Secret Files: Tunguska Review

Be honest… How long has it been? A year? Two? Maybe just a few weeks if you picked up the new Broken Sword. Actually it was Dreamfall for me, the last adventure game I played, and I still really enjoyed it. If I am completely honest, I almost missed Secret Files: Tunguska. If it weren’t for a review copy turning up for us innocent wide eyed folks at Boomtown I wouldn’t be sitting here having just finished one of the better adventure experiences of the recent years.

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the general game concept. Using a mouse you point and click at what you want to do and how you want to use it and through a combination of items, locations and brainpower a solution to how to proceed through the game and fulfil your often microcosmic objectives emerges. Quite simply it’s a case of ‘use crowbar on crate’, but thankfully much more interesting. Like most adventures, it is impossible to die which helps the puzzle aspects and unlike most modern adventures I didn’t have to push a series of crates into position to proceed.

Get the brain in gear

Most of the brain scratching work you’ll be doing is thankfully not based on the pixel searching days of old (whereby half of the problem would be finding the right areas you can interact with, and the items you can select,) because of a scene search system that arguably improves on both the alliteration and the gameplay of many an adventure game. By either pushing the space bar or clicking the ever present magnifying glass icon, all of the areas that you can interact with on the current screen are highlighted for you, so that you won’t miss an item because you didn’t see that you could pick it up.

It was apparently a device that the developers used to try and reduce the urge to pick up a walkthrough, and it certainly worked in my experience. Unfortunately, at a couple of points, through desperation, I did end up with the tendency to try using all items on all hotspots in each room to proceed, more often than not succeeding with a clever, yet difficult to work out, solution. Ultimately it is a better system, despite the temptation to brute force an answer. The rest of the game is based on exploration, a few nice logic puzzles (such as manipulating coins to put them in the right pattern) and quite a decent story and its development.

Nina Kalenkov

Your protagonist that you’ll be playing for the majority of the adventure is Nina Kalenkov, the daughter of a rather clever scientist working on research to do with the unexplained explosion that took place in the early 19th Century at Tunguska. Her life, in a typically clichéd yet obligatory way, is thrown upside down when her father goes missing, and her investigations into the cause leads her to uncover a threat that could change the face of humanity forever. Of course that last sentence works best when read with a deep voiced American accent, which we shall get on to later.

The plot flies around the world in an epic scale that gives a lot of different locations, but a slightly shorter experience than The Longest Journey(s) or the equivalent adventures of the past. A few rendered cinematics perforate your gaming experience and generally impressed me, especially from the low profile status that the game has. The game itself is comprised of well designed and animated pre-rendered backgrounds with 3D characters slotted on top effectively. Overall, the game does look pretty great.

Where are we again?

Nina starts off in Berlin, and while her accent is forgivably American, it seems like all of the characters in the entire game, no matter where in the world you visit have no foreign accents which stands out a little despite the generally believable acting. Most of the performances impressed me, especially the actor playing Nina who sailed through even the most dubiously translated line with little problem.

While the orchestral music is effective, it is limited to cinematics and especially dramatic moments, but certain modern music helps the atmosphere (and even proves to be the basis for two of the more clever puzzles in the game). There is certainly polish to Secret Files: Tunguska, although a few silly one shot bugs that I noticed could point towards the benefits of a little more testing, hopefully eliminated in the version that has turned up in the shops.

And just like that it’s all over

The plot splits off to let you control another character (in another location) at one point, although you have the choice of who to control, allowing a clever method to continue in the game, even if you are still trying to think up how to proceed with one puzzle on the other path. By being clearly paced towards the ending, I didn’t feel disappointed at the conclusion (or the promise of a sequel – 2008 seems a long way away!) the story is wrapped up nicely; loose ends being tied into a coherent bundle. Perhaps one problem with the speed of the ending is that the obligatory romance seems to have been thrown in for Hollywood completionist reasons.

So the big question; Should you buy Secret Files: Tunguska? Not if you don’t like adventures of course, but coming from an adventure game fan, I found it a very fulfilling addition to my collection, and from a relatively unknown German game developer (Fusionsphere Systems) I can offer only congratulations to them for a decent brain testing continuation of the genre. Oh, and the budget price it is available for can only be another reason to open the Secret Files.