he premise of Schizm: Mysterious Journey, the new game from Polish designers LW Avalon, is that in the year 2083, humans discover the planet Argilus. A survey ship lands and its team of scientists find incredible cities, quaint towns and fantastic industrial centers, but no inhabitants.
Doors are unlocked, meals are unfinished and machines are still running, but there is no sign of the beings that lived, ate and worked on this world. As the game opens, it is 10 months later, and a supply ship manned by Hanna Grant and Sam Mainey arrives at Argilus. They are unable to make contact with the survey team, their ship's systems start to fail, and they have to ride two different crash pods to the surface.
From this premise, Schizm unfolds as an adventure game in the Myst tradition. Using the mouse, players move through Argilus and interact with the various puzzles that it presents, all from the first-person point of view of either Hanna or Sam. The two characters start in different places and eventually end up together, but players can switch back and forth between them at any time. Occasionally, solving a puzzle requires
changing characters. To move, players click where they want to go. To interact, they click on the object or device.
There is no violence in Schizm; there is nothing to kill. What the game is all about is its puzzles—the small puzzles of getting from place to place on Argilus and the great big puzzle of what happened to both the original inhabitants and the survey team. The small puzzles consist of music puzzles, language puzzles, math puzzles and memory puzzles. Nearly every step forward requires unlocking some riddle of this alien world.
A world full of challenges—but no villains
The Australian science-fiction writer Terry Dowling helped create the story and background for Schizm, but his contribution is overwhelmed by those of the art and design departments. In an adventure game like this one, where the backgrounds are essentially static, it is important that they look great. Schizm's do. There are intricate machines, some of wood and brass, some of more high-tech materials, some seeming alive. There is a lot of water and a lot of open sky, which saves Schizm from the video-game curse of the action always being in underground tunnels. Along those lines, travel from site to site on Argilus is along winding paths, in the baskets of balloons, on various organic craft and in other picturesque modes.
Meanwhile, the puzzles are not easy. They integrate with the world so that they seem to be simply the way aliens would have designed things, not just challenges created at random. That said, some puzzles do change randomly, meaning that the answer is different each time the game is played. Players
who pass the game to a friend can't also give away all the answers. For example, there is a bridge that every player will have to learn to properly adjust for themselves. Just to make it harder, some puzzles require the player to be right twice in a row, and the game doesn't allow saving after
the first success.
Some of Schizm's puzzles require sound clues to solve. The audio uses 16-bit stereo sound with full 360-degree real-time sound positioning. If the sound card supports this and if the speakers are set up properly, then the environment sounds just as gorgeous as it looks. Footsteps sound different on different types of pavement, for instance, and the direction of a noise can actually be determined by turning the character.
To play Schizm, you have to be the sort of person who likes having their brain teased, and who doesn't have to be killing things to have fun. If you are that sort of person, you'll have a great time working through the ten gigabytes of game world to solve the final challenge.
— Eric
Back to the top.
