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For Hard-Core Adventure Gamers Only (Get the DVD Version!)

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 36 / 37
Date: January 23, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Usually I write a review to "gush" all over a product, but for me this game is the exception. In my opinion, some gushing and some caveat emptors are in order for Schizm: Mysterious Journey. First, a review I read before I purchased the game said it best: "Albert Einstein on his best day could not beat this game without a walkthrough!" Plain and simple, some of the the puzzles in Schizm are HARD--VERY, VERY HARD. Second, although other reviews I've read complain about the acting (it's really adequate for a computer game), one main reason I buy an adventure game is for the artwork, graphics, and atmospherics. In Schizm, these elements are "drop-dead gorgeous!" I have never seen an adventure game so beautifully rendered. Also, the music and sounds compliment the game perfectly. Finally, I strongly suggest that anyone purchasing this game buy the DVD version (presuming your computer is so equipped). I'm told that the DVD's graphics are far better than that of the CD-ROM version. So in sum--if it's easy puzzles, a great story line, and "award winning" acting that you want in an adventure game, keep looking. However, if you value REALLY HARD puzzles, a gripping plot, super graphics, marvelous sound and ethereal music, buy the DVD version of Schizm: Mysterious Journey. But beware: it's one for hard-core adventure gamers only.

Not as good as I had hoped

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 25 / 27
Date: November 05, 2001
Author: Amazon User

(...)P>I started out liking this game a lot, but as it progressed, I liked it less and less. What I really look for in a game is a first-person perspective, a plot or story that you have to uncover by solving a variety of puzzles, not getting killed, good graphics and decent sound, pretty much in that order. While I found all these things in Schizm and they were enough to keep me interested, the game had problems enough that I became increasingly angry and frustrated with it.

Schizm was designed for DVD and it shows. The CD-Rom version not only has less of a game, but also does not run particularly well. Panning is slow. Sound halts and stutters. Sometimes the game freezes altogether. Allegedly you can correct this by using the full install, but about every time I tried this, the install procedure crashed my computer. The one time I managed to get it fully installed, the game ran in Hungarian or some other Eastern European language, so I had to go back to swapping discs anyway.

This game is complex. Sometimes it seems arbitrarily complex -- that is, the complexity really interfers with enjoyment of the game. The two character perspective starts out as intriguing but just becomes a pain as you can't ever move them at the same time, but have to keep going back and forth between them even when they're supposed to be together. Several times this involved swapping discs half a dozen times in the space of thirty seconds of gameplay. They come up with a lame plot element to explain this, but it's still a drag, especially since there is no zip feature to speed you past places you've already been. A zip feature would have been very helpful.

The puzzles range from somewhat hard to extremely difficult. Often the difficulty stems less from mental capacity needed to solve them than from some arbitrary complexity that just seems put there to make the puzzle hard. For example, several puzzles contained so many variables that even when you knew the logic involved you still had to spend an inordinate amount of time going through the variables to find the one that worked. Some indication of the correct path would have been helpful. (Spoiler)

The sound puzzles in general were ill-conceived. I really think if you're going to have sound based puzzles in a game you should make the sounds thins like tones or bells or rhythms, or even snatches of music -- things that are easily recognizable. Trying to understand an alien language that sounded like badly recorded backwards masking was just too much.

There were a lot of inconsistencies in the alien culture, as well. Why should you use one set of number symbols in one place and a completely different set in another? Because things were often so different from place to place, I, at least, had the feeling that I never really learned anything and was making no progress.

There were a lot of things in the game I got that just didn't function. Mission logs that were supposed to be accessible were not accessible, characters who were supposed to appear did not appear. Fortunately everything that was absolutely necessary to the progression of the game happened, but I was in a constant state of anxiety that I would miss something vital.

I was interested enough in Schizm not to quit, but I spent a lot of time in what seemed to be pointless busy-work and I never really felt like I knew quite what was going on or how to proceed. I like non-linear games, but at times Schizm seemed so non-linear as to be incoherent.

Probably this is not a game that is going to keep you completely absorbed far past your bedtime, but it is a good game to play for a couple hours, then put away and come back to later.

Stunning but Tough

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 17 / 17
Date: March 28, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I have just finished reading a number of the reviews for Schizm and I cannot understand people complaining about the difficulty in solving some of the puzzles in this glorious game. Isn't that the point?

The graphics are beautiful. The story-line is good enough for an adventure game. The music and effects are on a par with the Myst Trilogy and the like. The added twist of having two main characters who must cooperate to accomplish some tasks is another nice touch.

