hardware and Windows 10 without any problems at all. At this point, I’ll take it.