The Moment of Silence Review

The Moment of Silence is a typical point-and click adventure, meaning you have to talk to everybody about everything, and try every item on everyone, and then collect another item and try it on somebody else, and then talk to them again because they may have some new info for you. This process would have actually been quite enjoyable if you weren't supposed to go pixel-hunting instead of concentrating on the story. At one hand, there are the puzzles which are very clever and logical most of the time, and on the other there is the nauseous work of checking out every corner of the screen in order to find items that would be vital for moving on to the other segment of the game. The game is quite linear, meaning you will be forced to perform certain tasks in a certain order, and having absolutely no freedom in choosing what you'll do first means you'll often be stuck at a certain point of the game, missing something that was right in front of your nose and unable to understand what was preventing you from moving on.

This sort of behavior can land you in jail, you know. While there, you may try to socialize with fellow convitcts and try to borrow ketchup from them.

The highlight of your criminal career will be snagging important CDs off of corpses. You have no moral issues about it: the dead guy's breath is awful and no one will ever miss him.

Some of the things that have really irritated me in the game were the wooden character animation and the inability to skip some in-game animations, so I had to sit patiently and watch a character walk from one point to another without being able to move until he was bloody finished. In fact, the entire game progresses at a rather slow pace, which gives you an authentic feel of engaging in a real investigation, but also bores you to death on certain occasions.

The game does not excel on the visual side. It is not one of those visually breathtaking games where every detail pulsates with life, but it's no ugly-loooker either. Apart from somewhat wooden character models that look as if they've been chopped out of a tree trunk, the items are rendered rather well, and some environments look really great and have a realistic feel. The game suffers from occasional bugs which result in missing textures - when I first entered James' office building, I could only see the floor while the ceiling and the central computer were totally invisible. This however only happened a few times during the game.

As for the sound, the voiceovers vary from mediocre to fairly good, ambiental sounds are rather limited, and the background music fits the game perfectly - all musical themes in the game add to the atmosphere significantly.

All in all, The Moment of Silence proved to be quite a pleasant suprise, as this is a very good and original adventure. It features a great story which develops in a satisfying manner, a gallery of interesting and believeable characters, some great dialogue (noticeably the one James leads with Huntington, who finally helps him see the truth about the world he's been living in), as well as some logical and creative puzzles. Its biggest problem, like many other games in this genre, is all that pixel-hunting, which leads to losing a great deal of time in running around and looking for an item or simply trying to find the way out. The awkward pathfinding and camera angles, as well as the utter linearity of the title, only make matters worse. Still, the game proves to be worth playing, and the story revolves in a way you'll find anything but boring - the climaxic outcome won't be too original or surprising, but will certainly be unexpected. Except for us who happened to read Orwell, of course.

Bearing in mind all this, I can definitely recommend this game to all patient adventure players who wish to take part in an engaging story, talk to some intriguing characters and use their intelligence for solving different puzzles. If you are by no means patient or believe the 'great alien conspiracy' is plain bullshit, you should probably stick to whatever you're sticking to and ignore the fact that aliens are here. Oh, yes, they are among us, man, and they watch our every step. They monitor our lives and find a way to get into our dreams. And the government is trying to hide the truth from us, man. Do you happen to have a smoke on you? Have I asked you that before? I have? Oh. Sorry. (The Goverment has decreed smoking is bad for you. Smoke a cigerette and we'll kill you. It's for your own good. -Ed)