I installed the CD-ROM version to my hard drive and the game played flawlessly. I did have a bit of trouble controlling the pan rate using the mouse, but soon discovered that the arrow keys provided a solution with the left and right arrows yielding a a 45 degree pan left or right, while the up and down arrows allowed a 180 degree switch (very useful when you realize you went the wrong way and simply want to turn around and go back.)

My only complaint would be the inability to terminate a video scene. While the videos are wonderful, deep into a game it would have been nice to be able to skip to the end... a small price to pay for a truly challenging game.

A superb game yet difficult...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 14 / 14
Date: February 09, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I must say that this game kinda surprised me since I saw it was published by Dreamcatcher. Dreamcatcher made my adventure gaming kind of boring and meaningless, as I played many of their games like: "The Messenger", "The Crystal Key", "Beyond Atlantis 2" and maybe another one I can't recall. Those adventure games were filled with beautiful graphics and lame gameplay and plots, so you better believe I was surprised when I picked up a copy of Schizm - Mysterious Journey.

The game has absolutely stunning graphics, which although sometimes appeared blurry and color distorted, but at many scenes the graphics absolutely shined (I'd give the graphics a solid 4 stars). You can see the air ballons, the flying ships beautifully detailed.

The gameplay kind of gave me mixed feelings since, there was a lot to tweak, a lot to look, a lot to use, but I regret not being able to sweep through the whole world in Schizm, and believe me there is a lot to sweep and explore in the Schizm world. Some people might call it "another" Myst-clone, but that's not the case here. You can play two characters by switching between them. Many people don't like the stranded/abandoned/lifeless worlds seen in Myst and in this game, people who love to interact and love the long dialogues with many characters should not try this game - go look for monkey island or discworld clones, but for people who love just to explore and see sheer beauty need to check this one out. Not to say that this game has no gameplay, it just concentrates more on the exploration side.

Now for the part I love the most: the puzzles. I'm a long time adventure gamer (and I mean long..., from the days of the zork text adventures) and I've stumbled upon many difficult/brain cracking adventure games (just the way I love it) and I solved all of them without using a single hint, my hardest one up until now was Discworld 1 in which I blew my brains out until I solved it, the Myst-Riven games were hard also, but I got through them also, but Schizm was EXCEPTIONALLY hard, maybe the hardest adventure game ever... There are certain puzzles that unless you are a mathematics professor it will take you forever to solve. I've been on it for a couple of weeks and I am only half the way...

To sum it up, this is a great game for the thinkers/brain busters types, definitely not for those hardcore Monkey Island fans. I recommend you all to buy it and try it out, but be ready to do some mind busting as the puzzles in this game will require the most of it...

And I was looking forward to this. To be specific...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 15 / 16
Date: November 01, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Well, the main reason I'm writing this is because there seemed to be a large lack of pride of the programmers, and it is reflected in the game.
----- Pride. In the flimsy booklet, and in the install procedure, you see that they will, and I quote, "gladly replace any disc free of charge, whether accidentally damaged or due to manufacturer defect." But, the very next sentence states that you have to send $8 for S&H [that's over 25% of the purchase price] and $2 for each extra disc [and again, that's even if it is damaged by the manufacturer, as stated. I mail CDs all the time for work... it costs about 75 cents... do they package it in lead? `Free' has taken on a new meaning, as has their `warranty'.
Moving to the game itself:
----- Characters. The voice actors were awful [probably my biggest negative, and hard to explain in type]... painful to listen to them... almost wanted to cut sound off and read subtitles. Listening to the woman 'heroine', I was just crying for Imoen, Charsi, or April Ryan. Wish they had spent the extra dollars and went with real actors. the guy hero... well... where's garret [or even Mr. Freeman or Max Payne] when you need him? [granted the actors may be very nice people, but they don't have game quality voices]. Actually, Jim Raynor would have been fantastic for this role.
----- Game settings... you have two settings: music volume, effects volume [oh, and subtitles on/off]. That's it. and the sound effects? Marginal. No video settings to tell the game "my system should have a stewardess on it, so throw as many triangles at the screen as you want." No video check, either. Nope... lowest common denominator, I suppose [which left it too blocky for my taste].
----- Interface. You can barely hear the walking sounds (so you don't know whether you're walking, or whether you're on a motorcycle, which seems like the case with the speed you move from room to room. But, that doesn't matter much, because you really don't have much control over where you can walk to... when you click to walk, you go automatically to where they want you to go, so you might as well just clip to there. There's not much looking around... stuff is either right in front of your face, or you don't get to look at it... but most scenery that you'd like to check out isn't available [plenty of doors on huts, etc, that are simply pretty scenery, even though you're right next to them and you're supposed to be investigating what's going on]. I'm left wondering, such as in the big lebowski, what's the point? What's the point of having all that scenery and what not, when there's a stiffly few things you can look at, and despite there being lots of `stuff' around, you can't investigate it. It's as if there's puzzle A, and you need to solve puzzle A, and other than that, that's it. Once you do that, you move on. Why even have a game interface or story? The walking was somewhat similar to Riven [and the year it came out... no progress, which is what I was hoping for].
Sure -- the backgrounds are somewhat nice, but stick to dl'ing some pretty wallpaper and you'll have the same.... artwork on your desktop you can't do anything with.

