Review Overclocked: A History of Violence Developer: House of Tales Publisher: Lighthouse Interactive Genre: Adventure Release Date: March 2008 Platform: Review by Sudeep Pasricha April 16, 2008		Buy this game at Trade for this game at:

What do you get when you drop a troubled protagonist into a seemingly innocuous scenario that soon turns into a perilous quest with unexpected plot twists and unhinged psychopaths looming around every corner? You get the premise for a journey of self-discovery … and the backdrop for several gripping adventure games released in recent years. Indigo Prophecy, The Moment of Silence, and most recently the brilliant (barring the spotty voice acting) Lost Crown are examples of how to run with this simple premise and craft a brilliant game. Overclocked: A History of Violence is a new entrant into this “troubled protagonist fighting against the odds” niche genre. I’ve eagerly awaited its release ever since I had the chance to marvel at its good looks in a tiny booth at E3 almost two years ago.

In Overclocked you play as psychologist Dave McNamara, a trauma specialist, who is called to New York and assigned to a peculiar case. Five young men and women have been found across New York, screaming, scared, some with barely any clothing, and all with no memory of what happened to them. Nobody knows what happened to them or where they came from. They’ve been put into separate cells at the Staten Island Forensic Hospital and Dave has been called up by Detective Moretti of the NYPD to examine the patients and try to uncover what transpired in their recent past. Sounds like the premise for a fairly standard, point-and-click, third person adventure, right?

Where Overclocked breaks away from the pack is in its unusual gameplay. As Dave brings the memories of his traumatized patients to light, the patients relive their past events in reverse chronological order. When you first talk to the patients and manage to get them to recall what happened in their recent past, they will only remember the last few moments before they arrived in New York. Subsequent conversations with them will take them further back in time, with each new flashback allowing the patients to relive the events leading up to the beginning of their last flashback.

As the patients recount their memories, you get to play as each of them in their flashbacks. This adds an interesting dimension to the game, where past events are viewed from multiple perspectives, and nothing is what it seems at first. Dave carries a PDA with him to record the recollections of his patients. A recording, among other things, can be used to trigger flashbacks when played back for the same, or another patient. Discovering such triggers to get each of the patients to recollect their past is one of more important challenges in this game. The rest of your time will be spent figuring out ways to open locked doors, fixing broken equipment, and solving standard inventory based puzzles – searching for knickknacks, combining them with other items, and then using them at the right time and place.

Unsurprisingly, life becomes more complicated for Dave once he embarks on his investigation. The head honcho at the hospital, Dr. Young, seems to resent an outsider meddling on his home turf. Detective Moretti begins to ask probing questions about Dave’s past and his military record. Even the local drunk at the neighborhood bar keeps heckling him for no apparent reason. If that isn’t enough, Dave’s marriage is on the rocks, and his best friend Ingram seems to be strangely distant for some reason. Dave also has frequent nightmares, shouting in his sleep and almost getting thrown out of his hotel because of complaints from other guests over loud noises coming from his room at night.

As the story progresses and you learn more about what transpired with your patients, there are some unexpected twists that will keep you playing, to figure out what happens next. Unfortunately, the extremely linear gameplay makes the experience of sitting through the game less than memorable. Tasks need to be performed in a certain sequence, and most of the time you’ll be searching for that one elusive object, or a specific way to trigger a flashback in a patient, to make further progress. When analyzing the patients, you will find that only one out of the five will be open to having a flashback at any given time. And sometimes you can’t even perform certain actions like using your phone to make a call unless you’re standing in a particular location.

Now linearity by itself is not a deal breaker. What Overclocked is sorely lacking in is a sense of interactivity. The locales in the game hardly have anything that you can pick up or examine. And the few places that you get to visit in the game are mostly indoors, and largely unremarkable and dull. This takes away all the fun out of exploring the locations in the game. Aside from your patients, you will find only a handful of other characters to interact with. Conversations with these characters will seldom reveal anything substantial about them. If you’re looking for quirky or interesting characters, there aren’t many in this game. With the exception of Dave, characters lack sufficient depth and personality to make you care about them.

Overclocked does have a few redeeming features. The voice acting is excellent, and the 3D character and environment models are good eye candy. The developers have done a nice job with the lighting and weather effects (it’s perpetually gloomy and raining throughout the game). The game engine is possibly one of the best I’ve seen – it very effectively caches data for a location to enable you to quickly and seamlessly walk around different screens without encountering frustrating load screens, although cut scenes can sometimes take a while to load. And while most of the inventory based puzzles aren’t too difficult, I liked how some of the puzzles require you to pay attention to the conversations and the environment for little clues that are useful later. Finally, I’m happy to say that I didn’t encounter a single bug or glitch while playing the game, which is noteworthy considering how so many games these days are rushed out of the door without proper bug testing.

Ultimately however, despite the novelty of playing through flashbacks in reverse chronological order, Overclocked fails to live up to its potential. If only the developers had spent some more time fleshing out the story, characters and the environments, this could have been a great game. The lack of interactivity and character depth, coupled with the linear gameplay and dull, empty environments left me feeling disappointed. The ending doesn’t help matters either. Without giving anything away, I’ll just say that it was quite underwhelming. In all fairness, Overclocked is a decent adventure game with a unique premise that’s worth a look if you’re a fan of adventure games.

Final Grade: B- (find out more about our grading system)

If you liked this game, then Play: Indigo Prophecy Watch: Memento

System Requirements:

• Windows 2000/XP/Vista
• 1.3 GHz processor
• 512 MB RAM (1 GB recommended for Windows Vista)
• 5 GB Disk Space
• 4x DVD-ROM drive
• DirectX 9 Compatible Video Card Shader Model 1.1
• DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card
• Mouse, Keyboard and Speakers