Hands-On Preview Culpa Innata Developer: Momentum-DMT Publisher: TBD Genre: Adventure Release Date: Q1 2007 Platform: Hands-On Preview by July 21, 2006

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Every now and then, when you least expect it, an unknown game pops-up to upset the tranquility of the adventure gaming community. From Norway’s Funcom to Argentina’s Nucleosys, they come like hurricanes and wreak havoc in their passage. Now our radars forecast a devastating, category-five hurricane arriving from Turkey; to level everything we’ve grown accustomed to and bring adventure gaming to whole new heights. Their name: Momentum–DMT and the game: Culpa Innata.

It is 2047 and most of the countries in the world - including America, Europe, Australia & Japan - have united to form the World Union. The World Union is one immaculate nation, where everyone lives in peace and prosperity, and crime and poverty do not exist. But this utopia has a downside as its citizens, driven by greed and selfishness, are absolute consumers, motivated and judged by their jobs and the money they make. They even have a Human Development Index (HDI), which defines their place in society, and rises the more greedy and selfish they become.

Apart from the World Union, the remaining countries form the Rogue states and the unexploited countries. In one of those Rogue states, a World Union citizen will be found murdered, an event that will cause upheaval in the ranks of the G.P.S.N., the Global Peace and Security Network – something like the World Union’s Police. The World Union, in its utopian state, has never experienced an act of murder. Now the G.P.S.N. has to solve this unheard of case while keeping it all hush-hush at the same time. One of their most brilliant officers, Phoenix Wallis, will be called to duty, and you will be the one to help her.

The first thing that hit me like a brick after a few minutes of playing the game is the incredible detail of this fictional world. The World Union’s bill of rights, the world’s political, economical and biological history, G.P.S.N.’s rules of conduct; everything is there to create a highly believable world and stays in mind as a not so impossible outcome of the future. The developers have gone to great lengths to create such detail and have succeeded 100%.

Culpa Innata is a 3rd person, point ’n’ click adventure. The game starts from Day 1, and time passes after certain moves or events, e.g. when traveling to a location or after talking to someone. Its investigative nature requires a lot – and I mean a lot - of dialog. Some of the dialog is optional, but does provide background info on characters and situations, and helps the immersion a lot. Personally, I don’t mind long dialogs, as long as they’re well written (and Culpa Innata performs pretty good in that area), but there is a slight problem in the way the dialog trees are carried out.

According to the G.P.S.N. rules, a peace officer can only bother a civilian for questioning once a day, because more than that would interfere with their productivity. This makes perfect sense, based on the ways of the World Union, but the problem is, most of the times a dialog option is selected, it leads to a new tree with the rest of the initial options disappearing. And since you cannot start the questioning all over at the same day, you have to wait for the next day to re-question a person in order to see the other dialog options. That way, it can take several days in order to finish questioning someone, and if you’re unlucky enough, you may not choose a key question that will open new areas in the game until after a long time. This greatly distracts from the immersion and is occasionally repetitive and frustrating. So, while the G.P.S.N. rule is a very good idea in the context of Culpa Innata’s world, the dialog trees need to be reworked to allow the player the opportunity to ask more questions in one session. Or at least distinguish the questions that progress the game with a different color, so that everyone who wants the least amount of dialog possible can only choose those and progress quicker.

Apart from this little dialog tree problem, Culpa Innata simply excels in every other area, with the puzzles being one of those areas – something really rare in adventures nowadays. Culpa Innata’s puzzles are mainly of the logical type, with some inventory puzzles thrown in. One word to describe them: Totally Challenging (ok, two words then). From the part of the game that I’ve seen, I can easily say Culpa Innata is one of the toughest and most brain taxing adventures released in the past decade! It does have a couple of unfair instances, but overall, it is exactly what hardcore adventurers have been waiting for! The difficulty level shouldn’t scare off beginner and novice adventurers though, because no one should miss out on its fantastic story.

Presentation-wise Culpa Innata once again reaches perfection. The graphics are full 3D, with exquisite colors and details, painting a great picture of the World Union. The characters’ faces are among the most impeccable I’ve seen in an adventure game – or in any game in general. The lip-synching and facial expressions are of movie quality. All that, glazed over with some really atmospheric and beautiful music and pretty good speech, deliver a package that is sure to sate everybody’s optic and auditory nerves.

To put it simply, Culpa Innata looks like one of the most challenging, deep and beautiful adventures to have graced the adventure gaming world in… well in its whole history! There is a Greek saying, “Where you hear about a lot of cherries, hold a small basket”! Meaning, where you hear too much hype about something, don’t expect too much. But let me assure you, after having played a good portion of the game, that this is far from being true in this case. There are lots of cherries here, trust me! Maybe gamers who are adverse to dialog will be put off by its amount, but you can’t please everyone, can you? Maybe non-experienced adventurers will feel a bit uncomfortable by the difficulty level, but there is always the Hints & Tips section in the JA Forums! And, in the end, all that does not subtract from the fact that Culpa Innata is the most anticipated adventure game for me, and will be an adventure game that is destined to become a landmark in the history of the genre.