Nintendo mind tricks...
By Ahchay

I love adventure games. Have done since I discovered Inca Adventure and it’s ilk twenty-odd years ago. I have spent more time in pixellated dungeons than I care to think about – I once spent four weeks desperately trying to solve a single puzzle in Infocom’s Planetfall. Cracked it too (REACH INTO HOLE. For the love of Mike).

So, Another Code – essentially a point & click adventure game for the stylus generation – should be manna from Heaven really shouldn’t it?

And it very nearly is.

Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way first… Presentation is top-class – Another Code is one of the shining examples of the ‘new style of gameplay’ that the Nintendroids have been harping on about since the release of the DS. The game uses both screens to full effect with a simply lovely top down 3D effect on the main screen and using the top screen for Myst style pre-rendered views of the mansion where the game is set. I guarantee that you will spend your first 10 minutes of the game just wandering around watching the scenery – it just works.

The interface too is the stuff that adventure game fanboys have been dreaming of. Again, for the most part, it’s entirely invisible – which, obviously, is a good thing.

Even the plot is ace. Okay, it’s slightly strained in places but that’s a criticism you can apply to pretty much any adventure game ever – for the simple reason that the minute you start asking why you can’t just hop over the wall (or whatever) then you’re straying into RPG territory. As it stands, the vaguely X-Filesy story unfolds through the the main character, Ashley, trying to track down her long missing Dad…

So where, you’re asking, does it go so wrong to only merit two stars?

And the answer is as simple as it is baffling.

It’s the puzzles you see. They’re either blatantly sign-posted by one of the characters *telling* you what to do next or they’re crippled by the sheer linerarity of the game. Often you are locked into a single location with only a handful of items in your inventory (you can only pick items up when they become relevant). It wouldn’t take that long to solve most puzzles by the simple expedient of using all objects on all things. In fact, in the entire game, there’s only one puzzle which had me stumped for more than ten minutes – this involved one of the more lateral misuses of the DS design and actually made me giggle like a little girl when I figured it out. So it was even more galling when the next puzzle more or less involved me clicking on the right part of the screen at the right time.

The conversation interface is wasted too. Conversations exist purely for plot development purposes – you can’t choose which questions to ask, you can only stab at the screen to advance to the next paragraph. Each character has a certain number of things that they have to tell you and you have to listen.

It’s a real shame, because both of these problems (three if you include the bizarre inventory management system) would have been spotted by anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of the genre. It is worth five hours of your time, but the niggles not only keep it out of the realm of the greats, but actively manage to annoy – buy it from ebay or the bargain bins as I can guarantee there’ll be a lot of people with second hand copies to offload by the time you read this.

August 2005

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