Atmospheric, but disappointing overall

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 12 / 13
Date: January 05, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Schizm is a beautiful game, but not without its problems. First of all, its navigation is cumbersome. Unlike other adventuregames of today, it does not allow 360 degrees movement, wich is a bit of a let down. The movement by mouse is tricky, and often irritating - you can't stop the movement in time. Freezing is frequent, saving every two minutes imperative. The storyline reminds (to say the least) a lot of other games in this genre, especially The Journeyman Project 3, by Presto. I would say, it's almost identical. And then there's the graphics, wich, at least on cd-rom, are not quite the quality I've come to expect, having played Exile and Riven. The puzzles defy logic. I would say the're undoable without hints, nudges and pushes, or even een detailed walkthrough in times. That said, Schizm has a beautiful atmosphere, great music and superb sounds. The different worlds are stunning, although, again, a lot has been borrowed if not copied from either Riven/Exile or real life (Gaudi's architecture, for example.) Is it worth the money? Yes, well, maybe. But be ready for some major irritations and resorting to walkthroughs.

A good challenge - but buy the DVD

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 10 / 10
Date: October 08, 2003
Author: Amazon User

First of all, the gameplay. The game is definitely difficult and some of the puzzles are potentially real stumpers. Some degree of mathematical insight is certainly required to solve them.

One problem I have with the puzzles is that they are not logically arranged. For instance, after progressing some distance through the game you reach a point where you have to return one (and perhaps both) characters to the point where they started the game to obtain something necessary to continue the game that cannot be obtained at the beginning. There is also an object that can be obtained from the beginning that is not essential to progress beyond the start of the game, but becomes vital later on, and it would be easy to leave the beginning without obtaining it. Problems like that add to the difficulty of the game. Things are made easier, however, by a limited number of inventory items, and the fact that if you hold the right inventory item for performing a task the computer automatically selects it for you.

Several of the puzzles are mathematically oriented. While I can usually work out mathematically related puzzles, I still can't determine the logic behind one of them (translating the old to new co-ordinates) as it seems that in the alien number system you carry numbers between some columns but not others. Another difficult mathematical puzzle, the triangle puzzle, was rendered impossible in my game by the graphics not being good enough to show the readings on the relevant instruments. This forced me to revert to a walkthrough to solve these puzzles, which was unsatisfying.

The rest of the puzzles generally were solvable (although a lot of logic needs to be applied, including drawing up lookup tables to determine patterns etc) but often lacked a real logic to them in terms of game story (like the houses which you must enter twice but leave once). This is in contrast to the puzzles in the Myst series, which are closely ingrained with the storyline and make good sense in the context of the universes created. The puzzles in Schizm seem to be there purely for the sake of vexing and perplexing the visitor, which is unsatisfying in terms of storyline. The storyline also doesn't make an awful lot of sense (there is a very contrived explanation as to why your two characters can't see one another, even when standing next to each other), but what the heck.

I also had a real problem with the acting, which is appalling. If you think the acting in most computer games is bad, you'll think it is Oscar material compared to that in Schizm. I understand that the actors are not natural English speakers, but the game makers could at least have cheaply hired a voice actor to overdub their lines.

Now some technical points.

I bought the CD version of this game. As many of the reviews below indicate, this game was initially designed for DVD, and has suffered in the translation to CD.

The biggest problem is the graphics. The game has a lavish production design but the compression required to convert the game to CD has resulted in blurry and indistinct graphics at some points. Mostly this is merely an aesthetic problem, but when you can't read numbers on dials or key sets of co-ordinates, it's a much bigger issue. Were it not for walkthroughs I simply wouldn't have been able to solve one of the puzzles purely due to bad graphics. There are also some objects which were very hard to distinguish for the same reason.

Unless you do a full install of all 5 CDs (which I would highly recommend, although you will need lots of disk space) you will need to change CDs frequently. One thing adding to the problem of swapping CDs is that you control two characters who must be moved independently - so when moving both characters from location A to location B you need to walk each character along the path one at a time. It would have assisted if the programmers had enabled you to move both characters together, and included a 'zip' mode as there is a lot of pacing back and forth through familiar territory.

