Schizm DVD

Schizm is a hard core adventuring game for Windows. You take control of Sam and Hannah, which is a great aspect of the game so you don't get stuck! The funny thing is... YOU WOULD NEED 8 CHARACTERS TO NOT GET STUCK IN THIS GAME! The biggest thing I hate about that game that it is really hard and even with a walkthrough you get stumped about some of the puzzles. If you love puzzles, and puzzles that are real hard, this is a great treat for you. Now the people that love Candy for the eye, eye Candy will like this. Although, this is a great DVD graphic game, the graphics aren't as great as you'd expect. When you look at the graphics, you see little fuzziness fromfar away places, and bright places. When you move, there is a bit of different lights, so you can tell they made a movie of the movement.

This game is a quite long, but even though there is only 2 sides, it is quite hard to not go nuts from the swapping. You are asked to flip the CD over atleast 6 times in the game, and it gets annoying.

When you get the game, a lot of people are experiencing sound problems and studdering of the game and sound. With Schizm, this is normal

As you say story, there isn't much of a story for a SciFi writer to make it. I was really mad at how Sam and Hannah so very rare would talk to each other, when they had the chance. This game is Non-Linear, but there are some parts that are Linear. For instance, there is a part in the game where you must go in the right spot, with Sam and Hannah, same spot, and they ask each other where there coordinates are. To me, this is Linear min a sort of way. I don't like in Adventure games where there is only 1 possible solution for everything! Schizm also does this.

Then support for the game is alright. You can e-mail someone and get the reply, but on the official Schizm forum in the dev teams web site, no one ever replies! You might get an e-mail reply from someone on the support page, but they just tell you to look at the Support page of http://www.schizm.com This I also do not like.

When you move, the game studders, because it has to load up the textures, which this is really annoying. This game is quite buggy, with many inpossible solutions on the site to fix this.

If it is a great game and truly adventurous story you want, get Mystery Of The Druids. If it is great graphics you want, go see a movie. I don't reccommend this to anyone, as it is quite boring, and frustrating. I think I'll go read.

------------------
Dr. Chud

Dr. Chud -- I love the way you ended your review -- it made me laugh! Thanks for your thoughts on Schizm. I think it's great to see games reviewed from many different perspectives, and that seems to be happening with Schizm more than most other games in Boomer Reviews.

I'm just starting the game, and so far the puzzles haven't been too hard. I like challenging games, so we'll see how it goes. I was hoping that the developers had learned from gamers' experiences with the last puzzles in Reah, and would make the puzzles a bit less intimidating in this, their latest game.

I'm seeing some minor pixelation and some of the dancing pixel effect, but the game environments are so beautiful and mysterious that I don't mind at all.

EDIT * * * * * * *

Well, now that I've finished the game, I agree with you that this IS a very hard game. The puzzles get hard pretty fast and then they get harder! Reah was just a warm-up for these puzzles, a bit of of a toning exercise for the brain before the real challenge begins! I would hazard a guess that there are very few people who will make it through this game without consulting a walkthrough.

Still, I would heartily recommend this game to anyone who enjoys a Myst-style adventure experience. I thought the graphics were amazing. The environments portrayed in this game are beautiful, colorful, and incredibly immersive.

I enjoyed the story, not just the mystery aspect, but also the relationship that developed (however sketchily) between Hannah and Sam. The ending was a surprise to me -- I was imagining quite a different explanation for what was going on.

I agree with Dr. Chud that more should have been made of the conversations between Hannah and Sam -- there are places where it simply doesn't make sense that they aren't talking to one another. If they are solving a puzzle together, where one character has to do something to enable the other character to complete a task, it's crazy that you don't hear them communicating this to one another. I assume that the designers felt that this would be too apt to give away the solution of the puzzle. Personally, I would have loved receiving hints this way, and it would have drawn me even deeper into what was happening in the game.

This is actually quite a romantic scenario -- two friends, fighting for their very survival, using their wits and talents together, standing next to one another without being able to touch one another. I thought more could have been made of this romantic tension.

I didn't mind the disk swapping, though I wasn't expecting it in a DVD game. I see why it was necessary though in a game this large.

I didn't have problems with the game stuttering. I did have problems with the game crashing until I turned down the graphics acceleration. After that, the game crashed only occasionally during the longer video sequences.

Like Reah, this game is close to being a classic. I hope that Detalion keeps making more and more of them.

I found Schizm (DVD) one of the most interesting adventure games I have ever played, the sound and the graphics were excellent, there were no bug or glitches hang ups or any other trouble when played with Nvidia Riva TNT/TNT2 Pro graphics card and 600 MHz.
Yes some of the puzzles were hard but if you were suddenly put into and alien world how easy do you think it would be to figure out all the things Hannah and Sam had to? I was also an integral part of the story line that they could not communicate freely at will and that at times they were provided with information that was not strictly true. I would have liked a little more places to explore or a little more insight into to the life of the inhabitants, it was not until the end that I understood that the setup was a "setup". I was so interested in the game that turning the disk was not much of an inconvience specially since the turns came at convenient

I played the CD version on a low-end computer: 466MHz, 6GB, 64 MB RAM, and an integrated 4MB video card. I did a full install and it ran beautifully: no stuttering, freezing or crashing. I did use a walk through, or I'd still be pulling my hair out over the puzzles. All in all, I thought it was one of the most beautiful games I've ever played, and was very sad when it was over. In fact I started over and played it again.