Hitchcock: The Final Cut Review

When I first heard about Hitchcock: The Final Cut, I was pretty confused by the title. At first I thought it had to be an interactive educative title describing this great director's opus, and then I realized that it is actually a game... Being too lazy to look for a preview on the net, I waited until I got the game to see what it's all about. Once I did get the CD I found out that it is a classical adventure game heavily inspired by Hitchcock movies. So heavily, in fact that the developers bought the rights to use several famous scenes from his movies like Saboteur, Psycho and Torn Curtain in the game.

The main character is a private eye named Joseph Shamley. The most interesting thing about him are his 'psychic powers' he gained the day his parents died in a car accident. Now, not only did this happen the same day Hitchcock got buried, but he also started having visions which are in fact scenes from Hitchcock's films. Be that as it may, Joseph gets hired by a cousin of a pharmaceutical tycoon and film producer to solve the disappearance of an entire filming crew on his estate.

This is my wife. Arghh, put that away!

Naughty, naughty!

The gameplay in 'Final Cut' is something we had a chance to see in adventure games over the last couple of years. Everything highly resembles Alone in the Dark with not as much action, and say, Grim Fandango. You control the hero using the cursor keys, and there are keys for jumping and strafing. I have never been too fond of this control method, but it seems that the classical point and click interface is slowly falling to oblivion. So, we have no alternative but to get used to new trends, which in this case leave a bad impression about the freedom of movement, badly affect playability and only goes to prove that the developers of such engines are too stupid to do simple path-finding routines. You will frequently run into "glass walls" which restrict your movement, and will therefore loose a lot of time watching your character run without actually moving. This can get highly annoying at times.

When Joseph gets in the vicinity of an interactive item on screen, he will turn his head in its direction, and an icon informing you of the type of interaction you can perform on it will appear in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. It will mostly be a possibility to examine something, use it or talk to it if it is a person. A simple concept, you cannot beat that... but, at times it gets a bit difficult to find the right position for the icon to appear to let you, say, open the doors... As for the looking glass, it functions simply and intuitively - the looking glass contains the zoomed-in vision of the area you are holding your mouse over, showing you what you can take or read.

The key thing with the interface is some sort of a palm-top computer that you can summon by right-clicking. It contains all the facts you discovered, all your items and a map which you can use to travel around when you are in the open. It seems practical at first sight, but I was less than happy with the way it functioned. The designers seem to have preferred a complicated approach to everything and it took me several minutes to figure out how to combine two objects in the inventory. Now to save you the trouble, the procedure is as follows: you enter the organizer, select the first item, after which the organizer disappears from screen, and a small icon of the selected item appears in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. Then you open the organizer again, select the second item, and that is that. It wouldn't hurt if they had let us examine and combine items within the inventory.

The adventure is not on the difficult side; in fact I would only recommend it to the less experienced players. The number of interactive objects is minimal, and each screen has about one to three places where you can do or see something. Furthermore, as there are relatively few locations altogether, you will have no trouble in spotting all the interesting places in each of them. There are not too many situations that require you to combine something in your inventory, and for that matter, you will not even have to use the inventory too much. Most problems simply require you to think clearly and logically. The same goes for the few dialogues in the game; they are clear, concise, and usually come down to questions you may ask about what you discovered until a certain point in the game.

Let's go for a swim, shall we?

They've gone out of business here...

The graphics are a combination of 2D backgrounds and 3D characters. Typically for Hitchcock's style, all scenes are completely static and in dark, gray tones. Not to mention that a lot of locations bare a striking resemblance to locations from the movies, like the house from Psycho, or the restaurant from the Birds... Just like in other similar games, each scene is covered by several cameras which change when the need arises. Unlike other games where camera change is triggered by you standing at a designated spot, here, it can change if you simply turn to another direction. This can seem a bit confusing at first, especially if you simply want to turn without changing the scene... and the worst thing about this is that camera positions have not been too well defined, so that you can find yourself off screen, and then you have to walk around until you hit something or turn until it changes the camera again. For instance, in the scene where you have to walk on some building construction and watch your every step, the camera simply won't provide you with a sufficiently good feeling of space. Hitchcock might as well appreciate this camera placement, but I know the players will not, as this simply thwarts playability.

I also had the impression that the 3D engine had not been done as well as it should have been. As the entire game takes place in 800x600 and that characters are the only 3D objects in the game, I really think they could have done a better job with their animation and modeling and make them cast shadows. Now when we know how modest the graphics are, we simply have to wander why we have to suffer graphic glitches every time something complex and difficult like opening/closing doors takes place on a PII-450 with 128MB RAM and a GeForce2 rig. I admit my computer is far from a speed demon, but I won't accept the fact it is unable to render those couple of polygons at decent speed.

All in all, this is an average adventure game meant for not too demanding adventure players. Using Hitchcock's name and work was a good marketing move, but, unfortunately the game quality doesn't live up to it.