Of course it was a great idea! I Confess that I admire Arxel Tribe's idea of incorporating the work of the greatest filmmaker in history into an adventure game. But what this talented group of game designers came up with, Hitchcock: The Final Cut, is a very strange game indeed.

Like so many Hitchcock films, it's a story of mystery, Blackmail and Murder. You play a private detective who's contacted by a Rich and Strange man whose mute daughter summons you to his estate, where he's producing his own private movie. Unfortunately, someone's decided to Sabotage the film, and no sooner do you arrive but bodies begin piling up.

Is the Notorious mogul's daughter and as Young and Innocent as she seems? Or is she actually the Saboteur? Well, you don't have much time to think develop your Suspicion in this department, because almost immediately after your arrival at the estate, The Lady Vanishes. Things begin to go Downhill from here.

And there's more plot. Lots more. Your character gets to act in the movie (overcoming his own natural Stage Fright), is forced to dig graves, has to release a corpse strung up on a Rope, and generally has to figure out beyond a Shadow of a Doubt what Psycho is responsible for all this carnage, and to do so without fingering The Wrong Man.

Unfortunately, game's presentation and interface are an even bigger mystery. Presented in third person with extremely handsome backgrounds but only mediocre character models, you'll wonder why the game developers made the curious decision to employ mouse support in the close-ups but not in the long shots. Long before you've taken Thirty-Nine Steps, your finger will be very tired of hammering on the arrow key. What's even worse is that now-depressingly-familiar problem of erratic camera angles. They change so frequently, and so unexpectedly that it's enough to cause Vertigo. A simple act of walking from one side of a room over to the Rear Window will sometimes trigger two or three changes of camera angle.

There's also a bafflingly cumbersome inventory management system. But the most unforgivable sin the game makes is forcing you to launch the game with one disk, even though you immediately must switch to another disk to play the actual game!! This is shoddy file management at best, callous disregard for the player at worst.

I've done a lot of strange things in adventure games, but stopping the Family Plot in order to bake an apple crumble has to rank up there with the strangest. And what's with the girls' mynah bird? We all know mynah birds talk, but this bird is as smart as a person and can carry on complete conversations and follow out complex orders. This bird would make Lassie feel inadequate, and its presence makes it hard to take anything in the story very seriously.

The game is also oddly tone deaf when it comes to the pile of corpses that accumulate during the story. I know Hitchcock often had a mordant sense of humor regarding death in his films (actually, this was demonstrated more in his famous trailers than in the films themselves), but the cavalier attitude of the game's hero (and, for that matter, the girl) are just very, very off-putting. SPOILER ALERT: At one point in the game, the girl is literally rolling around under the covers in a sexual Frenzy while virtually every family member she's ever known lies freshly dead in the immediate vicinity.

There's also a general sloppiness in the game that's very discouraging. Conversation trees frequently make no sense, as they refer to events that have not yet happened. And there is severe character clipping, making one scene which features a character pacing in a circle and blithely walking through the wall on every spin, unintentionally hilarious. It's also a bit offensive to have the game begin with a splash screen that says "Alfred Hitchcock Presents." No he doesn't. He's dead, and this game should not be blamed on him.

The most crushing disappointment about Hitchcock is it's almost total lack of interest in Hitchcock's films. Though many of his films are referred to (and even quoted with short, generally irrelevant clips), and most of the characters have names that echo from the films, that's about as far as it goes. Think how much fun they could have had with puzzles based famous plot devices in the films. Or even how rich the atmosphere of the game could have been if the themes of Hitchcock's work - voyeurism, sexual obsession, mistaken identity - had been used. Hell, even Hitchcock trivia questions would have been fun.

I do not enjoy beating up on any game by Arxel Tribe, as I think they are a talented bunch, and they've have made games I truly admire (Faust, Ring, Pilgrim and Louvre). And let me stress again that the artwork in the game (excepting the character models) is extremely moody and attractive. But instead of being Spellbound by Hitchcock: The Final Cut, I was eager to wish it Bon Voyage. This game is for The Birds. Hitchcock deserved better. So do we.

Grade: D

System Requirements:

Windows 95/98/ME
Pentium 333 MHz
64 MB RAM (128 recommended)
24x CD ROM
8MB 16 bit video card
16 bit sound card
300 MB disc space
DirectX 7

See: Young and Innocent
Play: I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream
Read: The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy