Posted By: genf
Schizm review - final version - 09/30/01 03:03 PM
Schizm - Review
This is my very first game review. Usually, I only play a game after I've read
many reviews and thus have a good impression of it. For Schizm, this was different. For various reasons, the game had a lot of anticipation. After it had become available in Germany, I saw some first reactions on discussion boards and decided to buy it before I had read even one review.
Now that I've finished Schizm and write this review, it has not yet been released outside Europe. Many gamers may still be in doubt whether or not to buy the game. Maybe my review can help.
Well - Schizm is an outstanding game - and I have a lot to say about it.
The game starts with a video showing two astronauts being interviewed in a television show. They tell about a space mission to the planet Argilus. Some months earlier, a scientific team has been installed on the planet while the two (Hannah and Sam) stay behind orbiting the planet. Then after some time all communication falls away and Hannah and Sam are forced to go down investigating.
This is where the actual gameplay starts. You control either Hannah or Sam, being free to switch at any time. Bringing Sam and Hannah together is your first mission. Soon you notice strange things: the planet is full of signs of an advanced and living civilization, but the people (as well as the human team) have left mysteriously. You only encounter 'ghosts', human or non-human projections telling you something. What happened and how can you ever escape?
Schizm comes in two versions: CD and DVD. Many words have been written about the differences between these. The game was originally designed for DVD, assuming that the DVD market would grow strong enough to justify this. However, when the release date came near, this turned out to be false. Too many gamers don't own a DVD drive yet and so a CD version was necessary.
Now this gave the developers a problem. The game's size had grown to over 10 GB (even too much for a DVD!) - how to possibly put this onto a reasonable number of CD's? The solution they chose was: scrap a small number of game locations and compromise the graphics quality.
I will come back to that later.
I do own a DVD drive, so I bought the DVD version. First remark: the huge storage capacity shows. The authors did every possible effort to prevent their game from being a 'slide show', and they succeeded. Each move - forward, turn, look up/down, zoom in/out - is smooth. VERY smooth. And you will experience many spectacular moves: climb and descend stairs, walk long and twisting paths, go up and down in elevators, make long rides in exotic vehicles etc.
And even when you don't move, what you see is always spectacular. Argilus' landscapes are - forgive the cliche - pure eye-candy. Immense organic ships, floating in the ocean. Industrial complexes full of machinery. Religious sites. Abandoned villages built in sheer rocks. All shown with many details. Even the sky is beautiful, whether you wander in mid-day or around sunset.
And if this were not enough, there are many animations. Waving or floating water everywhere (sea, lagoons, small waterfalls). Blowing flags. Flickering torches. Flying and swimming animals. They make the world lively and realistic. Many times I replayed some part of the game, just to re-enjoy the landscapes.
As you might expect from the setting, Argilus is a science-fiction world. The inhabitants were a high-tech people. But it also has Riven-esque elements in it: rusty levers, cracking wood, not-so-high-tech hydraulic systems. The combination of all this, plus the mysterious ghosts that you encounter gives the world a surreal look.
Unfortunately, I also have some negative remarks about the graphics.
First: the quality gets considerably worse in interior locations. In full daylight, pictures are sharp, but dark locations tend to look a lot more blocky and blurred.
Second: many of the longer first-person animations are not shown in their full length. Imagine: you make a ride from one cliff to another, but you only see the first and last third of it. The transition should take you 10 seconds, but you only see 6 seconds.
Now this would be acceptable for a third-person movie: with some clever camera switching, one would never notice the loss of 4 seconds. But in first-person no camera switching is possible, and you notice very well. It ruins your feeling of immersion a bit.
Third: there is something odd with the animations. Whenever there is any animation going on (even if it's only in a small part of your view), the whole window animates! So stones, ground, walls and all other dry materials flicker along with a small burning torch in the corner. As soon as you turn away from the torch, this effect is gone and everything looks stable, even though you're still in the same room. Apparently, the whole view has been rendered as many times as was necessary to make the torch look realistic. It's a strange and unrealistic effect. (Well... it may be better than Riven's technique which always showed 'animating' rectangles.)
