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Voyage: A Journey | ||||||||||||
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n 1865, French writer Jules Verne published From the Earth to the Moon, a novella-length tale about a club of inactive artillerymen who launch a venture "worthy of the 19th century"—the manufacture of a titanic gun capable of shooting a projectile all the way to the moon, and a one-way trip for all onboard. The story's sequel, Around the Moon was published five years later, and describes the events that occur after the projectile is launched. Due to a chance encounter with an asteroid that modifies the craft's trajectory, Verne's characters are only able to orbit the moon, before returning to Earth. Much of the second tale thus consists of theorizing on the part of the projectile's occupants as they peer inquisitively from their portholes at the nearby but untouchable lunar surface.
Enter The Adventure Company and Voyage, a speculative adventure game that reimagines Verne's story by considering what might have happened had the projectile in fact touched down. Crewing the vessel are Barbicane (an artillery expert), Capt. Nicholl (a specialist in armor plating and Barbicane's rival) and famous French adventurer Michel Ardan. After the projectile is fired, the game indicates that all three men are knocked unconscious, and as the story opens, players assume control of a befuddled Ardan onboard the projectile, struggling to determine where he is and what has happened.
Voyage is controlled using a classic point-and-click interface, in which moving the mouse pans the camera through 360 degrees. Gameplay consists of exploring different environments, reading notes and other materials and collecting objects to be used either with each other or with the environment itself. The mouse pointer takes the shape of an alien three-fingered hand (foreshadowing what's to come), which changes dynamically as it is moved over "hot spots," allowing Ardan to interact with his surroundings. Areas are prerendered, and movement is not continuous 3-D, but rather occurs by clicking through rendered stills. There is no on-screen interface in exploration mode, but right-clicking brings up the inventory screen, which includes the game's log (a history of actions taken), a "puttering about" section for viewing item combinations that have been completed, an "ideogram" display that depicts translated lunar ideograms, an "investigations" section for checking the status of various inquisitions and the inventory display itself. Since losing the game is not an option (if Ardan "dies," the game restarts at the point prior to the misstep), the game provides a "lunar IQ" score, which gauges how many or few mistakes the player makes while solving puzzles.
When sense of wonder was king
Voyage is a welcome return to the adventure genre that (a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away) ruled computer gaming. From Roberta Williams' King's Quest series in the 1980s to Cyan's infamous Myst in the 1990s right up to Dreamfall's stunning The Longest Journey in 2000, the genre has changed very little. This is a testament as much to the accessibility of the adventure game's easy-to-jump-in interface as its slow-paced formulaic limitations, responsible for the genre's slide into obscurity over the past decade.
Right from the start, Voyage is pure Victorian science fantasy with a period-specific sense of humor that lacks any trace of modern self-consciousness. Unlike Verne, whose stories are less extrapolations from science theory than elaborate hypothetical geographies, the story in Voyage focuses exclusively on the fantastical: a breathable atmosphere that forms and evaporates daily, plant life that explodes and disappears in conjunction with the atmosphere, and the ruins of a temple clearly built by an alien race. And the writing is top-notch for an adventure game, filled with the sort of science-almost language and eloquent, eccentric passages one finds by turning back to that positivist 19th-century era during which science was still a heady tool destined to answer every question about humanity's place in the cosmos.
Two things hold Voyage back from winning the A: substandard rendered visuals and an occasionally cumbersome item system. In confined spaces, Voyage looks great—especially the sequence inside the projectile at the beginning—and playing with chlorate of potash, potassium droplets and retrorockets is diverting intellectual fun. In open areas on the moon, however, the game looks chunky and pixelated. As snappy as current low-end machines are these days, a game like Voyage could (and should) have used two or three times higher-resolution renders and richer color depths to smooth the granulated, blocky look that mars many of its eerie lunar vistas.
The other problem is Voyage's interface. While the removal of an on-screen inventory table in exploration mode is commendable and immersive, it becomes cumbersome to right-click into inventory mode, left-click on an item, then click back to exploration mode to use the object. The game is filled with esoteric items, from azotic acid vats to "Zubdssik greasy amalgam," and having to remember what's in inventory while working a puzzle without being able to see both simultaneously is frustrating. This is exacerbated in one of the game's early timed sequences, in which players must jettison extra inventory items (one at a time—click into inventory, click out, repeat) to prevent the projectile from slamming into the moon's surface.
Quibbles aside, this is one of the best adventure games to come along in quite some time, and will be a special joy to fans of 19th-century science-fictive antics. Bugless and easy to jump into, here's a game that's fun to play, has plenty of Vernesian lore for hardcore aficionados and won't insult your intelligence. You can't beat that for 20 bucks.
To the average gamer, Voyage may seem little more than another Myst clone, but to students of science-fiction's nascent period it's a time machine back to a whimsical era in which the so-called "sense of wonder" was king. —Matt
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