Secret Files: Tunguska

Не сказать, что я поклонник классических квестов девяностых и начала нулевых годов, но эта игра мне очень зашла. Да, это далеко не шедевр, свои косяки присутствуют, но на один раз крайне недурно. Советую пройти всю трилогию, а первая часть лучшей в ней, кстати.

Secret Files: Tunguska place itself between a LucasArts/Revolution Graphic Quality and Design and a Microids Classics narrative. You can expect a solid gameplay, with a good amount of close up, puzzles and interactions. However the gameplay take some leaps in the final chapters asking for some necessary interaction with journal that might stop your run for ages whitout a hint, a la MGS 140.15. Narratively this first chapter of the saga feels a bit rushed, but still proves it's ground for future entries, giving a vibe of the first Discworld or Broken Sword. Both the protagonist are classical investigators, more mature and sexist than a George and Nico, or a sugarcoated Guybrush, that leads to crude, unfair, dirty jokes not for everyone, especially in 2024. "Best Che Guevara joke since 2006"

A solid point and click adventure. Its strengths are the presentation, humor and the story. On the negative side some puzzles / combinations are illogical for me and the conclusion leaves out some answers. It should also remark that the story can get a bit too cheesy for others and it is produced in Germany. With the later I mean some jokes, jabs and word plays are lost in translation or weaker. For itself it was a quite successful point and click adventure in its time which is remarkable as the genre is not that relevant for publishers. Also it is a collaboration of 2 developers that works smoothly (Fusionsphere Systems and Animation Arts). It is the story of Nina Kalenkow who wants to visit her father who is a scientist in his lab in Berlin. When she arrives her father is missing and his laboratory is devastated. It looks as someone searched for documents and kidnapped him. This is a start of an adventure that will take her to many places to uncover the truth. The story kept me engaged but it is a bit cheesy sometimes. There is a connection to the Tunguska event / catastrophe (Not a spoiler as it is the title). In 1908 in a remote area of Russia an explosion flatten a huge area including whole forests. It is still unknown what happened back then. A meteorite impact was the supposed cult-print but there was no impact crater found. From then on there were many theories like a less dense meteorite that exploded in the sky (not hitting the ground), huge gas eruption, a rare kind of volcanic eruption up to strange theories like a miniature black hole or even an alien vessel. But back to the game. It is a normal / standard point and click adventure. Collect items and combine or use them at the right place. It has also some puzzles were you have to figure out patterns. If you are lost there is an option to highlight all objects you can interact with. Mostly the puzzles and riddles are good and I was sometimes proud to find the conclusions. However some combinations are not that intuitive or logical atop of very few that feel forced into the story. If I should rate it from good to bad it would be approx 75% to 25%. The presentation was great and the graphic still looks not that outdated. The soundtrack and voice actors fully deliver (German version). I will praise the cast and say that there is not one weak character. The humor works great but it takes some time to start and the end credits are hilariously funny. They use some good word plays, jabs to celebrities, stereotypes and sometimes dark humor or fourth wall breaks. Again I don't know how much is transferred into other languages so take this with a grain of salt. Overall this was an enjoyable game. It is not a timeless classic or best of its kind but still worth playing and remebering. If you like the genre than this is a solid game and worth a try.

All the components of a bad Pn'C adventure are there: - Gormless inventory combinations. And since at times your character tells you that she won't do something until she has a good reason, it's particularly baffling: you'll endure throngs of actions that make no sense to you, the player. - Abysmal voice acting with intonations all other the place and ridiculous accents that make even a non English native speaker cringe. - Dialogues ranging from asinine to infantile. - Pixel hunting, despite the existence of a hot spots key. - Responses to a small set of possible actions only. - A terribly annoying main character, moreover afflicted with nasal logorrhea. - No humour. Or more likely failed humour. - Dull scenery. For a couple of nice landscapes, you'll spend most of your time in bland rooms, not to forget a truly disgusting toilet scene. - Generic plot, complete with conspiracy, nonsensical motivations, unrealistic science, plot-holic events, all good for a parodic game but rather distracting here. - All puzzles so easy that they are completed in 10 seconds tops with minimal thinking. - And much, much more ! The visuals are fine. The atmospheric background sound is often quite good, although not fully translated (like the German voices heard through walls in a Cuban asylum.) The interface is average. All in all, there are worse games out there, on a technical standpoint, but this one is definitely not pleasant to play.

When I started the game, I noticed a few things: (1) The voice acting wasn't great. (2) The dialog **** good. Sometimes embarassing. And (3) the puzzles were the 'combine some items' type, which are a good adventure game **** there were about as contrived as 'puzzles' of this type get. Before long, I was sick to death of guessing what inane 'improptu tool' I was supposed to make with the things in my inventory. And the voice acting was, all to often, bordering on abysmal. (To be fair, a few of the actors do a good **** I feel like those were the same voices that seemed familiar from anime dubs.) But between the weird 'never use contractions' thing, the odd phrasing and word choice (that I imagine stems from the US version of the game being translated from a non-English language original), the fourth-wall stuff ("I managed to open the door! Don't you love playing adventure games where the main character addresses the audience?") and the main character's voice acting being all over the place in terms of quality, I was having a hard time bringing myself to slog through this game. So...I looked up a walkthrough. I don't like wasting money by buying a game then just plowing through it, but this game wasn't giving me a reason to play it. So by the time I finished the game, I'd seen the extent of its dull, inane, meandering story; I'd heard plenty more bad voice acting; I'd enjoyed plenty of robotic animation; I'd had to play 'hunt for the pixels that I can click on to find an item that the walkthrough tells me is there' more times than I'd liked; and I'd gone through puzzles that, had I played the game organically, probably would have meant resorting to systematically trying to combine everything in my inventory until I stumbled across the right pairing. I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone unless they'd run out of other adventure games to play and needed one that would probably taken them a long time to get through. Upside: the game runs without crashing. That's worth a 2, I suppose.