The first two points above give me the impression that Schizm's creators aimed just too high with their graphics standards. They tried to make the game look perfect - which is great - but then found out that it had become too large to fit even on a DVD. So they had to compromise, which (unfortunately) is visible in the final product.
Now think about the CD version... The capacity of the DVD is about 10GB. The capacity of the 5-CD version is about 3.5GB. I never saw the CD-version, but I really fear about how it looks.
Don't get me wrong... Schizm's graphics are stunning. But I want to tell you everything I noticed.
Over to the gameplay.
Schizm is highly puzzle-oriented. You walk through the environment until you've reached a place where you can do something. In most cases, finding a puzzle is no problem. (I said: in most cases. I will come back to that.)
So: in most cases, you won't wander around wondering what to do next. You won't go pixel hunting. You won't try every inventory object on every screen object. You won't even search long for clues either. In most cases, you just get them presented. "Here's the puzzle, here are the corresponding clues, go ahead and solve it."
Well, solving the puzzles... that's a different story. They are hard, very hard often. You need lots of patience and persistence. You spend many hours experimenting. You need logic, arithmetic and deduction. Often you have to gather clues like symbols, patterns, numbers or sounds, and use that in some machinery. But it's seldom as simple as you think. Most of the time you are thinking about how to use the available information in the puzzle you're working at. Many times I thought 'Aha!', convinced that I knew how to solve a puzzle - only to find out that I needed yet another piece of information. This may get frustrating from time to time.
Some puzzles can be solved by trial and error. There is one where you can guess the solution with 10% hit chance, each time you try. Yes, you get a decent clue how to solve it without guessing. But then you need some clever thinking to get to the solution. Guessing was simpler in this case.
The puzzles are nicely integrated in the environment, and they are original. You get no chess puzzles, no slider puzzles, no mazes. The existence of the puzzles in the gameworld however is not always realistic. A few puzzles involve deciphering a number system. I encountered a 12-base AND a 10-base system, with completely different symbols. That's somewhat unrealistic in my opinion.
In another occasion, you play a little game against the computer. You have to win twice to accomplish some goal. Sure: this game is fun and clever, winning is neither too hard nor too simple, but... it makes no sense at all in its context. A password, a key, a pattern... all suitable ways to protect information or locations. But a game is ridiculous. Or did you ever play a game to get access to your home or to your computer?
The game box tells that the game is non-linear. Indeed, usually you can work on more than one puzzles simultaneously. This is good, but it also leads to what I consider the main flaw of Schizm's puzzle design, and in fact the main flaw of the whole game.
Some of the puzzles can easily be overlooked. All right, you play an adventure game, so you're supposed to explore. But the problem is: you're not always hinted to what you missed, or get a clue where to go back searching.
Let me be more specific.
At some places, you have to use an object to accomplish something. If you happen to possess that object, the game lets you use it straight away. If not (because you have not yet solved some other puzzle), you get no indication at all that you need something, even when you're standing at the right spot. There is no cursor change. No locked door with a keyhole. Just a location you can't interact with. You consider it part of the environment and continue your exploration.
On other occasions, a device or machine is inactive or non-accessible UNTIL you have solved a puzzle elsewhere. So again, you think it's part of the scenery and never notice that it has been activated unless you recheck.
Am I nitpicking here?
No, this hit me severely. Somewhere during the latter parts of the game, I got terribly stuck because I had missed a puzzle at the very start of the game! The walkthrough was not very helpful until I read it from the beginning... It turned out that I had missed a few puzzles along the line, all because of one of the above-mentioned effects. Backtracking was a dreadful experience, which took me endless hours of re-exploring locations that I had already seen many times before, checking and rechecking the walkthough, etcetera.
