Did you know that water, when combined with rock salt and ferrous sulfate makes hydrochloric acid? If not, you’re going to be quite stuck just a few minutes into Undercover: Operation Wintersun, an adventure game set in Europe during World War II. The HCl puzzle is a stop-you-dead moment that may keep many players from discovering that the game, though flawed, is highly enjoyable and refreshingly intelligent.
You play as Dr. John Russell, a brainy Brit who finds himself thrust in the middle of a dangerous spy game. Despite being more comfortable in a classroom than a war zone, Russell is the one guy capable of figuring out if a set of Nazi blueprints for a uranium bomb are legit, so he’s sent with all due haste to Germany. Russell is paired up with the most pathetic excuses for spies this side of Mad Magazine, Peter Graham and Anne Tyler, who are perfectly happy to let Russell do all the heavy lifting. Any situation they encounter, be it a locked door or a sleeping German soldier, is met with a shrug and a “Well, what do you think, doctor?” I think that I’m a civilian and you’re a spy so I’ll be over here reading Life magazine while you deal with the problem, thank you very much.
Of course, that wouldn’t make for a very interesting game, so it’s lucky that Russell is as smart as he is. The puzzles of Undercover are, for the most part, all quite logical and make sense in a real-world way. There are exceptions, like desk drawers that have to be manipulated just so before they open, but for the most part, approaching an in-game situation the way you would if you encountered it in real life will put you on the road to success.
That said, Undercover is also savvy enough to know that, as an adventure fan, you’ve likely been around the gaming block a time or two, and does its best to get you off of puzzle-solving autopilot. For example, as in most other adventure games, you collect items that will later be used to solve all manner of puzzles, but your pockets will end up stuffed with far more swag than you’ll actually need, providing you all manner of red herrings to pursue. When presented with a locked door, a seasoned gamer might notice the newspaper and pencil in his inventory and assume the solution is simply to slide the paper under the door, then poke the key out of the hole with the pencil. Undercover knows you’ve seen this trick before, though, and lets you go through the entire process only to discover that the key is too big to fit under the door. Gotcha.
While this does add to the game’s appeal by requiring players to actually think things through, it can lead to some unfortunate situations. Remember that hydrochloric acid? You’ll have an armful of cleaning materials that you can add to the bottle of water, and the game is more than happy to let you get the concoction wrong. The only trouble is, there doesn’t seem to be a way to get said liquid out of the bottle once you’ve screwed it up, so if you don’t have a convenient save file, you’re a wee bit screwed.
The puzzles also do a fine job of advancing the story, which plays out like a page from Spy Mad Libs. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to steal the secret plans for the (uranium bomb) from the (Nazis). The secret door is behind the (bookshelf), but first you’ll have to (electrocute) the guard. It’s not the deepest narrative in the world, but it gives you heroes to root for and villains to boo and sometimes that’s all you really need.
The only real knock to be made against Undercover is its god-awful voice acting, which is so bad it’s positively distracting. Russell is the lone exception, but his lines are delivered with a languidness on par with someone who has just had a third helping of Thanksgiving turkey, which seems a bit out of place when he’s commenting on how much danger he’s in. My advice: turn off the sound altogether and just read the dialogue as it pops up. Sleepiness aside, the professor is still an extremely likeable guy, and you feel good about helping such an unassuming hero save the day.
