Hauard Filips Lavkraft is a name that has long become a part of pop culture. he popularity and influence of this writer are so great that the recent impression of some kind of artistic depictions of art pieces inspired by Lavkraft's work. It turned out that this prejudice in the case of Conarium somewhat justified. Although it is a solid game, it is quite far from the adjective "fantastic" or "impressive". This is a new game of Zoetrope Interactive, an adventure fan known for the mini-series Darkness Within. Players who had the chance to try the games from this series are known to be directly inspired by Lavkraft's myths. We will not indulge in the debate as to whether it is wise to constantly create games on the same subject, but the impression is that people from Zoetropes devoted their lives (less or less successful) to attempting to honor Lavkraft or to simply provide new fixed Lavkraft junks which they are audited by the audience.
The authors of Conariuma were not just inspired by Lavkraft, but they put the game in the same "universe" in which the famous actor was performing. This game is actually a kind of extension of Lavkraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" story, as the game does not add directly to the action "In Madness Mountains", but it only mentions certain characters and events. As dictated by an unwritten rule pertaining to this type of game, the main character is initially bound by a partial amnesia and the story is drawn through numerous documents and audio records. In Conariumthe protagonist wakes up in an abandoned Antarctic plant. Coming the mosaic of information from the other hand, he soon learned that he was part of the team of scientists who found the ancient ruins of some mysterious race at that location. The task of the team was to pass through the veil that separates our reality from a second dimension of the world, otherwise unbreakable by the limitations of human senses, and thus overcomes the fragile form of ordinary mortals ...
Unlike the Darkness Within series, in line with today's trends, this is not a classic adventure but is ranked in the famous boundary between simple adventures and walking simulators. The progress of the game is most commonly accomplished by collecting items and using them in the right place. This is not a challenge at all, because there are not many items, you will always use them near the place where you found them and you do not have to manually select them in inventory. Moreover, it's enough that you have an appropriate, slightly picked item in the inventory and as soon as you click on an object, the game itself will use it in the correct way. Because of this kind of mechanics, "puzzles" are trivially easy and serve only to boost research, rather than to give the player any more serious challenge. Something is more difficult with the launch of various mechanisms,
Even if the challenge of the game is not superb, it would be much more correct that the other two important pillars of quality adventures are fine. Indeed, it is premature that the authors focused on the atmosphere and the story. The atmosphere is really impressively dark and tedious. To build a delightful butter with which Conarium is the most desirable, it's a pretty good audio-visual component of the game, which is especially true for graphics. Theoretically, the graphics quality of a 3D game that only a few people rule should not be in the quality range used by blockbusters, but this is the title that uses the Unreal 4 engine to revive Lavkraft's imagination and it is very funny. Locations are well designed, from a dead-end facility from the beginning of the game, which evokes memory of "The Thing," to the crumbling temples of the goddess of the Elder Gods. The most interesting is the design of numerous statues and monuments, whose alien, omnipresent appearance is one of the most striking parts of the game. Music and sound effects are also at a high level, and in particular, they are inhumane, overcoming sounds coming out of the darkness.
While the atmosphere works more than well, with the story, unfortunately, the situation is much worse. For the most important part of this title - its scenario - it can not be said to be average. Characters are not elaborated and do not even have a particular specialty or harm. Their replicas are boringly written, and a bad voice actor certainly does not help, as well as a general plot that does not lead anywhere. Surely this is not about a creative, meta-like way to get the player to feel slow to get mad, because there is no talk about some depth of the script, everything is superficial. Nor is anything that is happening in the game something terrible. Authors mostly did not want to use "scams", and situations, where your character is in danger, is reduced to a minimum. The consequence of this is that, despite the dark atmosphere, you mostly fall into the levels. It is seen that the people of Zoetrope were more aiming to build a silent heart than to frighten us, which would be all right for the story to be more striking. Like this, Conarium has nothing to really "buy" the player.
Rate:7/10
