The Tunguska Game Event (Secret Files: Tunguska (PC))

Member Name: collingwood21

Product:	Secret Files: Tunguska (PC)
Date:	27/03/07 (288 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Detailed background graphics, Some good puzzles, Nice interface

Disadvantages: Bad voice acting, Too many cliches, Dull characters

The release of “Broken Sword 3” in 2003 seems to have sparked something of a renaissance in “point and click” adventure games, a genre that only a few years previously had seemed to have been killed off by game designers as being unforgivably old-fashioned. Point and click adventures have been around since the start of video gaming, and despite games getting progressively more violent and action-orientated over time, they have managed to survive and are still around now (albeit looking rather better than they used to). I used to be a big fan of old 2D adventure games such as the “Monkey Island” series, and personally I welcome the fact that new adventure titles are being designed with the all the benefits of modern graphics and sound behind them, and that a new generation of gamers are being introduced into what can be a very absorbing type of game to play. Riding this new wave of popularity comes “Secret Files: Tunguska”, a committed old-style title with not an action sequence or timed challenge in sight, that was released late in 2006. This game met a mixed reception, and by the January 2007 sales it was already being offered for a knock down price; but for a mere £8.99 I was willing to find out just how well modern point and click games were being designed.


**Plot Synopsis**
The intriguing premise of “Tunguska” is that the plot is based around a real occurrence known as the Tunguska Event or Great Siberian Explosion. In the early morning of June 30th 1908, something exploded with the force of 2,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs in the remote Tunguska region of Siberia, felling millions of trees over an area of 6,000 square km. The explosion could be seen from 1,000km away and witnesses reported seeing a long object fall from the sky, which was illuminated in a blue-white light. Strangely, there was little scientific curiosity about the explosion at the time, and as a result there is still a good deal of mystery surrounding what actually happened. Did a meteoroid explode in the atmosphere? Was it a comet that crashed to earth? A black hole? A UFO crash site? A secret weapon test? German developers Fusionsphere have decided on their own explanation (hint: not one of the more rational ones) and put it at the core of this game.

Set against this historical backdrop comes our modern day heroine Nina Kalenkov, one of those beautiful-but-smart, strong-but-vulnerable types beloved of game developers (think Lara Croft in tight jeans). The story begins when Nina’s father Vladimir Kalenkov, a Russian scientist living in Berlin, is visited at work by another gaming archetype, the mysterious hooded figure. He subsequently disappears, with his office left in shambles and the local police being less than helpful. Deciding to take matters into her own carefully manicured hands, Nina enlists the help of her father’s hunky colleague Max Gruber and begins investigating. In the style of all the best adventure games, money and real world practicality are no obstacle to plot, and we set off on a globetrotting storyline that provides some interesting locations (but leaves you feeling glad that game characters don’t leave carbon footprints).

The plot manages (just) to remain interesting enough to keep you playing, although ventures over into being silly and tenuous at frequent intervals – Nina will travel half way around the world on the flimsiest of evidence – or keeps falling back on tired stereotypes such as sneaking into military installations and investigating spooky castles. With a little humour or imagination such settings could have worked well, but as it was they felt rather jaded. The characters also leave a lot to be desired. The combination of a young couple who obviously have feelings for each other was done first (and done better) in “Broken Sword”, and our heroes seem to have no personalities to speak of. Nina’s defining characteristics are her tight jeans and worrying about her father. Max seems to be capable of nothing more complex than smiling a lot and liking Nina.


**Gameplay**
The gameplay is a classic third person point and click style design, with some nice touches added to it. “Tunguska” has nine locations that you reach sequentially by progressing through the game, with movie sequences feeding you more plot between each of the locations. Each location is typically made up of between two and four detailed static screens where your character can interact with objects, collect anything that isn’t nailed down for their inventory, and speak to anyone who happens to be loitering about. You usually start each location with nothing in your inventory; each works as a self-contained level, thus eliminating the annoying backtracking across large numbers of locations (all accessible at the same time) that some older games favoured.

A good deal of thought also seems to have been put into the interface for “Tunguska”. One of the big failings of point and click games used to be that every time you entered a new location you would have to carefully “sweep” the screen with your cursor to find the hotspots you could interact with; it was often the case that you found yourself stuck for a long time because you had failed to find the 1 pixel wide key object that would enable you to progress hidden in the darkest part of the most obscure location, which could be incredibly frustrating. “Tunguska” has neatly sidestepped this problem by providing players with a magic “search scene” button. Click it, and all the hotspots and exits are magically lit up for you to investigate. This really helps you to progress smoothly through the game, as it ensures that it is very difficult to become stuck because you didn’t find a certain object, room or puzzle. Of course, there will doubtless be some purists who will argue that this makes the game too easy, but personally I like my games to have a minimum of frustration in them.

