Review Apparitions Developer: Star Mountain Studios Publisher: Star Mountain Studios Genre: Casual Game Release Date: Q4 2007 Platform: Review by Ryan Casey January 9, 2008		Buy this game at Trade for this game at:

Since 2003, Star Mountain Studios has produced casual games under the direction of three ex-Vivendi employees, Richard Sternberg, Briar Lee Mitchell and Adam Ryan, who have worked on such games as Quest for Camelot and The 7th Guest. Sternberg chose to leave Vivendi Universal to pursue his own independent projects, and chose his veteran friends Mitchell and Ryan to join him in continuing his passion for creating adventure games. However, for their newest game, Apparitions, SMS teamed up with a more well-known group - TAPS, or The Atlantic Paranormal Society, familiar to viewers as the intrepid spirit-seeking duo on the SciFi channel’s popular show Ghost Hunters. Co-founders Jared Hawes and Grant Wilson apparently worked with SMS on the game to make it as accurate and authentic as possible.

In the game, players join the Pete Wren Paranormal Investigation Agency on their trip to the Florida Keys. The Red Reef Inn, once a popular and successful business, became dilapidated and abandoned. Now that it’s being renovated, however, some of its more colorful stories are coming to light - and some of its more interesting ‘inhabitants’ are starting to show themselves. The game provides rich and inventive background to the Inn and its ghostly residents, all of which can be read at any point during the game by accessing your main laptop, which stores of all of the images, audio and video clips that you collect during your exploration. The graphics, while not spectacular, are well done and help set the atmosphere. The music also creates an eerie mood, but is often repetitive and even cuts out completely at times, leaving you to search the house in an awkward silence.

In addition to your laptop, you have many investigative tools at your disposal. To detect the presence of paranormal activity (or is it?), you have a camcorder, temperature gauge, heat detector, and EMF detector in the lower right corner. (I found the temperature gauge to be the most useful when trying to sense activity.) My main quibble involves the camcorder. First of all, there is no indication as to whether or not, when you are using it, it is recording anything. Secondly, some of the ‘events’ happen so quickly, it is hard to get to the camcorder. In some cases, I actually forgot to get it because I was watching what was happening. Thus, I missed out on some important footage.

In the other corner of the screen there is a voice detector (again, no sign of being in use until you check your laptop), a radio which your fellow investigators use to speak to you (usually nothing more than “This door is locked” or “Did you see that thing move?”), and a built-in hints system: Lucy the psychic. I found her “hints” to be hit or miss. She would often say something like, “I feel an entity near the kitchen counter” or “I sense an angry presence near the honeymoon suite,” yet I would canvass those places for five or ten minutes and sometimes find nothing. To be honest, I’m not sure how one is expected to play the game without Lucy. The case history on the Red Reef Inn gives some suggested locations to search for different spirits, but apart from that, there is no other information given to point you towards a certain spot in the house. Every time you ask Lucy for help, however, you lose points.

Now that I’ve gotten through most of the basics about this game, I will just flat out state that I didn’t care for it. It has its scary moments, sure, but I didn’t have the patience to get to some of them. Searching the hotel is a tedious, tedious process; I used Lucy constantly, not even caring about points, simply because I wanted to see something happen and was tired of meandering around the place with no interesting results. And, as I said, sometimes I found something and sometimes I didn’t. And if I did, I didn’t always have time to grab the camcorder.

And there is nothing else to do in this game but walk around looking for paranormal activity. A lot of the rooms, for whatever reason, are locked and therefore off limits, which leads to a ridiculous amount of backtracking to the same rooms over and over again to try to find new entities or noises or whatever. The worst part is that you cannot zoom in on anything! Once you are in a room, you can spin around either way to see what’s there, but your feet are virtually cemented into the floor. Arrows at the edge of the screen (which are sometimes difficult to find) can rotate you either way, and once you’ve gone as far as you can, you can click to see the room from a different perspective (a bar at the top of the screen lets you know where in the room you are (e.g. north, south, etc.)). For me, moving around the rooms was smooth but the transitions from room to room were usually slow.

For every piece of “evidence” you find, you can rate it in your laptop as invalid, possibly paranormal, or proof. Thus, you don’t have to be a “believer” in order to paly this game! Then, when you think you have compiled sufficient evidence to prove that the supernatural is (or isn’t) at work at Red Reef Inn, you can send your report to TAPS for Jared and Grant to assess. Through the game itself, you can also join the online community for the game and discuss your findings and experiences with other players.

However, I cannot say that I would recommend this game. Perhaps there are people out there with more patience than I have (for this game, I mean; I know there are plenty of people more tolerant than I!) or who take a greater interest in the ghost-hunting idea. I don’t deny that it is a cool idea for a game, but it failed to keep me entertained. Had I stuck with it longer, maybe I would’ve found more to like about it - but a game shouldn’t have to fight to keep me engaged. Star Mountain Studios shows potential with Apparitions, but in my opinion, the final product falls flat.

Final Grade: C+ (find out more about our grading system)

If you liked this game, then Play: Delaware St. John, The Lost Crown Watch: Ghost Hunters, Most Haunted Read: Stephen King

System Requirements:

• PC with 1.6 gigahertz (GHz) or higher processor clock speed recommended; 1.6 gigahertz (GHz) or higher required (single or dual processor system);    { Intel Pentium/Celeron family, or AMD K6/Athlon/Duron family, or compatible processor recommended }
• 512 megabytes (MB) of RAM or higher recommended (64 MB minimum supported; may limit performance and some features)
• 50 megabytes (MB) of available hard disk space    (or should we double this, to allow space for the installer and the installed at the same time?)
• Super VGA (800 x 600) or higher-resolution video adapter and monitor
• Keyboard and Microsoft Mouse or compatible pointing device• Internet connection recommended