Warding You off "The Ward" (The Ward (PC))

Member Name: wampyrii

Product:	The Ward (PC)
Date:	03/04/02 (41 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very deep plot

Disadvantages: TOO deep, puzzles uninvolving and simply too tough for words, looks dated, plays badly, simply not entertaining

If you are a fan of all things fantasy or sci-fi related then you'll understand the joys of being plucked out of your humdrum life and transported off to a land of magic and mystery. To be taken on a voyage of pure discovery, to be shown strange and wonderous visions, interact with multifaceted, quirky characters and generally to experience the unexperiencable is a fantastic thing. when this is done well, whether it be in book, cinematic or some other medium then its wonderous, when its done badly its awful - there is little inbetween. The Ward is an example of when it is done very badly.

The designers of The Ward are a Croatian company called Fragile Bits(make your own jokes)and what they seem to have misunderstood about the adventure gaming genre is that its not quantity of story but quality which gets the results. We were not all drawn to Monkey Island series initially because it was a game of such vast scope but because its story was very funny and very well designed. Equally we were not drawn to the likes of the Atlantis or Journeyman Project series of games simply because of their sheer scope, but because they had scope AND an intruiging, relevant storyline. The Ward has a massive plot, but to be fair, no one in their right mind wants to gain a PHd in the culture and history of a ficticious alien race before they stand a chance of solving just one puzzle! There is a vast difference between becoming immersed in an adventure game and drowning in it.

Let me try to begin to explain the plot - I completed the game with a walkthrough in the end(something I have NEVER done before, I hate cheating) because frankly its just ridiculous to consider anything else! You are an astronaught aboard the Apollo XIX bound for the moon to investigate some strange seismic activity which has been observed over the last couple of months. The mission goes well, but just as you are about to return home something attacks you and the rest of the crew, destroying the
module and knocking you unconscious.

You awake some time later in a strange alien complex, a complex somewhere on the moon! The complex seems deserted, you have no clue why they would bring you here and just dump you but you are going to damn well find out. Find out you do - and prepare to get confused. An ancient alien race messed around with their genetics, eventually renaming themselves "the makers". The "makers" were a highly technologically advanced race of greatly engineered intellect. However, they got stuck on a particular project of compressing space, eventually turning to time travel for the answers and never returning. Many years later another alien race comes along and finds some of their technology, a few artifacts etc. and has a tinker around with them, but full knowledge can only be discovered by the combination of another artifact called the techonvirus. No problem - except that the technovirus was split in two, one part found on the moon, another on the holy mountain, hidden so that only a mysterious being called "The Ward" would be able to find it and unite the two sections.

They think you are "The Ward" and they will stop at nothing to get the technovirus assembled so they can use the "maker" technology. Meantime another alien race breaks you out so you can escape and ummm...yeah I give up its too complicated and it just goes on forever - and thats before you really get into the story!

The game is split into three distinct parts. The first where you find yourself alone on the moon base and wander about trying to find out who put you there, why and why the hell they have buggered off and left you if you were so damn important to them. The next puts you in a human prison colony on Mars, much more interactive now as you ask 50 million questions, eavesdrop and generally cajole information out of people to discover that(shock horror!) you are The Ward of prophecy - or might
be. Finally its business as usual as(and I bet you didn't see this coming!) you find the aliens are about to destroy the Earth and only one man can stop them - some guy they call The Ward...in a part which wasn't prophesised.

The Ward is a game which for me has three major problems and then doesn't excel in any of the other areas any good adventure game should. Firstly there is no sense of wonder, no intrigue and no excitement. This is very much a science fiction tale and in every respect a very well trodden path in terms of science fiction tales as well. The problem is that Fragile Bits fails to appreciate that "I'm so intrigued I'll keep playing for ever and ever!" doesn't go hand in glove with "I'm so fecking confused I'll just have to keep playing this forever!". The opening 'chapter' as it were doesn't encourage you to keep adventuring around the complex by dumping you in the middle of confusion and explaining nothing, it just gets you removing the CD-Rom and looking for something better to do. Making a player feel lost and disorientated doesn't entertain them, it aggravates and bores them and I was aggravated and bored for most of this game - even WITH a walkthrough when I had finally had enough of playing games of trial and error to do te simplest things!

The second major problem is the amount of information you have to assimilate here to even begin to solve the puzzles or have an understanding about what is actually going on. You engage in a bunch of conversations where you have to hang on ever word and inflection of the speaker or you'll miss something incredibly important. There are terminals dotted all over the place which will give you something along the lines of a small book to read every time you access them and again, no skim reading or you'll miss something. Expect to learn an awful lot about the complexes, alien history etc. in your quest to find out anyt
hing at all! Very shortly after you install the game and start exploring you'll notice it feels more like a chore than a game and thats exactly what it is.

Last problem and is that the whole thing feels very 'backwards' in terms of technology used and interface. Characters don't speak to you, their text appears on the screen. The graphics look old and dated and the interface is also very retro. Now, that shouldn't be too much of a problem if the other elements were there but when you have a game which is this lacking then it needs something to save it. If I had played this game 7/8 years ago I would have been saying the graphics and sound were average - now, its just not good enough.


...and there are more points of concern.

The most important aspect of all in any game is the gameplay, nothing else should really matter but a little window dressing is nice. The most gorgeous looking, most perfect sounding games are often let down by poor gameplay(Riven for example) and as I've already said The Ward doesn't have those elements so you'd hope the gameplay was exceptional.

It isn't. In fact its crushingly dull.

Forget that the first part of the game has you wandering around a none too exciting deserted moonbase reading a bunch of uninteresting facts about what it is and why you are there because it gets worse. You'd think that interacting with other characters might be fun - it is in every other adventure I've played in the last 15+ years, but not here. These are the most dull people you can imagine, full of matter of fact info. and descriptions and nothing else. There are no personalities here, you may as well go back to one of the terminals and read the information, these people are no different, just with a more pink hue to them. Worse still talking to people often requires that you find the exact spot to chat otherwise they'll ignore you or tell you something else - stup
id.

Another gameplay gripe is on the puzzles themselves - an integral part of adventure games. All too often they fall into the category of 'sliding block' puzzles which are not only unituitive for the most part but you'd also think that an advanced alien race might just have developed something clever than sliding blocks to open doors, safes, terminals and whatever else! There's keys too, don't forget keys, these aliens still have Yale locks in their doors - one minute a sliding block game to open a door, the next a Yale key(which was that little red speck on the desk amid a wreckage of paperwork 20 screens back - the one you missed and won't find for weeks). Sigh.

Those are the 'puzzles' which are do-able of course, many of the others are either so complicated or unintuitive that you'll spend much of your time trying every possible combination to solve them rather than using your brain as all good adventure games require. Of course some puzzles don't even allow you to do this and many have infuriatingly short time limits(never should an adventure game be hurried, its an unwritten rule!) which make impossible puzzles even tougher! When a game has a vast majority of puzzles which(when not sliding block) result in the player switching to trial and error because they haven't even the faintest clue where to even begin solving the puzzle then the game has failed. That is the case here. The Ward is a very tough game to complete but its the 'wrong kind' of tough, its not tough because the puzzles require a lot of mental capacity, they're tough because they make no sense, or because you are given not hint of what you are even meant to be doing.

To give you an example of how unintuitive - and this is one of the "do-able" puzzles. You need to get through a grate in the wall. in you pocket you have a screwdriver and a bunch of other stuff. Do you:

a) Unscrew the grate from t
he wall with the screwdriver, it is screwed in placed.

b) Prise it away from the wall using the screwdriver or other implement.

c) Wander around the complex until you find a metal maintenance droid. Decide in an amazing leap of logic that to unscrew the grate you WOULDN'T use a screwdriver because aliens use them for something else obviously - toothpicks maybe - and try to remove the droid's arm so that you can use its hand as a screwdriver!!!

Obviously the answer is c), but only if you work for a Croatian game developer. Naturally you use the screwdriver to remove the hand, then when it doesn't work(duh you forgot, its an alien toothpick) you pull out a scalpel and cut of the arm(scalpels being a great metal cutting tool), wander back and unscrew the grate with the hand. The screwdriver can't be used to unscrew screws, neither can the rather screwdriver shaped scalpel, but a hand can. Sigh.

When you consider the effort which has gone into the story and plotting in The Ward it is equally very disappointing to see that when playing you follow the kind of distinctly linear path you would have expected 7/8 years ago. The view is the 2D perspective kind rather than the far more immersive 360 degree panning which most(I thouht ALL until I played this) modern titles opt for. You WILL explore where you are ALLOWED to explore and nowhere else, and whilst on those screens only designated hotspots are up for further investigation. A while ago the adventure gaming community pointed out most forcefully in criticisms of games that to be truly "there" you have to be able to act as if you were truly "there"! If you can't look inside the desk drawer, whether its empty and its pointless doing so or not, then its restrictive and not very realistic, hence with games like The Ward its impossible to get lost in the storyline - something which the overkill on background and info. would seem to suggest was the ma
in focus of Fragile Bits! The joy of adventure games is adventuring, not being taken on a guided tour.

More niggles? Sure. There is no map so you spend hours wandering from location to location when a quick click on a map would have been so much simpler and seems included with every other game release. Saving games is a bizarre ritual involving 4 temporary slots, 9999 saved to hard disk slots and a strange comination of mouse buttons and shift keys to achieve this - don't ask! I mentioned the lack of spoken conversation - to be fair some is spoken, but most you have to read. That which is spoken is delievered in the staccato tones of someone reading off a card and with no thespian talents - probably the game developers themselves. Ambient sounds are also non-existent, or at least minimal. The soundtrack is however excellent, very futuristic and eerie, perfect for the game and the other great feature is the cut scenes and intro movie which are some of the best I have seen. The graphics to be fair are very detailed and atmospheric as well, but 2D just doesn't cut it in today's adventure gaming world.

In all, I suppose if you are looking for a really challenging adventure game then this may hold some appeal to you. But be warned, the challenge comes not because its tough or packed with original puzzles, but from the shortcomings described above. For 99.9% of gamers I would advise steering well clear. It doesn't get a one star rating purely because a lot of effort has obviously gone into the storyline and that story is rather novel, but as a game it loses its appeal very quickly.


~System Requirements~

Pentium-133 or equivalent(200+ recommended)
32 MB RAM
8X CD-ROM(12X recommended)
SVGA 4MB VRAM
130 MB disk space(250MB recommended)
Mouse
Sound card

~Other Useful Info.~

Genre: Adventure/Sci-Fi
Players: 1
Online Play: Nope
Official Site: http://www.odigames.com/
game_sites/ward/

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