Occasionally game developers decide to shake things up and bit and play around with the tried and true methods of controlling your actions in games. Sometimes this spawns great successes, such as the megahit Dance Dance Revolution. Other times it doesn't work out so well. Lifeline is one of those brave titles that challenges you to think outside the box and try a new method of control, with some success. It's not a game for everyone, however, as some people will find the switch from manual to voice control endlessly frustrating.

The first every space hotel is opening its doors for the first time with a big Christmas Eve party. You've been invited to attend, along with your girlfriend Naomi, and things are just starting to get under way when the lights go out and strange monsters rampage among the guests. You lose consciousness in the attack and when you awaken you are locked in a strange room with a computer terminal and a headset. It only takes moments to figure out that the terminal is connected to every camera in the hotel, and you search for survivors. The first you find is Rio, a spunky waitress who has been locked in a cell. Using the headset you can communicate with her, and it doesn't take long before you both realize that if either of you is going to escape you are going to need to rely on one another.

The game justifies the underlying mechanic well -- you cannot directly affect the world because you are locked in a room. You do have access to the controls to the hotel, which include most of the locks, and you have the ability to communicate with Rio. Rio is athletic but not very bright, so she relies on you to give her direction. This is done using voice recognition -- you will absolutely have to have a headset if you want to play Lifeline. We've all been spoiled by Star Trek and other sci-fi romps where "voice recognition" means any accent, any enunciation, any statement. The hardest thing when you pick up Lifeline and start to direct Rio around is learning to think of your voice as just another controller. You need to control your volume, shouting orders in battle can confuse the voice recognition. Depending on your accent you may need to try different pronunciations for different commands, which can be especially painful if you discover it in the middle of battle. But the hardest part is not the voice recognition itself, but the list of words it will recognize and how objects in the game are handled.

If you are a veteran of text adventure games then you are doubtlessly familiar with the pain and agony of trying to locate the right word for something. In Lifeline a lot of your time will be spent getting Rio to take a closer look at objects. These objects, while helpfully highlighted by little radar blips, are not named at first. As an example, you could be looking at a table with six blips. Let's say there are two stacks of paper, three mugs of different sorts, and a messy pile of you don't know what. "Check paper" will probably get her to look at one of the piles of paper and say "Do you mean this?" When she asks that the radar blip becomes a blue dot, and highlighting it will give you the proper name of the object, in this case we'll say it's a magazine. You read the magazine, but how do you get the other paper? "Check paper" will not work, so you'll end up going through a list like "Check letter", "Check note", "Check memo" until you hit one of the words in the word bank that are associated with the object but not the formal name of the object. This becomes more confusing when you get to the cups, each of which has a different name and none of which have an overlapping word bank, leaving you to throw out every possible word for a cup-shaped object that you can think of. Then there's the pile of you don't know what. You can try "Look down" to get her to look down at the table, and in many cases just getting her to look in the right direction does help. Not in all cases however. Since two of the cups are labeled as being tea cups you decide to try "Check tea". Unfortunately for you there is also a TV in the room, and because "tea" and "TV" are too close, she goes off to inspect it.

While the game certainly has its frustrations and rough spots, it's not all bad. When the voice system works well it really does elevate the game and feels very immersive. The developers have wisely added a rich variety of mini-games that all rely on the voice recognition system, the best of which being a tongue twister challenge that lets you restore Rio's health without spending heal capsules. There's also some surprisingly touching moments where Rio softens and asks you things such as what the first word your mother taught you was. Adding to this are good visuals, passable audio, and a nice combat system with target-able body parts, which emphasizes skill and timing over liberal use of the auto-fire command.

Lifeline is not a game for everyone. It's quirky and the controls feel like a toddler's first step-- wobbly and unsure but the beginning of something wonderful. People who enjoy quirky Japanese games with unique premises such as Disaster Report will likely be more delighted than frustrated with the game. We look forward to seeing where the next step in voice recognition-driven games will take us.