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Be afraid. Be very afraid.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 29 / 33
Date: March 01, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game is exactly what it promises to be, and then some. It's a true adventure game which requires only the ability to use a mouse and your brain. It's scary, atmospheric and leaves you guessing till the end. The story is slowly revealed as you play but some of the aspects are subtle. At the end, you have to actually think about what happened but if you've paid attention everything is pretty much revealed. The truth is in there...

Scratches is great!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 12
Date: March 16, 2006
Author: Amazon User

A scary adventure game in the style of Blackstone Chronicles, the Dark Fall games and the creepier moments of Amber: Journeys Beyond. A must for fans of the genre.

Not to be played alone in the dark!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 9 / 10
Date: March 16, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game has a lot of virtues and is destined to be a classic. The interface is fairly seamless and there are no contrived puzzles for the sake of adding puzzles. The highly detailed and beautiful graphics work perfectly together with an amazing sound track and special effects to set a sinister and forboding mood. The game really shines in this respect, and I must say, I have never experienced better visuals or audio in a game of this genre. The mystery itself is quite original and revealed in bits and pieces. Things start to get scary after a while, and I found myself on edge, afraid to open doors or even turn around, for what I might find. The mystery was so captivating that I wanted to know what happend, but I was also afraid to find out. The only shortcoming, in my opinion, is that not everything you need to do or find, is intuitive. I found myself stuck in a few places, but had no problem finding a walkthrough to help me out. Overall, this is truly one of the most captivating, scary and enjoyable adventure games I have ever played. If you like adventure games and don't mind getting scared out of your wits, this is for you.

take time to smell the Black Oricids of Death

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 13 / 26
Date: March 18, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Cats got nothing to do with it. This is the best game I've played since Highschool. A graphic adventure set in some obscure English Village in particular a rickety old mansion and it's surrounding estate(in totallity huge). By day, the dismel grey sky of peace yet forboding all the same. The music very Myst-like violins in the house; but by night a macebre of horror and inscensent scratching. You are a british storywriter of a famous book and want to go full time as author yet have no inspiration in town so you move to an obscure little(as in huge) Mansion on a Hill in a dark estate. If you play it alone(and your appartment is bigger than eye's veiw) you'll be as jumpy as your cat by the end of this game. By no measn are "cats" involved, dispite the title. You'll have a good idea of that and what it "might just" mean come nightfall... By the end of the game, you'll know...

SOOO overrated!

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 9
Date: March 19, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I am very upset that I counted down the days for this game to come out... even the extra days since the release was delayed more than once. I found it very boring. I felt myself getting scared a couple of times only because the game was hyped up to be "so scary". It was just BORING. Not only were there not 14 bazillion annoying slider puzzles, there were NO puzzles, at all. Yeah, I mean, you had to figure out what to do with the basic items in your inventory but it was usually pretty obvious. This was one of those games where you walk around to everything again and again only to find out there is some silly little trigger that you hit but not in just the right spot. I kept waiting for SOMETHING, ANYTHING to happen but it just didn't. And wow did I get sick of looking at every painting in the place thinking I might have to for some reason.

On the other hand, the scenery is pretty cool and it is very easy to move around the house and the grounds. It is a bit eerie but no need to think you can't play it alone, nothing jumps out of corners or anything.

And as is common in this genre, the ending sucked. You are left to use your imagination but don't know if you are right or wrong.

Overall, I was extremely disappointed and hope I get most of my money back on this when I sell it on ebay!

The best of it's kind

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 12 / 14
Date: March 20, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I went into this game hesitant because a) I usually don't care for "horror" settings and b) games where the main draw is "only three people made it!" tend to be more flawed than they are made out to be by hardcore adventure fans.

This game did everything almost everything right. The atmosphere was amazing, you really start to feel claustrophobic at some times and a sense of dread at others. This is a psychological horror game, similar to movies like Session 9 or The Blair Witch Project. In other words, if you really get into the storytelling like I did, things will get really really scary. If you don't care for the story and skip through the journals, it won't be so scary. For me personally, it worked wonders. I couldn't sleep for days afterwards.

As for the claim of some (like Sharon West below me) that the ending is poor, I completely disagree. If you like your stories spoonfed to you, then you'll hate the ending. If you pay attention to everything you witnessed, there may still be things you'll uncertain about, but for the most part you can figure out what happened. You'll want to work out your theory with others who completed the game, just like a good movie that makes you think. I don't understand these people who want to play an adventure game because they supposedly like puzzles but then hate an ending that they have to think about. Kinda ironic. Personally, after playing games like the recent Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes incarnations I found it a refreshing change to play a mystery game where they actually let YOU solve the mystery.

Puzzles are uncannily well thought out and logical. There isn't a single puzzle where afterwards you'll go "well, how was I supposed to figure that out?" Well, maybe one, but it wasn't that obscure. They are all based on real world functionality.
One other thing: it's been noticed on forums I frequent that even though the game is in a first person perspective, people who usually prefer third person adventure games are more likely to like the puzzles in this game. Interpret that as you will.

My only caveat is that the pacing is a little slow on the first day, mostly because it seems to behave as if you're not an adventure veteran.

If you're not a fan of point-and-clickers, then this game isn't going to change your mind. But if you are, this is easily the best one I've played in years.

Moody, atmospheric, but ultimately boring!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 10 / 17
Date: March 22, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The Mystery: C-

The questions to answer are: What happened to the Blackwood family? What led to the mysterious death of Catherine Blackwood? Did her husband do her in, as local legend would have it? Did he go mad?

What begins as a search for the truth while trapped in an aging Victorian mansion for the weekend quickly becomes a tedious way to pass the time.

The ending was ambiguous and, I thought, stupid. The only rule of a mystery is that by the end of the story, you must solve the mystery. This ending only led me to more questions. Yech.

