Still Life Review

ValkyrAssassin reviews the adventure game Still Life, the 2005 sequel to Post Mortem.

[@marmeladenfreund]

Thanks for the video! In order to categorise Still life, I'm afraid I need to expand a little... I've been a point & click adventure enthusiast since the late 1980s (mainly detective puzzles and cyberpunk subgenres). And it's safe to say that the genre has had its ups and downs. A high point was undoubtedly in the mid-90s. Titles such as "Gabriel Knight - Sins of the Fathers", "Broken Sword", "The Dig", "Full Throttle", "Blade Runner" and others were the innovative cutting edge of the gaming scene at the time and impressed with, among other things, dense stories, good manageability, beautifully and lovingly drawn graphics, a well-rounded multimedia experience and top Hollywood-class voice actors. The studios invested a lot of money and had great success with the games. From the end of the 90s, real-time strategy games and first-person shooters increasingly pushed point & click adventure games from the gaming throne. The studios tried to react to this and modernised the genre, to make it more "upbeat". But this mostly went wrong and resulted in the late 90s to mid-2000s being an absolute low point for the genre: the 3D or 2 1/2D graphics looked sterile and were prone to errors, the scenes looked empty and dead, the characters and NPCs were bumpy and uncanny, the dialogues were flat and expressionless, mostly spoken by cheaper category C and D actors. And most importantly, the puzzles were too easy and were often replaced by an overabundance of silly, annoying and out-of-place in-game puzzles (completely overdone and unrealistic mechanisms, safe locks or circuits, etc.) that often disrupted the flow and enjoyment of the game. Typical for the time are also too many scenes and empty intermediate screens that you have to click through again and again - convenient mechanisms such as hotkeys, maps and shortcuts were mostly not yet available. Even games with a good, promising story became tedious and annoying, flat, bland and disappointing. And one of these games with an actually good story that falls exactly into this category is "Still Life". Other examples include "The Moment of Silence", "Gabriel Knight - Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned", "Syberia"... Nevertheless, after this phase, adventure games started to pick up again and from the mid-2010s and the entry of several independent labels (e.g. Wadjeteye Games, Grundislav Games, etc.), the the great adventure-expierence of the 1990s was regained and even clearly surpassed.

[@dumlepumle]

Nice review, played through it recently on windows 10 and didn't encounter as many issues as you did. I have for the most part good memories of the game and its story and atmosphere, but i remember struggling with some of the puzzles. That robot also brought up some bad memories.

[@Centralis-sg1ld]

Good video but you need to work on your voice.

[@naryanr]

your voice is way too hard to hear man