Still Life Preview

From the developers of the highly acclaimed adventure games Syberia and Post Mortem comes Still Life, a police-adventure game that follows the exploits of Victoria McPherson, an FBI agent who is investigating a series of grisly murders in Chicago. The game features an easy interface, complicated puzzles and a great sense of atmosphere that any fan of adventure games should enjoy when the game is released this April.

Still Life is the spiritual successor to the acclaimed Post Mortem, as Victoria is actually the granddaughter of Gustav McPherson, the hero of Post Mortem. In fact, much of the gameplay will have the gamer playing as Gustav through flashbacks to 1920’s Prague, as Victoria searches for clues and discovers similarities between the murders she is investigating and those that her grandfather probed many years prior.

The game essentially begins with Victoria arriving at the location of the fifth murder and conversing with a beat cop who was on the scene. This interaction allows the player to explore the game’s conversation options. By using the left and right triggers, you can either give a professional response or a personal response, respectively. Depending on whom you are talking to, this will shift the conversation. For example, some people won’t respond to you if you are all business and don’t try to be friendly to them first before prying them for info and some people aren’t going to respond to personal comments and only want to talk shop.

Once on the murder scene, you gain access to a forensic kit that will make things quite easier for your investigation. The kit, which has standard crime-scene tools like bags and dusters as well as black lights and luminol to discover bloodstains, is quite indispensable for uncovering clues and hints to your crime analysis. Another necessity will be photography. You’ll be required to photograph the scene after searching it, and then use the photo to compare the location to find differences.

The game’s interface is pretty easy to grasp and feels a lot like Syberia, which makes sense since the same creators are involved with Still Life. The menus and inventory are easy to navigate, giving you the ability to zoom and check inventory items such as photographs.

So far the game has a very slick amount of polish, and the graphics showcase this very well. The game is teeming with atmosphere, feeling more like a stylized movie than a video game; think of films like Seven and you’ll get what I mean. The environments look great and the character models are very well animated and brought to life. When the game switches control from Victoria to Gustav, the screen becomes awash in a brownish hue, feeling like a faded memory, which is a nice touch.

All things considered, Still Life is shaping up to be a very impressive cop thriller in the vein of its predecessor. While the subject matter and language aren’t for the squeamish (expect an M Rating), fans of Post Mortem and Syberia should keep an eye out for this one.