W.I.R.E.D. Review --
I can tell you the exact moment that I decided to stop playing Agatha Christie: And Then There Were None and never come back.
But first let me say how much I appreciate the effort. The Wii's mouselike controller and casual audience make it perfect for point-and-click adventure games, which of course is why absolutely no one has bothered to make one. No one except The Adventure Company (natch), who has ported its 2005 PC adventure game And Then There Were None, based on the best-selling novel, to Wii.
As a proof of concept, it works like a charm. Adventure games work very well on Wii. The interface transfers over perfectly, the one-handed controls mean you can eat lunch while you puzzle over the game's brainteasers, and high-tech graphics aren't important to the slow-paced style.
But as a game, And Then There Were None commits every cardinal sin of bad adventure design.
When I first started playing the game - how silly I feel, looking back! - I thought it was shaping up to be too easy. The re-enactment of Agatha Christie's famous novel was speeding along at a rapid clip: Ten strangers arrive on an isolated island, and one by one their mysterious and absent host begins to murder them. By the time five people lay dead, I'd only solved a few puzzles, although I'd amassed a sizeable inventory of objects whose uses I could not even begin to guess at.
By this point, my main complaint with the game was that too much of it seemed to revolve around tramping around the island aimlessly, having absolutely no direction as to what to do, and finding nothing. Eventually, I'd pass some arbitrary waypoint and the game would load up the next cut-scene, somebody else would die, and the game would continue on with me having done very little.
And then, about halfway through, I hit The Wall. My character decided that now was the time to put his "plan" into action, a plan that he had not shared with me, for getting off the island. Great! Only except I had pretty much clicked on everything by this point and didn't know what to do. Applying a little more brain power, I discovered the secret entrance to a hidden room. But was still totally stuck.
Before I tell you what happened next, you have to understand that the game's shelf life was rapidly deteriorating. And Then There Were None is not a good-looking game by anyone's measure; the characters and environments were pug-ugly in 2005 and the journey to Wii did them no favors. The writing is mediocre, the voice acting barely passable, and the music is one repeating piano piece that would drive one to suicide if there were not already a murderer on the loose.
I had been quite forgiving of all of this because, well, it's based on a great murder story that I haven't read. By this point (about four or five hours in), I was getting absorbed into the murder mystery and wanted to know what happened next.
So bearing all this in mind, I hope you understand why I went to the Internet for help. Loading up a FAQ for the game, I was immediately confronted not with a head-slappingly obvious solution to the puzzle, but a giant list of in-game items that I had absolutely no idea existed.
The pipe stem is in the ladies' bathroom? I marveled. I went in that bathroom like ten times and looked everywhere! But there it was: A miniature gathering of pixels that for all the world looked like a slight discoloration in the sink tile, something that I never in a million years would have clicked on.
More revelations from the FAQ: Belied by the serious, realistic ambience, the latter half of the game hinges on the sort of completely ludicrous, use-the-turkey-baster-with-the-flour1 type of puzzles that no one ever solves unless they a) cheat b) try to combine every object with every other object in a desperate bid to make progress.
Yes, I could have brute-forced my way through some of the puzzles using just that technique given enough time, but some of them were profoundly absurd in their opacity. Had I really been enraptured with the story and presentation, I might have just looked up the puzzle I was stuck on and proceeded from there, but by that point I had lost all ability to care, and shut the game off forever.
I'd like to encourage The Adventure Company to bring more point-and-clicks to Wii, but please, please make them better than this.
Source: W.I.R.E.D.