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Review
The
First Mile
Review by Ricardo Pautassi
January 13, 2005 |
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The First
Mile (hereafter
referred as TFM) is the fourth commercial
game released by Malinche Games; Pentari:
First Light, Greystone and Endgame being
its previous installments. Having covered fantasy as well as thriller-like
subjects, this time the company tries to
set a foot in the crowed horror-story section of IF (interactive
fiction) games. In short, its straightforward plot goes around a
typical thriller/horror subject. An isolated city in the middle of
America seems to have been the scenario for a killing spree just
before your unwilling arrival. Empty streets are the rule but soon
you will find a barbery, a nice coffee and and a bank --among other
facilities -- all full of decaying corpses bluntly showing that something
evil goes around the place. You would like to get the hell out of
the place but your car’s been smashed to death by one the now-crazy
citizens of this funny town. So, there’s no choice but to start
roaming the place in search for answers and, hopefully, for a way
out.
 Does the game succeeds
in creating the gloomy and oppressive environment deserved by the
above depicted plot? Well, it is clear that the author
tried to create
a sense of horror and tension by mixing murder and sinister elements into the
seemingly calm and orderly life of a small rural town. If you have read Capote’s
In Cold Blood or watched Stone’s U-Turn you are taking my point. Nonetheless,
such type of immersion is prevented by several issues. First, there are plenty
of dead people in the town. In fact much more than I would have expected. In
a sense, this helps killing --literally-- the tension. That is, at first your
are aroused by the gory depictions, but as the game continues they keep on coming
and coming, so losing impact as well as narrative grip. On the other hand, the
overall quality of the NPC's (Non Playable Characters) is good, in the sense
that they have their own agenda, can follow orders, show an acceptable knowledge
of their enviroment, etc. Nonetheless, there’s a scarcity of them, especially
in the streets. Moreover, the plot presents supernatural elements added here
and there, but the whole mix doesn’t seem to work properly. It is as if
the game got stuck somewhere between a police story and a horror one. Without
giving away much of the plot, let’s say that the game employs too many
common places of the horror genre in order to (partially) explain the rationale
underlying the whole story: an utterly bad villain who summons demons, body possession,
archaeologists unearthing old secrets and the list continues. The main consequence
of this is the plot losing cohesion, originality and, in the long run, interest
to the player.
 All
in all, in-game descriptions are pretty interesting. If you have
played Greystone,
Malinche’s previous installment, you sure would agree in
that barely described rooms and a general sense of “stripped” prose
was to be find in that game more often than not. In contrast, the
amount of detail presented to the
player in TFM is bigger and the prose more vivid.
So, kudos to Malinche for taking previous critiques into account. For those
of you who like more precise specifications
please see the review that was published in... No, I mean... OK, let me see:
as a rule of thumb when entering a room you will be offered a very rich description,
running about three to five lines. Most of the time I found another subset
of descriptions, mainly for those objects related to the plot and/or puzzles,
but
sometimes other objects receive attention too. Most of the time, the top-down
descriptive-chain ends here. Sure, since I am a fanatic of exploration I
would have preferred a bit more. For example, when gross carnage scenes are
described
the whole thing is well depicted but body’s descriptions are not taken
into consideration, creating silly non-realistic situations such as receiving
the standard reply “You do not see anything like that” when trying
to examine a heavily wounded woman lying in her own pool of blood. Nonetheless – and
taking my nerdy cries asides -- I should admit that this time I have no objections
regarding the level of detail, at least in most of the scenes. Another good
point of TFM is that has many optional puzzles,
including a maze and the possibility
to make your own “contribution” to the killing spree. Some of
these additional quests are pretty good, requiring NPC’s cooperation
and exploration. There are also many ways to kill the foes and most of them
will require repeated
attacks. Sure, you can die in many ways, drowned, eaten by beasts, under
the influence of spells, poisoned, etc. So, save early, safe often, as it
is said.
Nonetheless, these death situations appear in dangerous moments and are organically
inserted in the pace of the game (exception being made for an electric bolt
I used to repeatedly stumble upon in a certain part of the game).
 Dead Rock, the fictional
American mid-western city where events takes place, is huge, making
the task of drawing a map a must. It has many streets and
neighborhoods as well as a good quantity of buildings with indoor facilities.
Almost all
of them can be explored by the very start of the game, so creating a very
non-linear structure in terms of both story and puzzles. While this might
be regarded
as
an interesting feature, I have my doubts about it success in TFM. Mainly
because you can be faced with puzzles and bits of story that you wouldn’t understand
but with a proper sequence of events. This feature is quite common in adventure
games, it should be admitted, but in TFM seems to be the rule more often than
not. Moreover, the author seems to have thought a likely sequence of events because
sometimes in-game descriptions do not change when they should. Let’s consider
an example (warning, spoilers ahead), after having struggled for a while I managed
to kill one the main foes. I sighed and, much more relaxed, tried to fix a set
of phones in a room miles away from the place the battle have taken place. Imagine
my surprise when, on the point of succeeding, a scripted sequence appeared describing
this evil villain entering the room and screwing my plans. No explanation for
the “resurrection” was given and his behavior closely resembled the
one prior to his dead, so suggesting that the script did not consider the possibility.
This happened many times. In other case, I was on the verge of freedom but happened
to forget certain amulet I need it, so I return to a shop whose owner I used
to kill previously, but the room’s description kept on naming her, even
though it was not possible to talk to the NPC. Apart from these bugs, I noticed
some typos as well as an out-of-context description repeatedly appearing in the
bottom of the text. While no fatal, these bugs do not help increase the overall
quality of the game.
 For the experienced IF-adventurer
there are some in-game references to previous Malinche’s
games as well as Infocom’s classics. On the other hand,
the “help” command triggers a generic introduction to how
to play IF games. Specific verbs needed to finish the game are summoned
by typing “about”.
No specific in-game hint-system is available, though. This is not a terrible
nuisance since – with a few notable exceptions – only the
optional puzzles can be regarded as really dificult. Overall, the game
is fair in the
challenges presented. To give you an idea, I only had to peek twice in
the walkthrough to complete the quest. By the way, finishing the game
took me about 12 - 15 hours
of good-old typing.
To sum it up, TFM offers
a great deal in terms of gameplay quantity and variety but fails
when it comes to integrate such diverse material. Some
of the previous
cons of Malinche’s games – i.e, poverty of descriptions — are
more or less improved, but other drawbacks appear, mainly the clichéd
plot and the incapability to conciliate non-linear gameplay with the
development of some puzzles. The First Mile is graded C by this reviewer.
Final Grade: C
(find out more about our
grading system)
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