For me part of the allure of playing video games is that they can take you away from the real world briefly, into a fantastical world of wonder… where gallant knights fight for a maiden’s honour, where you can finally don the green jacket for winning The Masters, where you become an all-powerful Vampire slayer riding the kingdom of vermin.
Quintus and the Absent Truth is not that sort of game… going from the 2 chapters I played in the first 20 minutes, my child has been kidnapped and, apparently, her mother died in childbirth… lets knock a couple of points off for story then… great start.
In truth the first 2 Chapters of the game are incredibly short… just as well as the graphical style is quite hideous, it may be trying to convey the fact that it’s dark, but we’re talking simple outlines on a single colour backdrop… and while this may be just me, but the contrast was terrible… and there’s nothing in the settings to allow you to change the setup… at times I was struggling to see the doorways, corridors or anything that I was supposed to be interacting with.
At the same time, I’m not really sure about the Quintus mechanic… he’s a mouse and clearly your friend, at times where you can’t reach something because it’s too narrow, you use Quintus to help… so he can fetch you a key you’ve clumsily dropped behind some shelves, or scurry along an air vent to get you a page from a book… all this seems logical.
What isn’t logical is how, in the second Chapter, he opens a door for you from the inside… he’s a sodding mouse, how does he manage that? They show a chair positioned by the door to show how he may have reached the handle, but how did he move the chair?
After my first, short, foray into the game it’s a new low for Indiefest scoring… the final 2 Chapters will need to go some to change that… and I’m sceptical about whether that is possible.
A couple of days later and the end game appears… and it is truly awful, the story a mess and the whole Qunitus mechanic (when shown later) reveals this as being an appalling piece of software.
Story wise… it’s awful… seems you and your wife were musicians, and with her death in childbirth and your subsequent move into a self-imposed exile, the record company have decided… get this… to turn to the black arts and use your daughter in a ritual to bring your wife back from the dead to save their fortunes.
Yep… told you it was bad.
They’ve dug your good lady’s body up and plan to sacrifice your daughter to facilitate the resurrection and, if the poorly animated scene near the end is anything to go by, the spirit of your wife saves the day by snatching her back and taking out the record company executives.
Awful… terrible… distasteful.
As the game concludes it turns out that Quintus is actually a freaking cuddly toy, and all the sections where he “helps” you out by crawling along a tight spot to get a key… never happened, you were just doing this yourself whilst holding the toy.
Now if my kid had been kidnapped the first thing on my mind wouldn’t be to grab a cuddly toy to help me find her… even worse, there were large sections of the game where you played as Quintus… now did these actually exist in any sort of reality? Were they just included to pad the game out to some sort of acceptable length?
Scoring wise this is the new low… 42% and it was lucky to get that much.