With the market literally over-stuffed with first-person shooters and real-time strategy spin-offs, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find a game that truly sets itself apart; one of those barely-known diamonds in the rough. This is why I was all the more happy when someone brought The Experiment to my attention; an adventure title that seems to truly strive for something a little bit different.
The game takes place on a rusted-out supertanker, beached on an island in the middle of nowhere. About 30 years ago, a secret research organization set up a base of operations on this tanker to perform some manner of genetic research. Something has gone horribly wrong however, and now most of the crew has either gone missing, or has perished in horrible ways, leaving rotting corpses, scrapped machinery, and a massive enigma in their wake. The player undertakes the anonymous role of somebody who has gained access to the tanker’s security network, through which they meet the sole survivor of this catastrophe; a scientist named Lea Nichols.
The neat part of the game is that the player does not have any form of direct control over the protagonist; their entire interaction with the game world is through what remains of the tanker’s security grid. This means you can only ‘see’ the world through the various security cameras stationed around the tanker, and interact by opening doors and activating lights and various objects to help guide Lea to her objectives.
Unfortunately things go downhill once you realize that Lea is a little too dependent on your guidance. In order to get her to move somewhere, simply turn a nearby light on or off and she’ll start walking. The downside is that she’ll only move to that specific light and no further (unless scripted to do so). This is okay for the first-time exploration of most areas, but makes backtracking more of a pain than it should be. This also reduces the feeling of being an indirect observer, as Lea rarely acts or moves independently unless you trigger a scripted event.
Despite having to lead the protagonist around by the nose however, the game still provides an incredibly engrossing experience. It’s easy to establish an emotional connection with Lea when she makes it clear how much she needs your help to proceed, as you are the only one with full access to the security system. She’ll help you through things as much as possible however, offering tutorials and providing hints and clues for where to find passwords or crucial pieces of information – this is especially a good thing, as the game throws some real curveballs your way in deciphering documents to find that one password you need (anybody who’s heard of a “Polybius Square” before today, raise your hand…) and requires spending a good deal of time rooting through the base personnel’s private files.
On that subject, the game’s user interface isn’t too bad – the entire shell has the feel of a customized *nix environment to it (I give bonus points for how authentic the loading screens look in this regard) and provides a friendly window-oriented interface to work with. You can have up to three separate security cameras open at one time, but beyond that an unlimited number of dialogues can be open at any given time. This allows you to simultaneously manipulate several aspects of the environment at once while rooting through files or reading a given passkey. My complaint with this however is that the interface gets cluttered very quickly, and it can get clumsy trying to bring one or two windows into focus when needed. Running at a higher resolution doesn’t seem to help much (the interface just scales itself larger), and I really feel the game would have benefited from some kind of dual-monitor display mode to offset this.
On the bright side, this isn’t too much of a problem given how slow-paced the game is. In fact, despite the dark and scary picture the game paints, there really isn’t much danger at all. I never encountered a situation where Lea was actually in danger of dying, as most of the risky situations she ends up in deceptively give you infinite chances of trying over and over again until you get things right. As an example, one situation had me piloting a submarine with Lea inside, with constant warnings from her to be careful not to ram something, and avoid heated zones. No matter how many edges I bumped into or how long I lingered in a hot area however, Lea did little more than complain a lot.
