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Don't they test these things?

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 29 / 35
Date: December 26, 2002
Author: Amazon User

In SEVEN GAMES OF THE SOUL, you play the role of an elderly caretaker of an abandoned amusement park. You are approached by the devil with a task: witness the stories of seven individuals, and decide whether their souls will go to heaven or hell. It seemed like a fascinating premise, and I was eager to see how it would be handled in a computer game.

I'll admit it's my own fault for not making sure the game would run properly under Windows XP. It doesn't. It will run, but it isn't at all pleasant. The animated sequences get stuck frequently, and the audio is choppy. It's a good thing subtitles are available for the dialogue, although most of it is nonsensical, metaphysical gibberish anyway. As of this writing, there is no patch to make the game XP-compatible.

But operating issues are only part of the problem. The puzzles, if they can be called that, are so obtuse you'd have to be some kind of savant to be able to complete them unaided. There is absolutely no logic to them at all. At a later point in the game, you're rewarded with a demonic assistant, but the clues it offers are invariably for activities you've already completed. Apparently the clues are based on your physical location, not how far you've actually progressed in the game. Except for a couple manual tasks you need it to perform, it is useless.

The graphics are fairly nice, but interacting with things is also problematic. Hot spots are frustratingly obscure and you can move over them a half dozen times before they register. Occasionally, they are misplaced entirely. There is one room you can't exit until you make a quarter turn away from the door and click on a blank wall. And I am currently at a standstill in my game because a drawer I need to open will not open. I have gone over every inch of that room to no avail. What good is a game that you cannot finish even with a walkthrough?

SEVEN GAMES OF THE SOUL (or FAUST as it is referred to in the game itself) is a huge disappointment. It could have been interesting, but it getting through any portion of the game was torture.

Duh?

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 14 / 15
Date: June 09, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This has got to be one of the most innane games I have ever played. the idea of 7 vices is brilliant and that is what drew me in, however the 7 vices are never explored and are linked in the dreamland park through some bizarre connection known only to the creators of this little waste of space. In the end, I had no idea what the goal of this exercise had been. The acting is horrid, cursors are barely visable when they light on a hotspot and there is little control over any action--you are simpley moving the story along. Almost as bad, anytime you backed out to save you had to endure a lengthy movie credit sequence...over and over and over. Music not too bad though.

seven wasted hours of the soul

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: March 28, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I can't say enough about how poor this game is, especially after having finished a *real* game (grim fandango: buy it now). Typos, bugs and poor dubs are bad enough, but to have to endure the inane plot, the senseless "puzzles" and the utterly frustrating lack of continuity is too much (not to mention the poor attemps at ripping off myst/riven).

It's strange, though. There is some out-of-place attention to detail in odd areas. My guess is there was an above average art director, an ok story teller, some run-of-the-mill programmers, a UI person that had no clue, and someone in charge that had a "QA-be-damned" attitude that only cared about getting the thing out and didn't care about playability. I can't imagine *anyone* getting by without a guide book. It is just too obscure, annoying, and just plain idiotic to play. There, you've been warned.

If only I could give this game 0 stars

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 10
Date: August 19, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I don't like being manipulated by computer games.
I won't give any specifics away, but let's just say the goal stated in the instructions and in the game's introduction isn't the real goal. And you don't find out what the real goal is until the final scene. That's disappointing, because the stated premise of the game is intriguing, but it never comes to fruition.
Also, the puzzles are tough - anyone who says they did all of the puzzles without a walkthrough is either a liar or a genius.
The game looks and sounds OK, but the fact that there is no
risk factor to your character leaves the story flat and boring. Plus, the character development was choppy and incomplete - you don't know what ends up happening to most of the characters.
I definitely do not recommend this game.

buy the seventh guest instead. or watch the movie "freaks".

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 7
Date: March 26, 2001
Author: Amazon User

i sincerely regret the money i spent on this. the gameplay was awkward and way too linear. the graphics were malformed and irritating, with these huge pockmarked looking chins. bleah. i didn't bother getting past the second chapter.

when i buy a game one of my requirements is FUN. while the ambience was nice, i don't find it FUN to go over and over and over doing the same tasks to find one stupid little thing. that's bad design. or to have to hover over a practically one-pixel area to find said item or hint.

i recommend either encasing the game in concrete and dropping it in the ocean, or saving your money all together.

Confused and Angry

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: June 26, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I am often a little suprised at the reviews some games get, but i can understand that everybody has different tastes so it does,nt bother me. But this has me stumped this is by far the worst adventure game i have ever played,i did,nt even play it exactly i actually used a wwalkthrough for the entire thing just so i could also make a review on the storyline and plot otherwise i would have stopped lpaying right there

Lets begin with the puzzles probably the lowest point of the game they are impossible for the player to solve for the most part Some of the more ridiculous ouzzles include finding a tiny rectangular metal plate on the ground its colour almost matches the ground making it even more impossible to find but there is absoloutly no indication that you have to find this metal reangle which then makes a clicking sound and you are now able to open a plaque on the wall which before if you tried clicking on it nothing would have happend not even a click to indicate it is locked but can be opened. In another puzzle you enter a bathroom and there is a hotspot on a part of the wall the entire wall is the same with no distinguishable features but for some reason there is a hotspot on just ONE part of the wall clicking on this NOTHING brings up a mirror(??) a mirror just appears in thin air with what appears to be the reflection of a drawer in the bathroom, but when you look the actual drawer has not opened only the drawer in the mirror image and you must open the drawer in the mirror image not the real One. hows that for ridiculous. Furthermore much of what you do you dont know why you you need to do that, it lacks purpose and logic.

