Holy crap, Gray Matter is out?

[kane_magus]

Gray Matter. An new old-school point-and-click adventure game by Jane Jensen, creator of the Gabriel Knight series. It even has Robert Holmes as the composer.* I hope you can see why I would be interested in this.

But, even so, I'd been only kind of vaguely following this since it was first announced years and years and years ago, and for some reason I had gotten the impression that it was mostly going to end up as vaporware.

But now it has apparently been released already. And there's a PC demo available. It looks like the game is also available on the 360 as well.

* - Just a taste: Gabriel Knight 1 theme (and a few others), Gabriel Knight 1 intro and credits, Wolfgang's theme, Gabriel Knight 2 intro, Gabriel Knight 3 intro. (Well crap, now I want to go play Gabriel Knight again, let alone Gray Matter.)

Comments

[hikarugenji.livejournal.com]

Did you ever play GK3? That's the only one I didn't play: I enjoyed 1 and 2 (1 much more so than 2) and I see they're only $6 each on gog.com.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

Three was good, but I didn't like it quite as much as the first two.

Good points:
- Tim Curry is back as the voice of GK.
- Mosely is back, though unfortunately not voiced by Mark Hamill this time.
- Overall, I think that the game's story is as good as the previous two, even if it does have a rather The Da Vinci Code vibe to it (of course, GK3 predates The Da Vinci Code by a few years), so if you've read that or even just seen the movie, it might dilute the GK3 experience somewhat.

Meh points:
- Graphics, though not too bad for the time, are pretty dated by this point, as it was made during the earlier days of 3D games. I personally don't hold that against it, but some might.
- It contains a few sequel hooks for a game that was never and almost assuredly will never be made (though I can always continue to hope that will change someday), most notably the cliffhanger-ish ending. If you ever do play it, do a search for "gk4" in SIDNEY when you get access to it.
- Some of the puzzles solutions are just bizarre. In fact, I'll go ahead and spoil one of the most ridiculous puzzles I've seen in a game like this (if you don't want to be spoiled, don't click the following Youtube links, though it does serve as a good example of general gameplay as well): getting (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUX_6_VDy5E) the bike (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEzA4l5DHBg) on the first day. Conversely, there might be some things that you, the player, could know or figure out early, but won't be able to act on until you do whatever specific, finicky thing it takes to make Gabriel himself figure it out.
- The story is similar to The Da Vinci Code.

[hikarugenji.livejournal.com]

GK1 and 2 had some pretty unfair puzzles too; like hiding the clock in the plant in GK2 and solving that circle puzzle in the tomb in GK1. Sierra's games have always had that tendency -- the text-based IF community tends to be a little more concerned with that kind of thing.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

Oh man, yeah, I remember that clock thing in GK2. I think that was the first time I needed to look something up in a walkthrough for that game. I guess the "hint" was that the clock vaguely sounded like someone knocking on a door? Heck if I know.

Still, at least that puzzle was just a one-two step thing. Buy the clock and put it in the plant (for seemingly no apparent reason, unless you actually got the sound cue "hint" mentioned above). Compare that to the ridiculous chain of events (http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html) you have to go through to get the bike in GK3. Apparently, even the game designers hated that puzzle (http://www.gabrielknight4campaign.com/cat_hair.php), and it definitely didn't originate with Jane Jensen, despite what Old Man Murray said. Also, the fact that a lot of Jane Jensen's stuff was scrapped and replaced with crap due to "lack of time" is probably a big part of the reason I didn't like it as much as the earlier games.

(This is why I believe that more devs should take the approach of Valve and Blizzard and only release games "when they're ready" rather than adhering to draconian deadlines and ending up releasing half-assed crap. Of course, the problem is that Valve and Blizzard have more money than God now and thus have the luxury of doing that, whereas most devs have to deal with tight-assed publishers who want the game out now now now, no matter what. And, granted, there's also the fear that you'll end up in another Duke Nukem Forever scenario, but I'd hope that would be the exception rather than the rule.)

As for the GK1 circle puzzle... it's been so long since I last played GK1 that I don't even remember it. Unless you're talking about activating the snake mound in Africa... I remember that being pretty annoying, given that I think it was one of the first puzzles in the game that could lead to you actually dying. I think the thing that stumped me for the longest time in GK1 was finding the snake scale at the crime scene near the lake, but that was because it was kind of a hunt-the-pixel sort of thing. I remember having to look at a walkthrough just to know that there even was a snake scale there to find in the first place.

[hikarugenji.livejournal.com]

I remember when I first played GK1 I was so interested in the story that I didn't want to wait to see how it ended, so I cheated on a lot of the game puzzles. I already knew about the scale at the lake because I got Sierra Magazine at that time and they mentioned that in one of their reviews of the game (which might have had some strategy information too, I don't remember).

Man, I'm probably going to download this from GOG.com now.