You've got to be very original and creative to think about the concepts and ideas that are shown in The Experiment. You've got to be even more original and creative in order to actually make them work. Seeing that I gave this game the score of 4 out of 10, you may guess how well it worked for me.
The Good: In The Experiment you're not controlling your main character directly, but youYou've got to be very original and creative to think about the concepts and ideas that are shown in The Experiment. You've got to be even more original and creative in order to actually make them work. Seeing that I gave this game the score of 4 out of 10, you may guess how well it worked for me.
The Good: In The Experiment you're not controlling your main character directly, but you communicate with her via the security cameras in the building. This is clearly meant to be an adventure game, but not your same old stuff - something rather new, as you'll have to guide your protagonist and help her out in various ways using only the cameras and access to the files of different people who were the main character's colleagues, until something apparently went wrong. The story is slowly revealed as you're exposed to the different documents&emails of the employees and advancing with Lea throughout the base. The developers did manage to make SOME enthusiastic puzzles during the game just enough to make you feel that you're doing some more than just turning on and off security cameras.
The Bad: What seems to be an intriguing new kind of adventure, simply does not work. It seems the devs really have tried to give you a diverse experience but eventually it all starts to feel extremely repetitive. For a big part of the game I felt I was doing more research and "office" jobs as I ran through documents and stuff of the kind, looking for information and mainly passwords. You'll rarely encounter any more characters, or any sense of danger or excitement. As I waited for Lea to slowly move from spot to spot, while not letting her get out of my sight by switching on and off another security camera every few seconds, I started to lose my patience and just wanted this to end already. And the gameplay was not the only reason, as much as is hurts to say.
The Ugly: All that was mentioned above I could forgive if the game offered anything to drive me forward and make me WANT to go on. That didn't happen much. The story does have a potential of being a good one, but ends up feeling tedious and annoying altogether with the gameplay.
The main character is the one you'll see and hear most of the game, and, she is quite annoying to say the least, with clunky animations and monotonous voice which seemed to lack any sort of emotion even in the most "dramatic" moments of the game (not too many).
The soundtrack was very rich, yet somewhat bizarre, and ranged from acceptable to slightly annoying at times, but rarely felt like it actually fit the events of the game.
The graphics also ranged from OK to plain ugly, even in the "exotic" parts of the game (there are some) which ended up looking dead and blunt, and not too interesting to look at.
All these fact summarize to a very tedious experience, BUT, join the fact that the game is rather buggy in almost every aspect - The interface which is not too friendly and comfortable anyway, will sometimes not yield to your will as you'll beg for Lea to do what you meant her to do while she goes around and does something completely different. That is, IF she moves at all, because at times she'll simply stop moving, and you'll have no idea if that is because of a bug which made her freeze, because she simply "can't" see your signals, or because something just interrupts her actions. And all that may happen just before the game would randomly crush (although to me that happened rarely).
The lack of friendly interface makes it tough to enjoy even the sections where the gameplay gets some diversity, e.g. you're going to control a robot, you're going to control a sort of submarine, you're going to "communicate" with some sort of alien species in their own language using a language pack, but all these would feel extremely buggy and unpolished like the rest of the game.
The game rather disappointed me as it COULD be so good, but it simply didn't manage to be any good in almost any aspect. It ended up being a very tiring and time consuming experience for me, and it really felt like the real Experiment here is to figure out how many players would actually get through this game.… Expand
The Experiment (2007)Your Score0 out of 10User Score