Finally, there are more quicktime movies containing hints that are on the DVD version but are not on the CD version. The DVD also has an additional puzzle.

All in all - it's a difficult adventure, but if you want to be able to solve it yourself you may have big problems using the CD version, due to graphical problems.

Disappointing

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 12
Date: November 04, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I don't mind the graphics or interface of this game, but I do find the puzzles both trivial and frustrating. I don't much care for games that require me to keep detailed notes of obscure symbols, sounds, etc., some of which may be useful later. (I recognize that there are people that do enjoy this, and consider this a mark of a good game -- I'm simply not one of them. Since I don't usually play a game all at once, but over the course of two or three weeks, I find this process tedious.) I finally went to a walkthrough and, frankly, I never would have figured out the solution to the first puzzle. I'm not an idiot, and have played many of these kinds of games before, but this one is, in my opinion, not worth the trouble.

Do NOT Buy!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 9
Date: July 28, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This is an absolutely horrible game. The first thing you notice, though fairly trivial, is that the graphics are bad. There's no changing the resolution or the color depth, so it runs at what appears to be 640x480 or something with a very low color depth. Everything's grainy with banding due to lack of color.

The next biggest problem is that the navigation is terrible. You move forward by clicking when you randomly pass the cursor over the right spot and the cursor turn to the right shape. But, to turn, you either have to use the cursor keys (which do an instantaneous turn instead of a pan, so it's hard to hold an image in your head of where you are), or you click and PUSH the mouse in the direction you want to turn instead of clicking and dragging the window in that direction (and the pan is so fast you can't see the scenery go by). There's no cursor change in those cases. Then, if you can look up or down, the only indication you have is a change to an icon down below the scene in your inventory. Plus, the cursor shape indicating a possible path is very easy to confuse as to where it's really pointing. In some cases, clicking forward will turn you 45 degrees before proceeding to take you somewhere nowhere near where it looked like it would take you. In other cases, you think it's pointing somewhere you've been, but it's not (so you miss a path). You end up watching the cursor and thinking about the mechanics of movement instead of looking at the scenery and tying to figure out what's going on. Also irritating is that once you click to go forward, it will stop at multiple, non-significant spots (even on straight, non-divertable paths). So, you spend time sweeping the cursor over everything in every direction wondering what's so important that the game stopped you here.

But, the biggest problem is the puzzles themselves. The charitable description would be that they're impossibly hard. A more accurate description is that there's neither rhyme nor reason to them. In some cases, there's no indication that a device IS a puzzle and not just a static display. If you don't have a necessary inventory item, you can't do anything and there's no indication that you could EVER do anything in it. If you have some random inventory item that it expects, it just changes the cursor in the right place (if you happen to cross the spot) and you drop it on. In others, the puzzle is so vague that you're not even sure what you're supposed to be doing with it or why. Then you have to work your way through multiple, non-easily-written notation systems or phonetics. In my case, I uninstalled the game when it became obvious that it wanted me to reproduce some long string of barely heard, non-phonetically-writeable, background-noise-filled, alien speech on a set of devices strewn in four or six places about a very large room.

Impossible. Not fun in the least. Do NOT, under any circumstances, buy this game.

I wanted adventure, but I got lame puzzles

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 20 / 32
Date: November 08, 2001
Author: Amazon User

At least in Riven (which I also grew tired of), there was a sense of "being there," of exploring a mysterious, beautifully detailed world. I bought the CD version of Schizm, which was the only version for sale at Best Buy, dutifully loaded all 5 CD's, and was appalled at the low quality of the video. No sense of reality, no immersion. I KNEW I should've bought Myst 3, dang it. But the truth is, the puzzles in this "game" are what I'd expect to find in a newstand puzzle magazine. And I don't find those interesting, either. I'm a programmer, and I live to solve logic problems. So why don't I like Schizm? Because, based on the game's own description of itself, I was hoping that it would be more of an adventure, filled with discovery, wonder, and mystery. As if you were truly stranded on an alien world and trying to figure things out. The only game I've played like that is Thief II, which is WONDERFUL. You interact, you figure things out, you knock a few guys out here and there with a blackjack, and meanwhile a great story develops, PAINLESSLY. I can't wait for Thief III to come out...

This game was nothing more than an interactive screensaver wrapped around some lame puzzles. Very disappointing.

This is the second Dreamcatcher title I've bought. The other was Cydonia (now called Lightbringer, probably to throw people off the track who have read bad reviews of Cydonia). Lesson learned: if it says Dreamcatcher, avoid it all costs.

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