Coming to you live from the Jane Jensen conference. She's about to announce her new game, Gray Matter. Now, if you're unfamiliar with Jane's work, she's (quite literally) the mastermind behind one of my favorite games of all time, Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within, a tantalizing story about werewolves in a small Bavarian village. I consider those to be the golden days of adventure gaming, and it mostly has to do with the fact that Jane was able to masterfully tell her stories through video games.

OK, I'm gonna sit back and relax for a few minutes before the conference kicks off. Jane is a lot taller than I had imagined her.

Just kidding.

Anyway... the conference is under way.

Class Wolter, a representative of ANACONDA, is speaking about the company. Wolter is saying that they are the second largest independent German publisher, and well, he's blowing his own horn at the moment. He makes the funniest facial expressions when he speaks in English, but I digress. I guess that's not "professional" to say when you're reporting on a game conference.

Jane started out her career in the gaming industry by working as an assistant programmer at HP. Jane, NO! Hopefully, you didn't have anything to do with the making of this damn HP laptop that I'm using.

The presentation of Gray Matter starts with an animated story board for the opening cutscene of the game. It's a lot of sketches drawn in a rough sweeping style and they are really... you know... pencile-ish. I hope I'm getting a Pulitzer for this writing.

The leading lady is shown in sketch form. She's a babe. Her bike broke down on her way to the Oxford University, and she's now entering a Victorian style English mansion. Actually that would probably be the said Oxford University. She's the assistant of Dr. Styles, whoever the hell that is. I am quite sure that something spooky is going to happen at the campus. I think the sole purpose of Victorian style buildings in general is to scare people. She's ringing the bell... the door opens. She is entering a Center for Cognitive Abnormality research. The doctor reference makes perfect sense now.

At this point Jane is chipping in with her commentary.

She is telling us they are in the art concepting phase of the project and working on the engine. It's a paranormal mystery series, as she says, "she can't get away from doing that." Thank God about that, Jane.

She says the challenge for her was to find a fresh approach for this theme, "so gray Matter takes a lot more philosophical and subtle approach to the genre. What powers might lay untapped in the human mind," is how she tries to explain it. Jane calls Gray Matter "a lot more like Matrix than Van Helsing." That's a pretty accurate analogy and a telling one.

We're now being shown a rough 3D model of Dr. David Styles. He's been through a horrible car accident in which his wife died. Besides the sexy heroine, he's the second playable character in the game. Depending on the chapter you will either be controlling her or Dr. Styles. Styles is deemed to be half crazy by his peers, and well, he's wearing a mask over half of his face for crying out loud. That makes him pretty weird in my book.

Referencing to the recent trend of episodic gaming content, Jane goes from talking about the story to saying that, "while not an episodic, Gray Matter is first in the series." This is what she did with the Gabriel Knight series, so nothing new here.

Going back to the story, the deal with this Center for Cognitive Abnormality is that it is involved in neurobiological experiments (hypnosis, memory recall and a lot more). At the start of the game, you have to recruit six students to be your "lambs" for dream experiments. Before long, something goes very wrong on the Oxford campus.

Jane explains that the puzzles in the game will be traditional adventure puzzles -- inventory, logical type of puzzles, etc. Graphics-wise, Gray Matter will use pre-rendered 3D backgrounds and 3D characters on top of that.
Uh-oh, listen to this: "Having worked in the casual games market," Jane is saying the game will be "more accessible" than the Gabriel Knight games. This sounds like they might dumb down the puzzles, but she also adds that "she likes writing riddles," so let's hope they don't get swayed completely by the demands of the casual gamer market. In fact, I'm pretty sure this will not happen.

Before going off to an autograph session, Jane mentions that the game is slated to appear in Q4 of 2007, so Gray Matter is quite a ways off still. The good news is that a studio of 80 people is developing the game, with their internal motion capture studio, so it's more than likely that we'll get a top quality adventure game by the time this puppy is set to ship.

-- Uros '2Lions' Jojic

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Here she is, in flesh.

Half-mask? Damn.