Over the years, I’ve waded
through my share of “spooky-type” adventures, but The
Blackstone Chronicles is, perhaps, the most horrible game I’ve
ever played. Not horrible in the sense of design or play, mind you,
but in terms of its factual basis. More on that a little later.

The story is adapted from
John Saul’s Blackstone series of books, and centers around
the trials and tribulations of Oliver Metcalfe. Oliver is the son
of Malcolm Metcalfe, deceased, formerly supervisor of the Blackstone
Asylum.

The
Asylum stood abandoned since the 50’s, but has now been restored by
an historical society as a sort of “museum of mental therapies
through the decades”. When the game begins, Oliver is having
a conversation with his father, and that is one of the unsettling
points.

Is Oliver crazy, or is
he really conversing with Malcolm? Are the conversations he has with
other lingering spirits actual, or is he hallucinating? Does he have
a death wish that propels him into certain life-threatening situations,
or is he at the mercy of Malcolm’s malign manipulations? Has Malcolm
really kidnapped Oliver’s son Josh, or is it some sort of delusion?

That last question in particular
can cause great uneasiness. After all, if this is real, everyone else
Oliver talks to is dead, and you begin to fear reaching the end, for
what you might find. If it isn’t real, then he’s imagining conversations
with dead people, which might be even worse.

This uncertainty is bad
enough. The real gut-wrencher, however, is reading the exhibits set
up in several rooms. These detail the various “therapies”
practiced on the hapless inmates of asylums and sanitariums everywhere
over the years, and they aren’t made up. The designers did their homework
here; all the “treatments” are factual, not fake – and some
of them are still in use today. If this doesn’t send shivers down
your spine, nothing will.

So, between the exhibits,
treatment rooms, conversations, and various documents, an atmosphere
of horror and disquietude is well-maintained – all without the usual
sham trappings of bodies falling out of closets, monsters roaming
the halls, or revolting close-ups of maimed corpses.

The
puzzles generally are sensible, and of the traditional object-oriented
variety, though conversations are also very important here. It is
often only by speaking with the spirits of former inmates that you
learn enough to solve a particular problem, even if you may have figured
out the answer on your own. For all that, there is nothing obscure
or requiring leaps of illogic for the solution.

One particular type of
puzzle deserves special mention: the timed sequences. These are life-threatening
situations, and you have only a short period in which to come up with
the solution. If you can’t, or you’re too slow, Oliver dies.

However, you never go into
one of these unless and until you have everything you need to come
out alive. Also, if you should bite the dust, the game will give you
the choice of simply restoring to before the sequence began, obtaining
a hint to the answer, or learning the answer outright.

This is an amazing feature,
and an important one. Blackstone is a very linear adventure, where
the story advances in steps, almost chapters. Should you become stuck
anywhere, you could be stumped for awhile, and have nowhere else to
go, nothing else to work on. By providing answers for the truly frustrated,
the game allows you to survive the dangerous situations without the
need for endless restores and experimentation.

The interface is a simple
one, controlled via mouse. Directional cursors indicate where you
can move. A hand cursor highlights objects of interest; clicking the
left mouse button opens an on-screen box with the actions that can
be performed on or with the item: looking, moving, operating, or picking
up.

Using items from inventory
is equally simple. The object is put on the cursor, and run over the
spot onscreen where you want to do something with it: unlock a door
with a key, for instance. If the item has no use in that situation,
nothing happens. If it can be used, a text box opens on the screen
with the action available, in this case, “unlock door”.
Clicking the mouse performs the operation.

Blackstone
comes on two CD’s, but only one is needed for play. The first CD has
the install procedure, and “low-res” movies; the second
disk has hi-res movies. Both hold the complete game, so it’s just
a matter of which resolution you want; unless your system is very
slow, I recommend the hi-res, which is much better (though there is
no effect in the actual game; the graphics are the same there whichever
disk you use).

While Blackstone
ran smoothly enough, I did experience one technical glitch with it.
After the first installation, the game did not operate properly: the
mouse cursor would vanish, or the game would crash, or other odd things
would happen. This was cured by first uninstalling the game, then
reinstalling it and allowing it to put up DirectX 6 (I already had
DX6, and so had skipped that the first time). That worked, and the
game played fine.

Unfortunately, for the
hearing-impaired or deaf, this will not be a very playable product:
there are no text subtitles. While conversation topics are visible
text on the screen, everything is spoken. If you can’t hear, or hear
well, you will miss important information. This is an amazing omission,
especially considering the game is from Legend.

I
was also not pleased with the ending, which is a little too neat,
a little too pat, and left several matters unresolved. After the terrific
buildup of horror and anxiety through most of the game, this was definitely
a letdown.

Overall, Blackstone
Chronicles is an above-average adventure game, in spite of its
faults. Well-researched, frightening, with intelligent puzzles and
an interesting story, only the lack of subtitles and the weak ending
keep it from being really superior. While not especially difficult,
it should give anyone looking for “adult horror” a good(?)
time.

Just Adventure + Assigned
Grade: B+

System Requirements:

Pentium 166
180 MB free HD space
8X CD-ROM Drive
24-bit PCI Video Card with 2MB RAM
DirectX 6 compatible sound card
DirectX 6 compatible mouse and keyboard