Of course it was a great
idea! I Confess that I admire Arxel Tribe’s idea of incorporating
the work of the greatest filmmaker in history into an adventure game.
But what this talented group of game designers came up with, Hitchcock:
The Final Cut, is a very strange game indeed.

Like
so many Hitchcock films, it’s a story of mystery, Blackmail
and Murder. You play a private detective who’s contacted by
a Rich and Strange man whose mute daughter summons you to his
estate, where he’s producing his own private movie. Unfortunately,
someone’s decided to Sabotage the film, and no sooner do you
arrive but bodies begin piling up.

Is the Notorious
mogul’s daughter and as Young and Innocent as she seems? Or
is she actually the Saboteur? Well, you don’t have much time
to think develop your Suspicion in this department, because
almost immediately after your arrival at the estate, The Lady Vanishes.
Things begin to go Downhill from here.

And
there’s more plot. Lots more. Your character gets to act in the movie
(overcoming his own natural Stage Fright), is forced to dig
graves, has to release a corpse strung up on a Rope, and generally
has to figure out beyond a Shadow of a Doubt what Psycho
is responsible for all this carnage, and to do so without fingering
The Wrong Man.

Unfortunately, game’s presentation
and interface are an even bigger mystery. Presented in third person
with extremely handsome backgrounds but only mediocre character models,
you’ll wonder why the game developers made the curious decision to
employ mouse support in the close-ups but not in the long shots. Long
before you’ve taken Thirty-Nine Steps, your finger will be
very tired of hammering on the arrow key. What’s even worse is that
now-depressingly-familiar problem of erratic camera angles. They change
so frequently, and so unexpectedly that it’s enough to cause Vertigo.
A simple act of walking from one side of a room over to the Rear Window
will sometimes trigger two or three changes of camera angle.

There’s
also a bafflingly cumbersome inventory management system. But the
most unforgivable sin the game makes is forcing you to launch the
game with one disk, even though you immediately must switch
to another disk to play the actual game!! This is shoddy file management
at best, callous disregard for the player at worst.

I’ve done a lot of strange
things in adventure games, but stopping the Family Plot in
order to bake an apple crumble has to rank up there with the strangest.
And what’s with the girls’ mynah bird? We all know mynah birds talk,
but this bird is as smart as a person and can carry on complete conversations
and follow out complex orders. This bird would make Lassie feel inadequate,
and its presence makes it hard to take anything in the story very
seriously.

The
game is also oddly tone deaf when it comes to the pile of corpses
that accumulate during the story. I know Hitchcock often had a mordant
sense of humor regarding death in his films (actually, this was demonstrated
more in his famous trailers than in the films themselves), but the
cavalier attitude of the game’s hero (and, for that matter, the girl)
are just very, very off-putting. SPOILER ALERT: At one point in the
game, the girl is literally rolling around under the covers in a sexual
Frenzy while virtually every family member she’s ever known
lies freshly dead in the immediate vicinity.

There’s also a general
sloppiness in the game that’s very discouraging. Conversation trees
frequently make no sense, as they refer to events that have not yet
happened. And there is severe character clipping, making one scene
which features a character pacing in a circle and blithely walking
through the wall on every spin, unintentionally hilarious. It’s also
a bit offensive to have the game begin with a splash screen that says
“Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” No he doesn’t. He’s dead, and
this game should not be blamed on him.

The
most crushing disappointment about Hitchcock is it’s almost
total lack of interest in Hitchcock’s films. Though many of his films
are referred to (and even quoted with short, generally irrelevant
clips), and most of the characters have names that echo from the films,
that’s about as far as it goes. Think how much fun they could have
had with puzzles based famous plot devices in the films. Or even how
rich the atmosphere of the game could have been if the themes
of Hitchcock’s work – voyeurism, sexual obsession, mistaken identity
– had been used. Hell, even Hitchcock trivia questions would have
been fun.

I do not enjoy beating
up on any game by Arxel Tribe, as I think they are a talented bunch,
and they’ve have made games I truly admire (Faust, Ring,
Pilgrim and Louvre). And let me stress again that the
artwork in the game (excepting the character models) is extremely
moody and attractive. But instead of being Spellbound by Hitchcock:
The Final Cut, I was eager to wish it Bon Voyage. This
game is for The Birds. Hitchcock deserved better. So do we.

Grade: D

System Requirements:

Windows 95/98/ME
Pentium 333 MHz
64 MB RAM (128 recommended)
24x CD ROM
8MB 16 bit video card
16 bit sound card
300 MB disc space
DirectX 7

See: Young and
Innocent
Play: I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream
Read: The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy