Oh those amnesia stories…how much I loath them. To me, those storylines are a total copout of trying to tell a suspenseful plot by ‘discovering’ your past. Yet some have done a reasonable job like Stalker and XIII. This game Reversion – The Escape is a difficult one to state whether this amnesia copout plotline holds up as it forms part of a trilogy. Being the first one, there’s not much to say as your main goal is to escape the hospital and because it only last one hour, its best-selling point is that it’s free, and there’s nothing wrong with that unless you want to continue on with the saga then you have to pay for them (I think it’s around $AUD 6 each).
The game plays out as your typical point and click adventure game. Double left click to get the menu where you can talk / grab or examine or right click to access your inventory. You can also join items by dragging / dropping two items to make a third and some items are simply red herrings. So there’s nothing new presented here as far as adventure games are concerned.
The puzzles presented are not challenging at all as the clues are quite obvious. Examples like ‘…for the moment’ triggers that you are missing some sort of action and so forth. Also there’s not a lot happening as it plays on one event leads on to another so you won’t be juggling many puzzles in one go. Thankfully the puzzles are all logical so it shouldn’t be too difficult to resolve them. Just examine and talk to everyone and you cannot fail.
The game advertises that it plays homage to the old school adventure games. You can see this via the visuals as it all renders in 2D and actually does look nice. The character’s walking animation are quite stiff however you won’t be suffering from pixel hunting here. The musical scores are very pleasant to hear with sombre scores when doing some investigations and the title screen has an upbeat tempo. Sometimes I wonder if the game is an afterthought from the music itself. The voice acting is pretty decent too yet it has its odd moments of that ‘emotionless’ speech however nothing to cringe about.
Because this game is free, you cannot argue how good / bad it is however because it forms part of a trilogy, I guess you can say you are getting an entrée before the main course. Yet the strongest feature for any adventure game is its storytelling however there’s nothing really thrilling about this one. If developers 3f interactive can pull it off with the next two and increase the length, then it would be a decent purchase overall. However time will tell if this is the case and as for me, the game wasn’t thrilling at all yet enjoyable enough to finish it off with all sixteen achievements earned.