Puzzles: F

There are no puzzles to speak of. This is strictly collecting items and combining them together to make useful things, such as lighting a lamp in order to investigate a dark room. Yawn.

Gameplay: B-

This game is more a fetch-and-carry than a mystery. The mystery tends to get lost while the player spends all his time tramping back and forth through the rooms of the mansion, fiddling with the finicky navigation controls (i.e. you may only go forward by clicking on this very narrow spot, etc.)

Time Changes: When a given set of tasks is completed, the main character, Michael will begin to grumble about needing sleep. Put him to bed and the next event will automatically trigger.

Voice Acting: B

The two most loquatious characters are the narrator, Michael, and his agent/friend, Jerry. A handful of phone calls is all you get of their dialogue, but their voices are very polished and pleasing to hear.

Music: B

Cellar of Rats has developed a soundtrack that will tickle your ear: a combination of scratches, plinky piano music, mournful violins and otherwordly laughs and screeches that will carry you effortlessly through the game.

Graphics/Video: B-

The "3D" rendering is nothing more than a 2D image pasted onto a sphere so that the camera may rotate 360 degrees. This causes the image to warp around the edges as you turn the camera. Really, people, this is 2006. Even if you're working on a shoestring budget, I think it's safe to say that you have to do better than that.

The graphics themselves are otherwise very nice. The textures are clean and sharp. The images are simple, but very effective. The clouds move across the sky, the weather changes from gloomy to sunny to stormy, etc.

Technical: B

My computer has a very new processor and graphics card, and for some reason I found the load times to be ridiculous. It really broke the mood as I had to wait several seconds for a new room to load as I moved through the house. The door would open and the screen would freeze annoyingly while the computer worked to load the next room.

Overall, I think this one is neat and entertaining, a great way to pass a few hours, but it was lacking The Wow Factor for me. I just wasn't dazzled by what I saw like I have been by other games.

great horror for adventure fans

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: March 24, 2006
Author: Amazon User

If you are an obsessive drawer opener and poker around in crooks and crannies and pride yourself in finding a way behind expected routes rather than following them, even if it disrupts linear game play, this adventure game is for you. If not, don't go near it.

However, if you are of this turn of mind, it was, as the other reviewers attest, incredibly immersive and creepy. Having finished it, I have no temptation to go back and play the ending again, or review any of the compulsory midnight explorations or encounter a certain carved wooden object, in any form, ever again. In fact I was happy to uninstall it from my computer the minute I'd finished it, just in case it should try to get up to something on its own in the middle of the night (which for a game as static looking as this is high praise).

I've played the Darkfall games with a mixture of excitement and frustration, and this game outcreeps them both. I'm not sure I liked it, and I know that I couldn't play through some of the sequences with the sound effects on, but it was a triumph of its genre, even for a wuss like me. Have fun with it.

Fine work by Jonathan Boakes

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 75 / 79
Date: March 26, 2006
Author: Amazon User

A pleasantly spooky story from the maker of the two Dark Fall games, with some of the same strengths (lovely evocation of an England that no longer exists, some genuinely creepy moments) and weaknesses (erratic plot, bizarre use of English from a native speaker) of those two games.

The atmosphere is the strongest part of this game; the Victorian house is so lovingly recreated you can almost smell the moldy stench of rotting plaster that inhabits these places. The music and sound are a real bonus, with movie-level sound effects and score really amping up the creepiness.

The creepiness can be extreme at times, but it's of the something-unknown-about-to-spring-from-the-dark sort and not the rotting-corpse-shoved-in-your-face sort. If you've been desensitized by over-the-top gore fest movies, you might yawn at this; if you're sophisticated enough to appreciate Hitchcock and Poe, this will suit you down to the ground. Translation: there's no blood, but it could still give your kids nightmares.

As for the less wonderful stuff, well ... Some of the dialogue is downright weird in syntax and word choice. (When you use a shovel to make a hole in the dirt and put something in it, you *dig* the hole and *bury* the item, not the other way around. Shees!) Under other circumstances I'd put this down to translation difficulties, but that doesn't apply here. And there are some strange plot holes and sudden bursts of illogic that leave you scratching your head. The ending in particular is a little anticlimactic -- we didn't so much wrap up the plot as shrug and abandon it. Or is he planning a sequel?

Still, a fun game and an engrossing way to spend a rainy day. Though I wouldn't want to play it in the dark myself.

Keep it up, guys!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: March 28, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I've been eagerly anticipating this game for a year now, and it was well worth the wait. It's a sorely-needed oasis in a barren desert full of shoot-'em-ups. Never in my years of adventure game playing have I been so down-to-the-core *scared*, and to me, that's what makes an excellent game. In fact, at one point I was pulling my hair out because I had to find out the secrets of this creepy old house, but I literally was afraid...afraid of going down in that basement...
Graphics were unbelievably real! There was a certain picture hanging on the wall of the library that had this beautiful old wooden frame, and I knew if I put my hand on the screen I could feel the covering of dust and the nicks in the wood.
Lynn, enjoyed your comments about the game but have to correct you on its creators, because these guys need to be given their just praise. Agustin Cordes and Alejandro Graziani of Nucleosys are the game's developers, and they have the honor of developing the first commercial adventure game to come out of Argentina (you go,guys!!) Jonathan Boakes does indeed have his talented hands, or should I say his voice, in the project as Jerry the realtor, and a very reassuring presence he can be, believe me!!
So, kudos to these incredibly gifted independent developers, as well as Jonathan, Daniel Cordes, Cellar of Rats (his eerie music was dead-on--pun intended),and everyone involved with this. Hope their success continues in a big way!! Ok, fellas, sequel? Yeh-yeh-yeh-yeh...

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