The story itself is interesting enough, and the main characters are very much as well. However, their interaction with others comes off as very stilted and forced with no flow at all, which makes the conversations very unnatural and often boring. Character personality is damn near the entire point of point-and-click adventure games, from the hysterical conversations in Sam and Max to the snide comments throughout Grim Fandango - these are what make them worth playing through. Listening to the people (or creatures) and seeing their adventures unfold helps propel these games, littered with often harebrained puzzles, from confusing madness to a wonderful experience. However, this is also where our Russian-produced game falls firmly on its face.

Most of the areas are wide-open places with perhaps a couple of characters in each. The size of each screen makes the places feel thinly-populated, as if a disease has wiped everyone out and only a few remain. This is what really brings out the bad conversations, as those that are there have very little to say, and are completely absorbed only in their role as it directly pertains to the storyline. No non-sequiturs or just shooting the breeze, all the characters are as lifeless as the mannequin animation and dull puzzles. The Longest Journey this most certainly is not.

Many of the hotspots are very difficult to find and do not always register when you find them (forcing me to check a FAQ every so often to make sure I was doing the right thing). Even the hunting of hotspots and solving areas is neither rewarding nor interesting. Solving the current area and moving on only means more boring paths with people that could have been interesting, but fail immensely. At one point I got stuck because when I had triggered a necessary conversation it mysteriously skipped right past the talking, leaving me with no idea of what to do next. After searching fruitlessly for about half an hour, I reloaded a previous save game only to find I was unable to attain an item needed to get back to where I was stuck! Jazz and Faust does a piss-poor job in its genre, and while I never felt any elated emotions while playing, it certainly brought out a complete distaste for it a number of times.

Thankfully, it isn't all bad. The music is actually quite nice, both within the mood of the game and by itself. A shame that such a nicety is wasted amongst all this other drivel, but the tunes do well to aurally sooth during the annoying stretches of actually trying to play. Pity the voices do not fare nearly as well, often suiting their respective personas but unable to sound like anything other than badly reading a script. It makes me long for the great voices of LucasArts games - even simply text alone would done a better job here.

Please, no more. I am bored to tears and this game has exhausted my want to play any of its kind for quite some time. Perhaps once I can forget that I played it I will be able to play something like Gabriel Knight again and remember what it was like to play a quality game, but for now all I can do is look upon the genre with disgust. Leave it up to one game to taint so many others for me. I hate it when this happens.

Click here for Reno's first impressions

· · · MechDeus