In fact, the missed puzzle was a device which I had not overlooked at all. It had given me clues which I had used later on. I thought I was done with it and never realised that it ALSO functioned at a puzzle.
So yes, the game is non-linear. Be warned.
As usual with puzzle games, the puzzles are not or loosely connected to the story. Solving one gives you either access to new game locations, an object to use elsewhere or a clue to another puzzle. You never advance the story. That's not necessarily bad, but don't expect a Longest Journey-type of game or you'll be disappointed.
Talking about story: there is not much of it. The ghosts give bits and pieces of what happened to the original inhabitants and the scientific team, but that's all. You can't say anything back. You don't make decisions as a result of what they say. (Often they give a hint, so you run to the involved puzzle and try to apply that hint.)
The end game is a disappointment. No surprising conclusion. No splashing video. You're just done, and one of the ghosts tells you that you 'passed the test' and 'saved the world', or something like that.
As I said before, you can switch between Hannah and Sam. That's a nice feature. It means you can stop working on a puzzle whenever you're stuck and switch to the other person. If you get stuck there too, you're done.
In some cases they must help each other in order to get further. One keeps a device in some state to enable the other to do some work. This gives an extra dimension to puzzle-solving, but it has not been implemented consequently. I tried the same on other locations, but never got the same effect. When you switch and come back, your protagonist has stepped back (or out) and no state has been kept. It only works when the designers wanted it to work.
The interface is as simple as can be. About 75 percent of the screen is used for the actual game view. The upper 5 percent (only shown when you move the mouse there) contains an options menu bar (Save, Load, Quit, etc.). The lower 20 percent shows the inventory and an icon to switch between the two protagonists.
Talking about inventory: you never carry more than a few items. Where to use these is always obvious. If something can be used, a special cursor indicates so, but ONLY if you possess it (see previous remarks on this). Clicking is then enough: the game will pick up the right item and use it.
You get 16 save-game slots. That's not very much, given the nature of the puzzles. You will undoubtedly want to backtrack sometimes. My advice: save often and make sure you keep some older save-games.
Installation is quick and simple. The DVD-version doesn't allow a full installation. This may seem logical since you have only one disk, but beware... you have to swap your DVD disk from time to time.
Yes, you heard that right. How come? The disk is double-sided. So, after a few hours playing the game asks you to "please switch to disk side B". Isn't that annoying?
The CD version does allow a full install.
The background music is soft, atmospheric, never intrusive. It fits in the gameworld. I encountered some hiccups, especially just before a long transition or a puzzle zoom-in. Nothing to worry about.
Many events are accompanied by appropriate sound effects. When you walk, you hear your protagonist's footsteps. They sound differently on different undergrounds. At one occasion you travel in a motorized vehicle which enters a narrow tunnel. Right when this happens, its sound changes accordingly, giving a VERY realistic effect.
Voice acting is all right. One remark though: sometimes your protagonists react on something right before it happens. "The door opens!" they yell, and half a second later the door starts to open.
You can't die in the game. Just what you'd expect from a Riven-clone.
On my computer Schizm never crashed. I've heard others with serious problems though. Refer to the various discussion boards if you encounter problems: some Windows settings seem to be essential for Schizm to run properly.
The game even allowed me to switch to the Windows desktop and back without stopping it. When you return, the game shows a gentle 'Game paused - hit any key to continue' screen. Very nice indeed.
Puzzle states are never saved. When you zoom out from a puzzle (this may very well happen by accident) you will have to start your input all over again.
Somewhere I read that Schizm was meant to be a homage to Riven, and indeed the two gameworlds resemble each other. But Schizm's puzzle-oriented nature also made me think of the older game Obsidian. Maybe I should say it's somewhere in-between.
My conclusions? Schizm is a beautiful and immersive game, but it has a few flaws. Buy it if you like a good bunch of puzzles (and can live with the flaws). Buy it if you like to be immersed in a wonderful Sci-Fi world. Make sure you have access to a walkthrough. And buy the DVD-version if you own a DVD drive.
