Starship Titanic Review

9.1

Format PC

Developer H2g2

Publisher Zablac

Genre Point and Click

So is the adventure game really dead? Paul Presley thinks he may have found one that's still got some life in it.

Beware, adventure game, for I am death incarnate. I am your greatest enemy and your most passionate lover. I am the slayer of mediocrity and the champion of the great. I am your most strident critic and I smell inferiority at a hundred paces. Be good or be dead; there is no middle ground.

I'll admit that I'd been looking forward to Starship Titanic for a long time. I'd followed its development from an early stage, partly because I'm something of a Douglas Adams fan, but mostly because, as a consumer of 'good' adventure games, I'd been looking for something of real quality for longer than I care to mention and this held the most promise. Am I, then, a happy bunny? I couldn't be happier if I'd just been voted Most Shaggable Rabbit by Doe's Weekly.

Death incarnate?

A few issues ago, Zork: The Grand Inquisitor gave hope to my blackened heart. Here, finally, was an adventure game that tried to take the essential elements of the classic text-adventure and reinvent them for the nineties. And mostly it worked. Starship Titanic does much the same thing, but thanks to a few bright innovations here and there manages to take it one step further: we've got a storyline that is ever present but, vitally, never the sole focus of the action (a la oh so many interactive movies); locations that are rich in detail but are not tied down to the current swathe of on-screen action; characters that have a wealth of depth, but which you are left to discover for yourself (rather than foisted on you upfront); and, most importantly of all, puzzles that are very well-designed and perfectly integrated into the game.

That last point is important. Too many adventures of late have taken the route that goes: create the storyline, devise all the characters and locations, then throw in the puzzles in a gratuitous fashion in an effort to make it seem more like a game than an interactive storybook. Starship Titanic isn't like this - it has puzzles that are born of the inherent storyline. They never feel as though they've been gratuitously added, but instead as though they are the most natural progression of your present situation - a sign of a quality writer at work.

Speaking of which, so is this much-heralded unique speech interface: when you meet a character, you type in what you want to say and they respond accordingly. That's 'type'. With your keyboard. In plain English. It takes a little getting used to, but you soon get into the swing of things, and the sense of freedom this affords you is immeasurable. Plus the characters are so well-written that talking to them rarely becomes a chore. The whole thing is designed as though conversation is a puzzle in itself - you need information from a character, and you have to work out what to say to get it from him.

Another nice touch is the fact that movement between scenes takes place as quick, blurred jumps, instead of painstakingly slow rendered sequences. Concerns have been expressed about the movement interface, the somewhat arbitrary nature of the directional arrows, but whether or not this bothers you comes down to personal taste. Personally I prefer it to the more annoying 360-degree interface seen in the Zork titles. So there.

Call yourself objective?

There are negative points to be made, but to be perfectly honest they're mostly so damned petty that if I actually told you what they were, I'd look bad, instead of the game. It doesn't really have many actual flaws. Instead you can see elements that, while being perfectly fine as they stand, could possibly be improved further. The unique dialogue system, for example, occasionally shows its limitations - although this is perfectly understandable given what the developers are trying to do. At least it never breaks the atmosphere, and you still feel as though you can say and ask anything throughout (which indeed you can).

The next step for the developers is obviously some kind of advanced object interface. At present it's more or less like everyone else's: you pick up an object and your cursor becomes an iconic representation of it, which you use by clicking on other items. It works fine (and, thanks to the quality of the puzzles, you don't really notice its limitations), but it could probably be taken a step further, giving you just as much freedom with objects as the developers have given you with speech.

Justifications

As you've no doubt noticed by now (and the above points notwithstanding), Starship Titanic has got a score of 91 and, consequently, a Classic rating. There are a few reasons for this. It creates an atmosphere that's totally absorbing, it's an adventure game that's actually made me sit down and think (something that previously hasn't happened for quite a while), it's genuinely funny (again, something that's been long-missing) and it has first-rate presentation (which, I'm discovering, is more important than I thought).

But mostly I've decided to award Starship Titanic a Classic rating because of one thing: simply that it's turned around to a moribund software industry and said: 'You want to just sit there and chase each other's tails? Fine. We're going to do things our way.'

And the result is a piece of software that not only shatters several long-held illusions about what's possible in this genre, but innovates and is filled with everything that's right about adventure gaming. Other developers take note: this is the shape of things to come.