From the futuristic mayhem of The Moment of Silence
to the grimy psycho-disturbance of Overclocked, here we are now
with 15 Days, the new adventure from developers House of Tales.
In 15
Days we meet Cathryn, Bernard and Mike, earnest political activists
and art thieves who donate their sale proceeds for the benefit of
charitable housing development schemes in Africa. Their new client, the
mysterious Mr Odila, has a succession of highly paid missions for them,
but can he be trusted? The trio’s destinations must include the London
Modern Gallery, the Musée de Paris, and the island of Surinawa currently
under oppressive rule.
Simultaneously, we become involved with Jack Stern of Washington’s
International Police, who is investigating the death of the London Foreign
Secretary. Somehow the death is linked with Cathryn and her friends. Stern
attempts to discover the connection and catch up with the group, but this
proves to be far trickier than anticipated.
An
Innocuous Invitation
15 Days
is a third person point and click adventure. There are four characters for
the player to control at different stages of the game. For the majority of
the time we play Cathryn, a strong-willed young woman with apparent nerves
of steel. Nothing seems to faze her. Cathryn, Bernard and Mike live
together in a shabby, barely converted London warehouse. They each have
their separate rooms, although evidently must sleep on the floor as there
are no beds. These political activists are a stoic lot.
The plot of
15 Days is its magnetic strongpoint, with its yarns of meticulously
planned art theft and dastardly corruption. We sit in on the meetings,
take part in the preliminary dummy runs, and are in the thick of the
action when Cathryn says Go! The game’s linearity ensures that the player
always knows where to go and what to do. (Perhaps that will be the letdown
of 15 Days for some.) It leads you by the nose to locations, guides
you wherever it can, and switches quick-as-you-like to a cut scene just
when things get sticky and the player might have to, well, you know,
think what to do next. Easy peasy lemon squeezy, as I used to say when
I was eight years old. I like a dose of easy peasy now and then, it makes
my brain feel clever. 15 Days may not satisfy those in search of a
cerebral workout, but it will make everyone else grin like a silly thing.
Anyway --
now that I’ve finally stopped grinning like a silly thing -- a map button
looms at the bottom left of the screen: a useful feature with jump spots
to various locations. Move your cursor slightly to the right of this
button to reveal the inventory, and above it to show the save, load and
main menu icons. Pressing the Esc key will also take you back to the main
menu. The space bar reveals all available hotspots and exit areas. Double
clicking will make your character run. Dialogues and cut scenes may be
skipped by pressing the Esc button. Subtitles are available, and greatly
needed due to the regrettably low quality of the audio. There are
unlimited save slots.
The game’s
locations are bright and detailed, although eerily quiet. The London Eye
attraction stands deserted, a single lonely fish ‘n’ chip van nearby, a
tied clutch of desultory balloons waving in the breeze beside it. I rather
liked that the music was used sparingly and appropriately to the scene,
and that much of the gameplay was with ambient sound only.
Further
Investigations
Puzzles are
a mix of inventory, in-game web browsing, and the more intricate and
challenging “getting the gadget to work”. For certain puzzles, a ticking
clock will appear at the top right of the screen. This is not a timer, but
a bypass feature which allows the player to skip the puzzle after the time
has elapsed.
There are no
timed puzzles or sliders. There is one maze.
“Who let
you two clowns in here?”
The audio
quality of the dialogue in 15 Days is simply atrocious. Any
location with music or overlap of environmental sound drowns it out
entirely, and we are forced to rely upon subtitles. If 15 Days had
not offered the relieving bliss of subtitles then I would have been
scuppered, cranky and quite capable of a rollicking major art theft
myself.
“Everything soldered together myself. Blindfolded.”
I
experienced two crashes to desktop, and one particularly malevolent
humdinger which caused my computer to reboot itself. The game otherwise
ran smoothly.
Audio
monstrosities and the occasional whoops-to-desktop aside, I very much
enjoyed all that 15 Days had to offer, and would recommend it to
any gamer looking for an engrossing story and a plain and simple good
time.
Grade: B+
I played on:
Windows XP
Media Center Edition SP3
Intel[R] CPU
T2050 @ 1.60GHz
2.00 GB of
RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 7500 LE, 512MB
15 Days
is available via download at
The Adventure Shop. The game will also be releasing on disk in the UK
within the next few weeks.