This is my very first game review. Usually, I only play a game after I've read
many reviews and thus have a good impression of it. For Schizm, this was different. For various reasons, the game had a lot of anticipation. After it had become available in Germany, I saw some first reactions on discussion boards and decided to buy it before I had read even one review.
Now that I've finished Schizm and write this review, it has not yet been released outside Europe. Many gamers may still be in doubt whether or not to buy the game. Maybe my review can help.
Well - Schizm is an outstanding game - and I have a lot to say about it.
The game starts with a video showing two astronauts being interviewed in a television show. They tell about a space mission to the planet Argilus. Some months earlier, a scientific team has been installed on the planet while the two (Hannah and Sam) stay behind orbiting the planet. Then after some time all communication falls away and Hannah and Sam are forced to go down investigating.
This is where the actual gameplay starts. You control either Hannah or Sam, being free to switch at any time. Bringing Sam and Hannah together is your first mission. Soon you notice strange things: the planet is full of signs of an advanced and living civilization, but the people (as well as the human team) have left mysteriously. You only encounter 'ghosts', human or non-human projections telling you something. What happened and how can you ever escape?
Schizm comes in two versions: CD and DVD. Many words have been written about the differences between these. The game was originally designed for DVD, assuming that the DVD market would grow strong enough to justify this. However, when the release date came near, this turned out to be false. Too many gamers don't own a DVD drive yet and so a CD version was necessary.
Now this gave the developers a problem. The game's size had grown to over 10 GB (even too much for a DVD!) - how to possibly put this onto a reasonable number of CD's? The solution they chose was: scrap a small number of game locations and compromise the graphics quality.
I will come back to that later.
I do own a DVD drive, so I bought the DVD version. First remark: the huge storage capacity shows. The authors did every possible effort to prevent their game from being a 'slide show', and they succeeded. Each move - forward, turn, look up/down, zoom in/out - is smooth. VERY smooth. And you will experience many spectacular moves: climb and descend stairs, walk long and twisting paths, go up and down in elevators, make long rides in exotic vehicles etc.
And even when you don't move, what you see is always spectacular. Argilus' landscapes are - forgive the cliche - pure eye-candy. Immense organic ships, floating in the ocean. Industrial complexes full of machinery. Religious sites. Abandoned villages built in sheer rocks. All shown with many details. Even the sky is beautiful, whether you wander in mid-day or around sunset.
And if this were not enough, there are many animations. Waving or floating water everywhere (sea, lagoons, small waterfalls). Blowing flags. Flickering torches. Flying and swimming animals. They make the world lively and realistic. Many times I replayed some part of the game, just to re-enjoy the landscapes.
As you might expect from the setting, Argilus is a science-fiction world. The inhabitants were a high-tech people. But it also has Riven-esque elements in it: rusty levers, cracking wood, not-so-high-tech hydraulic systems. The combination of all this, plus the mysterious ghosts that you encounter gives the world a surreal look.
Unfortunately, I also have some negative remarks about the graphics.
First: the quality gets considerably worse in interior locations. In full daylight, pictures are sharp, but dark locations tend to look a lot more blocky and blurred.
Second: many of the longer first-person animations are not shown in their full length. Imagine: you make a ride from one cliff to another, but you only see the first and last third of it. The transition should take you 10 seconds, but you only see 6 seconds.
Now this would be acceptable for a third-person movie: with some clever camera switching, one would never notice the loss of 4 seconds. But in first-person no camera switching is possible, and you notice very well. It ruins your feeling of immersion a bit.
Third: there is something odd with the animations. Whenever there is any animation going on (even if it's only in a small part of your view), the whole window animates! So stones, ground, walls and all other dry materials flicker along with a small burning torch in the corner. As soon as you turn away from the torch, this effect is gone and everything looks stable, even though you're still in the same room. Apparently, the whole view has been rendered as many times as was necessary to make the torch look realistic. It's a strange and unrealistic effect. (Well... it may be better than Riven's technique which always showed 'animating' rectangles.)
