COGNITION EPISODE 2: THE WISE MONKEY
AN ERICA REED THRILLER
When Boston FBI agent Erica Reed's colleague is wounded and abducted by
a serial killer known as The Wise Monkey, it's a fraught race against a
ticking clock to save him. The Monkey's other intended targets have each
received a silver bracelet charm as a warning they might be next. Erica
has her suspicions – not to mention a full set of cognitive abilities –
and is on the killer's trail.
The Wise Monkey
is the second in a four-part adventure series by independent developers,
Phoenix Online Studios.
Why, Monkey?
Not having played the first
episode in the Cognition set, it feels a little disconcerting to
land smack dab at the start of Episode 2, where the player is expected
to know who is who and what is what. The dialogue makes repeated
references back to the previous instalment. For a little while I feel
like a dazed and confused cast member from an East End of London soap
opera. “Woss going ahnnnn?” I moan softly, as I stumble around
the comic-strip style environs of Cognition's FBI office. The
severed and bloody ear upon the carpet struggles to answer back.
Eventually, I find my bearings and the adventure begins in earnest.
I'm not entirely sure what to
make of this graphical style. The background detail is pleasant enough,
for the most part, but the characters are awkwardly drawn and jerkily
animated. When Erica opens a door, her legs bow. When she walks from one
side of the room across to the other, it's as if Groucho Marx is
channelling through her with knees akimbo and all that's missing is the
cigar and the knowing leer. Sometimes, Erica refuses to move despite
repeated clicking. Playing a preview copy of the game, I experienced a
large number of graphical oopsies: from characters facing the opposite
way during dialogue, to drifting through background objects, to Erica's
“sitting down” at a desk only to miss the chair entirely and be
effectively perching in mid-air. These errors were promised to be
corrected by the episode's release, and I do hope that to be the case,
for the overall effect was distracting if eye-rollingly amusing. I
encountered occasional sluggish cursor movement and long screen-loading
times.
Three icons at the top left of
the game screen allow access to the main menu, Erica's cell phone and
the hotspot feature; the space bar also working as an alternative for
the latter. A cognition sphere sits at the bottom left, where the player
might click on it for the purpose of examining certain evidence,
obtaining clues and seeing past events. The majority of The Wise
Monkey's puzzling bases itself around the sphere, and as such there
are very few stand-alone puzzles. Where one might think an opportunity
would arise for a challenge – for example, the opening of an intricate
wooden puzzle box, or a lock-picking – the player simply uses the sphere
to help Erica channel her special powers and the puzzle automatically
solves. The inventory appears as a vertical bar on the right side of the
screen, where items may be combined or examined in closer detail. There
are unlimited save slots.
From a stuttering beginning, the
story does pick up to become an engaging one, keeping the player
guessing up to the end. Severed ears and tongues, gouged eyes; this is
no meagre fare. The detail is never truly grotesque, drawn as it is in
the colourful comic-strip fashion which serves in diffusing the horror.
It is mostly a psychological game of cat and mouse, as Erica uncovers
multi layers of information and secrets. The amount of dialogue is about
right, not too excessive, and the voice acting is convincing for all
characters such as we meet along the way. There are not so very many of
them, mostly minor; the focus being primarily on Erica. There are a
number of locations to visit, although contained and with reduced
opportunity for exploration.
The game installed and ran
without any problems, and I encountered no dead ends or bugs.
At around 4-5 hours of gameplay,
I would say that The Wise Monkey has much to offer if you enjoy
your heroines young and feisty and your plotlines dark and
pondering.
Grade: B
I played on:
Windows 7 Home Premium SP1
AMD A6-3650 APU @ 2.60GHz
4.00 GB of RAM
Radeon HD 6530D Graphics
GameBoomers Review Guidelines
February 2013
design copyright©
2012
GameBoomers
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