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The Watchmaker was the most promising adventure title since The Longest Journey.
In fact, many people, striving for harder puzzles, expected the game to revive
the stagnant adventure market. While most of these hardcore players were pleased
with the result, the game was a major disappointment for the casual gamers, who
expected the sights and sounds to match the puzzles.
I have had high hopes for this game as well. Trecision, while not a household
name in the US, was always known for developing above average adventure games.
Their first adventure game, In the Dead of the Night, was released in 1995 as a
shareware title and almost immediately became popular among adventure gamers who
looked for a more mature detective adventure than what was on the market at that
time. A year later, Alien Virus didn't live up to expectations, mainly because
it was still produced for DOS. Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy (1998), however,
became one of my favorite adventure games ever, and still easily outclasses
Blade Runner as the best recent cyberpunk adventure, in my opinion.
Thus, when I finally got The Watchmaker, I was eagerly expecting a full weekend
of play, possibly an all-nighter. What I got instead was a collection of
original (and not so original) puzzles, sub-par graphics, bad interface and
awful voice acting.
The story
The Watchmaker thrusts you into the role of two investigators.
Daniel Boone, the "Mulder" of the two, is a paranormal investigator, while
Victoria Conroy, the "Scully", is a lawyer. Together, they are trying to locate
a pendulum, created by an ancient watchmaker. This pendulum gives virtual
immortality to a secret society (Illuminati, anyone?), which tries everything in
its power to keep it protected. However, other parties are interested, too: a
bunch of criminals, the CIA, and a group of religious zealots, the latter trying
to destroy the world with it. To make the matters worse, even without human
interference, the pendulum is bound to create worldwide havoc at midnight, when
an eclipse occurs. Your two characters are sent to an Austrian castle to find
the item and retrieve it before the time runs out.
 Once they arrive at the
castle, they will not only have to explore it and the surrounding premises, but
also lead lengthy conversations with other characters - the caretaker, the
castle supervisor and his wife, the cook and all the rest of people you would
expect in a detective mystery. You will be also able to explore the majority of
the castle straight from the beginning. From time to time, you will witness
lengthy cut scenes, which move the story forward, and which give the game an
almost movie-like quality.
Game mechanics
You will control both
characters separately, but will be able to switch between them as the need
arises. Each character has its own qualities and its own charm, working
differently with different people you encounter. In some cases, the cooperation
between the two characters will be necessary; for example, to distract a person.
The game is portrayed in a third-person 3D mode, but you will be able to switch
to a first person mode when necessary. As some of the items are located in low
cupboards, you will end up switching into the first person mode and crouching
quite often, in order to locate these items. This works similarly as the first
person mode in Gabriel Knight: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, with a
slight difference: you will be able to spend all your time in first person mode
if you want to.
While you will have only 15 hours to solve the mystery, the time in the game is
not real. The time is always stopped, until you solve another puzzle; then it
moves by a few minutes. This has two major implications. First, you can play the
game at your leisure and not worry about running out of time. Second, you will
always know when you solved a problem that moves the story forward. Sometimes
all you need to do is to enter a new location; sometimes a whole series of
actions is required to move the clock. However, whenever you are stuck, moving
the clock forward will change the time and thus the game environment enough for
you to try a new approach.
 The inventory is what you would expect from an adventure game: you'll collect,
view and combine items. In
addition, you will have a cell phone, a PDA and a recorder.
Some adventure games
are known for providing dead ends: situations that make the game unsolvable, and
you'll end up starting from the beginning. Nowadays, those games are rare, as
designers try to avoid frustrating their customers more than necessary. This
game is of the "good sort" - there are no intentional dead ends. However, a
major bug will cause you to be stuck at a dead end about two-thirds into the
game. For the dozens of people reporting the problem, the only solution was to
obtain a save game that puts them back into the story after this bug takes
place. Trecision has yet to release a fix for the problem.
Puzzles
The
puzzles in this game are some of the best you can find in current adventure
games. With a few exceptions, all puzzles are logical, yet hard enough to make
you think for a while. Some of the puzzles are quite original: manipulating
photographs and recordings are only some of them. While other puzzles are of
your standard variety of lever switching or collecting items (all of which are
on the most logical places, which gives the game a little authenticity), even
those puzzles were brought to perfection. For example, a chessboard puzzle was
much harder and much more enjoyable (after finally solving it) than the original
version of the puzzle in Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars (Circle of Blood
in the US).