The first two points above give me the impression that Schizm's creators aimed just too high with their graphics standards. They tried to make the game look perfect - which is great - but then found out that it had become too large to fit even on a DVD. So they had to compromise, which (unfortunately) is visible in the final product.
Now think about the CD version... The capacity of the DVD is about 10GB. The capacity of the 5-CD version is about 3.5GB. I never saw the CD-version, but I really fear about how it looks.
Don't get me wrong... Schizm's graphics are stunning. But I want to tell you everything I noticed.
Over to the gameplay.
Schizm is highly puzzle-oriented. You walk through the environment until you've reached a place where you can do something. In most cases, finding a puzzle is no problem. (I said: in most cases. I will come back to that.)
So: in most cases, you won't wander around wondering what to do next. You won't go pixel hunting. You won't try every inventory object on every screen object. You won't even search long for clues either. In most cases, you just get them presented. "Here's the puzzle, here are the corresponding clues, go ahead and solve it."
Well, solving the puzzles... that's a different story. They are hard, very hard often. You need lots of patience and persistence. You spend many hours experimenting. You need logic, arithmetic and deduction. Often you have to gather clues like symbols, patterns, numbers or sounds, and use that in some machinery. But it's seldom as simple as you think. Most of the time you are thinking about how to use the available information in the puzzle you're working at. Many times I thought 'Aha!', convinced that I knew how to solve a puzzle - only to find out that I needed yet another piece of information. This may get frustrating from time to time.
Some puzzles can be solved by trial and error. There is one where you can guess the solution with 10% hit chance, each time you try. Yes, you get a decent clue how to solve it without guessing. But then you need some clever thinking to get to the solution. Guessing was simpler in this case.
The puzzles are nicely integrated in the environment, and they are original. You get no chess puzzles, no slider puzzles, no mazes. The existence of the puzzles in the gameworld however is not always realistic. A few puzzles involve deciphering a number system. I encountered a 12-base AND a 10-base system, with completely different symbols. That's somewhat unrealistic in my opinion.
In another occasion, you play a little game against the computer. You have to win twice to accomplish some goal. Sure: this game is fun and clever, winning is neither too hard nor too simple, but... it makes no sense at all in its context. A password, a key, a pattern... all suitable ways to protect information or locations. But a game is ridiculous. Or did you ever play a game to get access to your home or to your computer?
The game box tells that the game is non-linear. Indeed, usually you can work on more than one puzzles simultaneously. This is good, but it also leads to what I consider the main flaw of Schizm's puzzle design, and in fact the main flaw of the whole game.
Some of the puzzles can easily be overlooked. All right, you play an adventure game, so you're supposed to explore. But the problem is: you're not always hinted to what you missed, or get a clue where to go back searching.
Let me be more specific.
At some places, you have to use an object to accomplish something. If you happen to possess that object, the game lets you use it straight away. If not (because you have not yet solved some other puzzle), you get no indication at all that you need something, even when you're standing at the right spot. There is no cursor change. No locked door with a keyhole. Just a location you can't interact with. You consider it part of the environment and continue your exploration.
On other occasions, a device or machine is inactive or non-accessible UNTIL you have solved a puzzle elsewhere. So again, you think it's part of the scenery and never notice that it has been activated unless you recheck.
Am I nitpicking here?
No, this hit me severely. Somewhere during the latter parts of the game, I got terribly stuck because I had missed a puzzle at the very start of the game! The walkthrough was not very helpful until I read it from the beginning... It turned out that I had missed a few puzzles along the line, all because of one of the above-mentioned effects. Backtracking was a dreadful experience, which took me endless hours of re-exploring locations that I had already seen many times before, checking and rechecking the walkthough, etcetera.
In fact, the missed puzzle was a device which I had not overlooked at all. It had given me clues which I had used later on. I thought I was done with it and never realised that it ALSO functioned at a puzzle.
