Anacapri - The Dream Review

someone needs to tell S&G Software that it's no longer 1993. Creating games with photographs and video clips in place of digitally created images is about as culturally relevant today as a new Coolio CD, so it's hard to see what the developer was thinking when it made Anacapri: The Dream. This throwback to the era of The 7th Guest may include thousands of photographs of one of the most gorgeous vacation spots on the planet, but it plays more like something you found at a yard sale than a game you pulled down from the new releases shelf.

The line between games and movies is sort of blurred in the structure of the game. While the play style holds tight to the point-and-click adventure template, the game is constructed solely with still photos that give your jaunt the vibe of an indie film. So even though you play a stereotypical sleuth looking to solve the mystery of the ancient Obsidian Disk on the island of Capri, the atmosphere is quite different from the sorts of adventures you might be accustomed to. Thousands of photos depicting everything from seaside vistas to cobblestone roads, to the many quaint shops lining the narrow streets of the titular town of Anacapri, give you the impression that you've embarked on a real trip to the exotic Mediterranean locale. The gameworld is absolutely massive, so it frequently feels as if you're really exploring all of the crooks and crannies of the island.

However, there are prices to pay for this type of presentation and the sheer size of everything. Many of the most potentially picturesque outdoor shots are blurry or strewn with artifacts, presumably to keep picture size reasonable. Oddly, the most sharply detailed pics are the dull ones that show a shopkeeper behind his counter or an old man sitting on a bench. Regardless of quality, there is an air of absurdity to the whole affair because of the use of multiple shots of people during conversations to give the illusion of movement. Done more subtly, this might have been a good idea, and might have nicely added the illusion of movement to what is otherwise a breathless game. But all of the changed poses and expressions given to Anacapri residents are wildly exaggerated, so encounters with them come off like some sort of bizarre mime show. Finally, there are some technological issues in the install process due to the high number of photographs. There are so many photos included as single, high-resolution files that the installation takes almost as long as a flight to Capri itself. You might want to brew a pot of coffee for this one, as it takes a good two hours for all seven gigs of picture files to be transferred from the DVD to your hard drive.

Unfortunately, this time isn't well spent. The game amounts to little more than a great selection of somebody else's vacation snaps. Gameplay lacks structure, due largely to the sheer size of the island. The game itself is such an afterthought that it feels like something hacked together at the last minute to justify writing off a vacation to Capri. Although you're assisted by a hotspot system that highlights key locations on each photograph, it's ridiculously easy to get lost because the entire island is open at the start of the game. Make a wrong turn, or simply get befuddled over the game's many vague clues, and you're soon off on an unintentional sightseeing tour. Although it's relatively easy to work your way through most in-game situations by doing some careful pixel hunting, closely following all of your instructions, and continually checking the city and island maps to see where you are, you still need a walkthrough to figure out how to get where you need to go.

Adding to the confusion of Anacapri is a plot that values nonsense about the nature of reality over the virtues of an easy-to-follow narrative. As if the real-world island wasn't hard enough to figure out, you regularly have to chug dream syrup that sends you off to explore surreal lands populated by ghosts and mythological monsters. Set-piece puzzles that bypass the absurdities of the plot are the only strength here, and there aren't nearly enough of them to compensate for the awfulness of everything else. Most don't even show up until near the end of the game, such as the nifty series of sphinx riddles, and the tile puzzle that is one of the final barriers to the Obsidian Disk.

Horrific voice acting and scripting, along with some truly weird musical choices, sprinkle extra strangeness into everything. Strangers stop to talk as if they were long-lost friends, and the topics of conversation often seem nonsensical until you start looking back on things and putting together the big picture. All of the characters in the game are voiced by a handful of terrible actors making lame attempts to change their voices with bad accents, which makes even real-world interactions with people shimmer like hallucinations. The dialogue is universally overwrought, characterized by lines such as "That disk will remain a dark stain on our past and humanity forever," spoken with all of the passion of a fast-food counter jockey asking if you want to supersize your value meal. Music is frequently jarring, and bounces all over the place between poppy lounge music and driving guitar. It's like you're being stalked by somebody with a xylophone on wheels and Yngwie Malmsteen, respectively. Thankfully, there are frequent, long stretches of silence.

If it were a relic from the early 90s, Anacapri: The Dream might be worth a play for the nostalgia factor alone. A "so bad it's good" vibe also creeps into the adventure through the voice acting, almost giving you the feeling that you're reliving some fond memory that hasn't aged particularly well. But you're not, and considering that the longing for a bygone day is the only possible reason for playing this backward game, you'll soon get tired of flipping through photographs and move on to something more modern and more competently designed.

By Brett Todd, GameSpot