2023-11-09 00:56:04
Inspired by Lovecraft, really?
Desolatium started over three years ago as a crowdfunding project from Spanish indie studio Superlumen for a VR and PC point-and-click game. The independent studio has now been bought by Dutch publisher SOEDESCO and although the VR and PC versions of Desolatium will have to wait a bit, console versions have been released. Desolatium is a point-and-click adventure game. For those who don’t know point’n click, in this type of game, you will scan environments in search of information and objects. Clicking on objects saves them to an inventory. By combining elements with each other and with your environment, you can solve puzzles and progress through the game. Most people will have played point-and-click at some point. In Desolatium, you play as four different people who are all involved in a mysterious cult. These people have different roles, such as university professor and journalist. However, in practice, they are not very interesting or charismatic. Despite the fact that the game is fully voiced (in English and Spanish) and the main characters comment on what they see in their environment, it is difficult to get past the generic side of the individuals. And since it’s difficult to sympathize with them, some parts of the plot unfortunately had little impact.
We weren’t impressed with the gameplay either. The game can be completed in around three hours. There are three different endings depending on what you find. The number of puzzles remains quite disappointing and the obstacles encountered were rarely difficult. This was mainly due to the fact that there are few items to find, so there are no surprises regarding what to combine and use when. What you often encounter are texts such as books and newspaper articles. It’s of course a nice way to give some context to the story, but it was just too much. Of course, games don’t have to be realistic, but at some point we found it hard to accept that people forget so much relevant information. This quickly leaves little mystery.
Be in the middle of the story.
The special thing regarding this game is that you play in a (usually) realistic 360° environment. The creators took environmental photos in various locations and translated them into the game world in a slightly modified form. You don’t move around in these environments, but stand at a fixed point in the middle from where you look around. By clicking on doors and paths, you move to a different environment. This ensures that you really feel like you’re in a city or building, but it sometimes makes the added elements feel even more out of place. There were two scenes, one with a fire and one with a monster, which seemed almost (unintentionally?) comical. Sometimes realistic settings are also confusing. While in “homemade” point-and-click environments you can more clearly indicate which routes the player can take and which objects are relevant, it wasn’t entirely clear in Desolatium where you had to go and what you had to TO DO. And while on PC you can easily hover your mouse over the environment to see when your cursor indicates you can click on something, on PS5 it worked a little worse. This sometimes led to frustrating moments where we clicked from one environment to another without knowing what we were looking for, only to discover that we hadn’t kept the cursor in exactly the right place before. Besides the realistic locations, the comic book-inspired style is also striking. You can see it at the start of each chapter, in dialogues and cutscenes. The character posters are notably well designed.
VERDICT
Desolatium is fishing for ambition, it’s a shame because it had potential. We can assume that the VR environments are very impressive and that this changes the entire gaming experience. For console players, the experience is too succinct given the price charged.
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