Interface
Interface is one of the weakest spots in the game.
There are basically four problems. First, the first-person view gives you such a
narrow field of view that using it all the time only gets you lost. Second, you
will not be able to control the cameras. This means that you will manipulate the
characters to move an additional two inches in vain hope to change the camera
angles. The only salvation here is that you will be able to use the arrow keys
to move the characters. Third, the pathfinding is a little buggy, and sometimes
your characters will go to places you didn't click on. While this is a small
nuisance for the most part of the game, it becomes a major problem in the action
sequences towards the end. The largest problem, however, is inventory
management. I got the strong impression that the designers forgot to that the
characters would need to transfer inventory from one to the other, and did not
implement any mechanism for doing so. As a consequence, transferring items is a
cumbersome process, which must be executed in the proper order and involves the
use of a cell phone.
Gameplay - 6
Overall, the gameplay is better than
average. The story is good enough to keep you interested, the puzzles are some
of the best I have seen in recent games, and the game mechanics suit my needs
perfectly: they combine the novelty of playing two characters with
solution-triggered time progression, which allows me to take the time to think.
However, the cumbersome inventory management and the pesky dead end bug greatly
detract from the overall enjoyment.
Graphics - 5
Graphics are a sore spot
of the game. The designers apparently wanted to show off their new engine
(which, using DirectX 7, has been outdated even before the game release), and
the results are less than stellar. The hand-drawn surroundings in the previous
games by Trecision were replaced with flat 3D surfaces, and not even the superb
castle architecture helps make the environment feel realistic. Characters are
very blocky especially in face animations. Cut scenes used the same engine.
While this way the game did not look inferior to the cut scenes, I would rather
play a 2D game with superb cut scenes than a game that features weak graphics
from the beginning to the end.
Audio - 2
The game has such a miserable
audio that for the first time I was glad to be able to turn off my speakers. The
in-game music is an endless loop of a few midi files. Growing up with DOS games,
I could not mind less, and actually found a tune or two to be pretty catchy.
However, the dialogue was a whole different story...
I must admit, I am very
spoiled when it comes to dialogue in adventure games. However, I still enjoy
good voices. I have played Broken Sword four times so far, only to hear the
awesome voice acting again and again. While the accents were a little overdone
there, at least I got the feeling that I really was in Ireland, France or Spain.
The same goes for the Gabriel Knight series. I admit that Tim Curry was greatly
exaggerating the New Orleans accent, but otherwise the voice acting was superb.
This game, however, is a miserable failure.
Maybe to make the voice acting more
authentic, the company hired a cook, a gardener, a housewife and a maid to do
the acting. Or maybe the programmers did it themselves. Whatever the reason, the
voices are incredibly flat and dull. You get the feeling that everybody was
incredibly bored. The fact that all accents are the same is not the main problem
here: the real trouble lies in the fact that whenever people open their mouths
in this game, you can almost visualize sitting them in front of a voice recorder
and reading a sheet of paper, without any emotion whatsoever. This completely
destroys the feeling of the game: instead of a dark, murky atmosphere you get a
theater play rehearsal, and even the little chemistry that develops between your
two characters goes down the drain whenever one of them speaks.
Replay - 3
Many people do not consider adventure games to be worth playing again. However,
even in this genre, there are small perks for which you'd want to replay a game.
Probably the best reason is if there are several ways to finish the game.
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is the prime example here. Other games
have great voice acting, music or graphics for you to try them again and enjoy
the sights. They are like books that you read more than once. You know already
what is going to happen, but you simply enjoy the style enough to read it again.
The Watchmaker is neither. The story is linear enough to keep you entertained
once, but doing the same puzzles again, this time without having to think about
them, is not appealing. The voice acting and inferior music would make you
replay the game only if you have strong masochistic tendencies. The graphics
leave lots to be desired, especially considering that the game competes with
titles like Jack & Faust and Syberia. The game provides nothing to get you
interested in a replay.
Overall - 4
Great puzzles are essential for good
adventure games, but there are other aspects a developer has to take in
consideration. The gamer must be interested enough in the story to play further.
There should always be the feeling of urgency. The presentation, such as
graphics and sound should force the player to take "one more thing before
quitting for the night" for hours to come, and before the player knows, the
night is half over. Nothing of this was present in The Watchmaker. The game
falls short of expectations, and will not appeal to anybody but the most
hardcore adventure gamer. The rest of the adventure gamers should look
elsewhere.
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