All the action is controlled with the mouse in a well thought out and wonderfully simple to use manner. Hover the cursor over a hot spot and a little image of the mouse pops up on screen – if the right button is highlighted, then you can right-click with your mouse to get a description of what Nina or Max is seeing; if the left is highlighted you can left-click to interact with or pick up the object, and if both are highlighted then you can both examine and interact with the hotspot. This technique is also applied to the myriad objects that the standard adventure game character can store in their very tight jeans: left-click to pick up an item from your inventory, then hover the object over hotspots and other items you have collected to see if the mouse icon lights up, and if it does, you can combine objects. This system means it is very quick and easy to see what can be combined or used on hotspots, but it also has a downside. As checking object combinations is so easy, it becomes tempting to just try everything with everything else to solve puzzles rather than thinking it through. Having said that, some of the puzzles encountered in this game are so bizarre, illogical and counter-intuitive that you would never think of them unaided. For example, to use a piece of rubber you have collected on a Y-shaped section of metal to make a catapult has a certain logic to it. But who would have thought that to use a bone on a vacuum cleaner would be a sensible way to proceed?

Another promising touch was the inclusion of the diary, where major plot points and clues are recorded for you to refer back to during the game. While most of the puzzles are solved with the use of inventory objects, there are a few harder ones doted through the game that the developers like to refer to (rather grandly) as “riddles”. The riddles are puzzles such as finding passwords to open safes, for instance. The diary has a special section that is intended to give you hints about the riddles, but the hints you get vary from being uselessly vague to giving you the answer outright, so I don’t think this element worked as well as it could have done.


**Graphics and Sound**
Visually, it looks like as much care and attention has been taken on the backgrounds as on the interface. The designers have gone for a realistic graphic style, with plenty of detail, good lighting effects and some nice environmental animations in place. The 3D characters – which themselves are not at all bad to look at – blend in well with the scenery, although they do move slowly through it, and the interaction with the objects can be a bit ropey in places, with hands operating door handles that are at least 6 inches away in the game world, for instance. The facial expressions are supposed to be adapted to the speech when the characters talk, but this has limited success, largely because these facial expressions were designed for the original German dialogue. It is not very noticeable and doesn’t really detract from the game, though, especially as I chose to follow the subtitles rather than listen to the speech for the most part. The cut scenes are impressive and enjoyable to watch, with many having a very cinematic feel to them.

The sound fares less well. Music is kept to a minimum, and where it was used, it was unimpressive and unmemorable. The absence of sound is compensated for in many of the outdoor locations, where ambient noises such as birdsong are a welcome addition to the atmosphere of the game. I wish that such touches had been used on the internal locations as well, as buildings are rarely completely quiet and a background soundtrack would have helped with the realism. It is the character voices that really bugged me with “Tunguska”, though. While I welcomed the chance to skip through irrelevant or slow speech (something frustratingly missing from too many games), the voice acting was poor. All characters, regardless of nationality, speak in drawling American accents – which I could have lived with, had the delivery of lines not been so cringingly awful. The speech patterns were stilted, as if the actors were reading the script for the first time, with words often mispronounced or with the emphasis given to the wrong words in a sentence. Nina’s voice was by far the worst, with her actor making her sound like a character from the O.C. (alright, we already got the fact she is sassy….). Her voice really grated after a while, and I mostly skipped through her lines. The translation from the original German was good (but not faultless); more noticeable were the errors that appeared in the subtitles, however, where spelling mistakes were evident with a depressing regularity.


**Final Thoughts**
“Secret Files: Tunguska” was a mixed package, and I think it is fair to sum it up by saying it was evidently the first adventure title by Fusionsphere. This was an apprentice’s work: sticking far too close to the work of the masters, emulating the good things well enough, but failing to show any inventiveness or imagination of its own. Still, there were some promising touches, such as the good interface and well-rendered graphics that gives me encouragement for future point and click games by this team. This was far from a masterpiece, but it certainly has the potential to entertain with some nice puzzles and an easy to use style that will probably appeal to newcomers to this genre. I doubt it will convert anyone who doesn’t already like point and click adventures, but it is worth trying for any fans of this kind of game, although I would not recommend paying more than £10 for a copy in all honesty. A solid enough debut, but with plenty of room for improvement in future titles.


**Product Details**
I bought my copy of “Secret Files: Tunguska from Play.com for £8.99 in their January sale; they currently sell it for £13, which is still better than the £17.98 Amazon is asking for it at the time of writing. This game has a PEGI rating of age 12+, and carries a warning that the game features some bad language. There is no warning of violent content, and to be honest apart from a couple of punches being thrown, this game has pleasingly little aggressive content. The following PC specs are the recommended minimum, although I will add for the less technically minded that this ran with no problems on my aged four year old laptop, so you don’t need a supercomputer to run it:

Windows 2000 / XP
128MB RAM
Intel Pentium II 500MHz (or AMD equivalent)
16MB DirectX9 compatible video card
2GB free disk space
DVD-ROM
DirectX9 compatible soundcard

Summary: Adequately entertaining adventure game