Gray Matter is a brilliant adventure game that has been about 8 years in the making. There have been production problems with this video game by the great adventure game writer Jane Jensen. Jane Jensen wrote a number of my favorite adventure games, including the Gaberial Knight games and King’s Quest VI. One of my all time favorite game quotes is from King’s Quest VI-And then you have a pizza. Hmm, maybe you had to be there.
Gray Matter is the story of Sam Everett, street magician and poor goth girl, and David Styles, scarred widower and slightly mad scientist. The story is set in Oxford and London and there are a lot of British accents. Sam is an American, but no one seems to hold it against her. There is a ghost, a secret magician’s club, gnarly mind powers, and budding romance.
We control Sam and David in alternating chapters, doing the usual adventure game dance of finding items, exploring rooms, filling our bottomless pockets, and talking to other characters. There are a lot of funny bits here and there, and the usual frustration of trying to figure out what to do next when it appears that you have done everything you can do. One of the cool features that I didn’t really use was color codes on the map that told when a location contained items that need to be done for the main objections, bonus objections, and when there is no reason to return to that location.
Gray Matter is an old school kind of game, not really surprising since it was originally slated to be released in 2004. The game is made up of static screens with the characters moving within them, this is a bit of a contrast from the more modern 360 worlds of games like Dracula 3 or even Journeyman Project 3. The icon turns into an eye, mouth, set of gears, or a magic hat as needed. One of the fun aspects of Gray Matter is having Sam perform magic tricks. But like so many aspects of the game, the magic acts were dumbed down to such a point that there was no challenge whatsoever in performing the tricks. It was a simple matter to randomly pick the correct trick and you could read the needed steps from the open book in the magic interface. I have to think this was meant to be a bit more challenging.
The cutscenes were rendered in graphic novel style, and they were often so short they hardly seemed worth the effort. There were a couple of places that Sam never got around to going to, even though it seemed as if she would at some point. There were a lot of long conversations and as the game reaches it’s conclusion, the finial scenes pretty much play themselves out with only one action needed to finish the game.
It was still a great game. The story was fun. The characters were interesting. The forced perspective rooms were pretty and occasionally stunning. The sequence under the club near the end of the game was brilliant, the rooms filled with wonderful and amusing items. Most of the puzzles were a little too easy, but I tend to prefer that to the Fibonacci sequences and hypercomplex puzzles of most Sherlock Holmes games. I became stuck not because I couldn’t solve a puzzle, but because I hadn’t completed some necessary action. There are a number of places where half the room is off screen and you have to pan the camera by walking in that direction. There are no obvious clues as to when this should be done.
Another odd feature-hitting the space bar shows all clickable places in a room, with the items names. This makes it pretty easy to make sure you didn’t miss anything, but half the fun of these games is panning around looking for things to do.
I still loved Gray Matter. There is no word as to when this great adventure game will be for sale in America. It can be found for pre-order on Amazon UK. Curiously, the Gray Matter – Original Soundtrack
The finial cutscene hints at a sequel, and I hope it doesn’t take Jane Jensen 8 years to get the next title out.