As for the plot it leaves alot of unexplained questions one of the characters "two siamese twins" are seen seperate in one clip, this is never explained or even referenced ever again, there alot of things like that, and the character animations are just terrible they have no facial expression the character mephisto has a constant grin on his face and for some reason his arms are constantly flailing about the place as he talks, actually all the characters are like that. You will find nothing in this game, If i were a game develop giving a presentation on what NOT to do in an adventure game id bring this along as an example.

Satan can have my soul before I'll play this again.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 38 / 44
Date: March 13, 2001
Author: Amazon User

The game sounds like it would be cool- you wander around an amusement park and deal with the condemned. Well, it's not. The graphics are out of date, the voice acting sounds like a badly dubbed movie, and the point and click puzzles make no sense. Also, you're in an amusement park but you can't interact with the rides. I could forgive all this if the story was good. Instead, the storyline is just a bunch of weird events strung together. For example, one of the "sins" you have to deal with is a scientist who gets offered immortality. He says no so you pile little rocks around his house and leave. And that's IT. Also, the puzzles are so illogical they're impossible to solve. It took me 15 minutes to figure out I had to get to the secret passage behind the refrigerator by lifting the fridge with a complicated rope system and a teddy bear. Yup, you lift a refrigerator by using a teddy bear as a counterweight. I just pointed and clicked on everything to solve the game. It took 4 long hours where I kept shaking my head and saying "WHAT'S GOING ON?". The only good thing about the game was that some of the FMV's were fun to watch. They didn't add to the plot, but they showed some creepy images. If you want a good adventure game I'd go with The Longest Journey. I just wish I hadn't wasted my 20 bucks on this one.

Um... well, it's European

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 8 / 10
Date: May 25, 2001
Author: Amazon User

A strange little game which starts very ambitiously and really gets lost along the way somewhere. There are a number of borderline offensive features -- such as the sex dream sequence, the subtext that Satan's not such a bad guy after all, and the Uncle Tom-like black character in overalls -- but the thing that really turned me off was the bad writing, bad animation, and bad acting. Or maybe it's just a bad translation? All in all, not really worth the bother.

I was disappointed

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: April 27, 2005
Author: Amazon User

In the early part of the 20th century, a man named Theodore More built an amusement park called Dreamland. The park was inhabited by various societal misfits--a pair of Siamese twins, an animal trainer with parental issues, a fat lady, etc.--all of whom had some dealings of an infernal nature with a gentleman named Mephisto. Now there's some dissension in the upper realms as to whether all these people deserved what they got and an everyman--Marcellus Faust--is sent to explore the past and sort things out.

_Faust: Seven Games of the Soul_ is a game that players seem either to love or hate. The ones who love it cite its adult themes, great soundtrack, decent graphics and freedeom of exploration. Its detractors refer to illogical puzzles, technical problems, random action triggers and lack of a truly coherent story. All these things, both the good and the bad, are part and parcel of this game. Taking all into account, I fully expected to be one of the pro-Faust camp. I wasn't.

In the first place, as another reviewer has pointed out, this game really doesn't run very well on XP. You can get it to run if you use a compatability mode and turn your sound acceleration all the way down. But sound in the cutscenes is still extremely choppy and there are numerous things in the game that don't work. Half the features on the main menu simply don't function. Some of these features are supposed to be helpful in gameplay (detailed notes on each character, for example, that just aren't there). Some are things that have led others to give Faust high ratings (no matter what, I could only access one song from the soundtrack)so their lack really had an impact. Within the game there are numerous glitches as well--hotspots that don't appear, or appear far from where they're supposed to, cutscenes that don't play, things that don't work. Just for that, I found attempting to play Faust a frustrating experience.

But it's when you get to the story that things really fall apart. In seven episodes, each devoted to one of the park's denizens, you're supposed to unveil a greater mystery. And you do, kind of. But the episodes themselves are too short and lack detail, and only a few of them contribute to the greater story. Otherwise, you're exploring territory that's infuriatingly random. Some of these people had relationships with each other. Some didn't. What's the point and who cares? By the end, I didn't.

The puzzles were a mixed bag, mostly inventory-based with a few combination locks--not enough variety to excite me, I'm afraid. And here, too, the randomness showed. There was too much inventory that you picked up that had no purpose other than to trigger a cutscene. There was other inventory that you picked up that had no purpose at all and later disappeared (what was that baseball bat for?????) There were puzzles that were so obtuse that there was no possibility that one could solve them without at least a nudge and puzzles that gave no indication they HAD been solved, so I still had to consult a walkthrough to see what was going on. There were puzzles with so many possible solutions--putting a number of words into order in a sentence, for example, when those words would make sense in a hundred different orders--that solving them would take days. I generally play without hints or a walkthrough, so having to exit the game and consult one about five times an episode just to follow the gameplay was truly annoying. Also, towards the end of every episode you're suddenly thrust into a totally different location where you have to complete some action unrelated to anything else to move on. The whole experience was like being shunted back and forth along a series of badly running bumper cars.

After everything else, the revelation of the "true" story and the final decision were a letdown and the two endings, good and bad, were frankly abrupt, meaningless and had the feeling of being slapped on.

I completed Faust in under 20 hours. It would have been shorter if I'd known what was going on. I have to say, for all the disappointments, it IS a haunting game and I DO keep thinking about it. I think if I had an older computer on which to play older games I'd play it again; maybe I'd like it better. But on modern machines, by the standards of today's games, it just doesn't measure up.

Constricted gameplay, confusing storyline

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: May 21, 2001
Author: Amazon User

+'s = decent graphics, interesting movies -'s = limiting gameplay only allows you to do what they require, many rooms/areas are shown that cannot be explored, your actions have little to do with the plot (it is more like movie that you watch than it is a game), multiple objects cannot be used/are not needed, minimal charachter detail

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