I am pretty jaded when it comes to adventure games, having played so
many of them, and so it is a rare thing for one to surprise me. But this game
literally took my breath away. In retrospect, I can’t believe I hadn’t played
it yet–I have had it for at least a year and kept passing it by because it looked
like some metaphysical exploration/know yourself kind of junk. But no, it turned
out to be a horror game extraordinaire.

The game opens with an e-mail message
asking you to check up on a coworker of yours, who is in a haunted house testing
some new equipment that is supposed to aid in tracking ghost activity. Of course
you agree, and you set off. When you get near the house, an apparition appears
in the roadway and you swerve into a lake. You drag yourself onto the shore and
set off up a hill to the house. When you check the garage, you find Roxy, the
coworker, unconscious or dead in the loft. You enter the house and find pieces
of her ghost-busting equipment all over the place. Your first task is to make
it all work again, and then you must make yourself into each of the ghosts, using
a special headgear called Amber, in order to free them by making them know they’re
dead, and ultimately revive Roxy. Each of the subplots deals with a form of man’s
inhumanity to man and thus is far more horrifying by its reality than if it were
purely based on the supernatural. The tension in my computer room was palpable
as I played this game. I kept having to take breaks because the walls were closing
in on me, I was feeling little breezes blow through my hair (turned out to be
the heater), and I kept hearing noises. This story is thick with atmosphere and
manages to be sweet, sad, horrific, terrifying, and believable all at once …
it’s a real ride on an emotional roller coaster. I give it an A+++, if
I might be permitted to make up my own grade.

Gameplay is extremely intuitive.
The interface is pure point-and-click, and the cursor changes shape to tell you
what you can do when you move it over a hotspot. However, there were a couple
of hotspots that were really small and hard to locate, so there is a bit of pixel-hunting
(but not for objects, just for hotspots). There are a few inventory puzzles, but
mostly you progress based on close observation of your surroundings. You can’t
die or make a wrong move, which is a plus for me, and I ran across no bugs or
system hangups. However, while I enjoyed Amber all to pieces, I am giving
this category only a B- because there was a maze (albeit an easy one) and
a slider puzzle–I believe I discuss in just about every review I write how much
I hate these two tired old chestnuts.

The beautiful graphics are largely
photorealistic images in the slide-show style of Myst and Riven, but
animated sequences are interspersed strategically throughout. I give this category
an A+–it’s obvious that the artist(s) had a great deal of design experience
and a good eye for layout–there was no clutter, although there was plenty to
see and do, and each of the styles for each of the ghost segments was perfectly
executed. Even though the graphics are not technological marvels, they were artistically
almost awe-inspiring. The level of detail was a marvel, too–for instance, Roxy
got her diploma from Miskatonic University in a subtle tip of the hat to H.P.
Lovecraft.

The music is movie-quality although not in the least bit bombastic.
In fact, it is downright lovely much of the time, a la Mike Oldfield, and it absolutely
heightens the tension–and there is a lot of tension in Amber. Sound effects
are fantastic and used in all the right places. When I heard a sound effect, I
knew exactly what it was supposed to be. The voice acting, while there was not
a lot of it, was not at all cheesy in the usual second-rate video game style.
The sounds category, largely because of the music, rates an A.

In
conclusion, if you want a horror game without gore (there is the teeniest amount
of blood but it’s on people already dead and not at all disgusting) that truly
will cause chills to run up and down your spine, I recommend Amber over
any other that I’ve played in the horror genre. It was good enough that I would
go so far as to rank it in my lifetime top five.

Final Grade: A+.

As
a final note, I would like to mention that Amber is a husband-and-wife
effort by Frank and Susan Wimmer, with a very small development team. This is
one of the all-time greatest adventure games ever produced, I believe, and I would
like to see more support for these small-scale gems in order that more might be
made. I have seen this game recently (April 1999) in the bargain bin at CompUSA,
so if you haven’t played it yet, get yourself a copy tomorrow–maybe the Wimmers
will be encouraged to make another game.

If you liked Amber:
Watch: The Haunting (1963)
Read: The Legend of Hell
House by Richard Matheson
Play: Morpheus

System
Requirements: Windows 95
486DX2/66
8 MB
RAM
High-color (16-bit) video card
45 MB of free hard disk space
4X
CD-ROM drive
Sound card