So yes, the game is non-linear. Be warned.
As usual with puzzle games, the puzzles are not or loosely connected to the story. Solving one gives you either access to new game locations, an object to use elsewhere or a clue to another puzzle. You never advance the story. That's not necessarily bad, but don't expect a Longest Journey-type of game or you'll be disappointed.
Talking about story: there is not much of it. The ghosts give bits and pieces of what happened to the original inhabitants and the scientific team, but that's all. You can't say anything back. You don't make decisions as a result of what they say. (Often they give a hint, so you run to the involved puzzle and try to apply that hint.)
The end game is a disappointment. No surprising conclusion. No splashing video. You're just done, and one of the ghosts tells you that you 'passed the test' and 'saved the world', or something like that.
As I said before, you can switch between Hannah and Sam. That's a nice feature. It means you can stop working on a puzzle whenever you're stuck and switch to the other person. If you get stuck there too, you're done.
In some cases they must help each other in order to get further. One keeps a device in some state to enable the other to do some work. This gives an extra dimension to puzzle-solving, but it has not been implemented consequently. I tried the same on other locations, but never got the same effect. When you switch and come back, your protagonist has stepped back (or out) and no state has been kept. It only works when the designers wanted it to work.
The interface is as simple as can be. About 75 percent of the screen is used for the actual game view. The upper 5 percent (only shown when you move the mouse there) contains an options menu bar (Save, Load, Quit, etc.). The lower 20 percent shows the inventory and an icon to switch between the two protagonists.
Talking about inventory: you never carry more than a few items. Where to use these is always obvious. If something can be used, a special cursor indicates so, but ONLY if you possess it (see previous remarks on this). Clicking is then enough: the game will pick up the right item and use it.
You get 16 save-game slots. That's not very much, given the nature of the puzzles. You will undoubtedly want to backtrack sometimes. My advice: save often and make sure you keep some older save-games.
Installation is quick and simple. The DVD-version doesn't allow a full installation. This may seem logical since you have only one disk, but beware... you have to swap your DVD disk from time to time.
Yes, you heard that right. How come? The disk is double-sided. So, after a few hours playing the game asks you to "please switch to disk side B". Isn't that annoying?
The CD version does allow a full install.
The background music is soft, atmospheric, never intrusive. It fits in the gameworld. I encountered some hiccups, especially just before a long transition or a puzzle zoom-in. Nothing to worry about.
Many events are accompanied by appropriate sound effects. When you walk, you hear your protagonist's footsteps. They sound differently on different undergrounds. At one occasion you travel in a motorized vehicle which enters a narrow tunnel. Right when this happens, its sound changes accordingly, giving a VERY realistic effect.
Voice acting is all right. One remark though: sometimes your protagonists react on something right before it happens. "The door opens!" they yell, and half a second later the door starts to open.
You can't die in the game. Just what you'd expect from a Riven-clone.
On my computer Schizm never crashed. I've heard others with serious problems though. Refer to the various discussion boards if you encounter problems: some Windows settings seem to be essential for Schizm to run properly.
The game even allowed me to switch to the Windows desktop and back without stopping it. When you return, the game shows a gentle 'Game paused - hit any key to continue' screen. Very nice indeed.
Puzzle states are never saved. When you zoom out from a puzzle (this may very well happen by accident) you will have to start your input all over again.
Somewhere I read that Schizm was meant to be a homage to Riven, and indeed the two gameworlds resemble each other. But Schizm's puzzle-oriented nature also made me think of the older game Obsidian. Maybe I should say it's somewhere in-between.
My conclusions? Schizm is a beautiful and immersive game, but it has a few flaws. Buy it if you like a good bunch of puzzles (and can live with the flaws). Buy it if you like to be immersed in a wonderful Sci-Fi world. Make sure you have access to a walkthrough. And buy the DVD-version if you own a DVD drive.