I am, as you probably guessed by virtue of my position as co-editor/co-owner/webmistress
of this here Just Adventure site, a pretty true-blue adventure gamer. I was sitting
around feeling sorry for myself because of the current dearth of new games, and
it came to my notice that Discworld Noir had been released in Europe but
would not enjoy U.S. distribution, so I bit the bullet and ordered it from the
U.K. Imagine my excitement when it actually arrived here a couple of weeks later!
I quickly ripped off the wrapper and loaded it up. First off, there were three
installation choices, small, medium, and large, with medium being the default.
Since I got me this nice big 20 GB hard drive when my old one died not long
ago, I went ahead and did the large install, which basically caused the whole
game (close to 1.3 GB) to run from my hard drive. I figured I was in the
gravy now and rubbed my palms together with glee.

DWN starts off
quite promising–you play as Lewton, “the Discworld’s first, and maybe last,
private investigator.” After a kind of a prologue that involves you dying
but somehow still being around to tell your story, a bossy woman named Carlotta
is in your office hiring you to locate her lover, Mundy, and then she leaves,
conveniently forgetting to pay you. You decide to take the case anyway, perhaps
swayed by Carlotta’s high, perfectly spherical boobs, but more likely by the sorry
state of your finances, “private investigator” being a fairly novel
concept on the Discworld. You uncover conspiracy within conspiracy on top of other
conspiracy, like peeling the layers of an onion, all in four acts. There are bits
and pieces of famous noir films liberally sprinkled throughout the game, but with
kind of a distinct Discworld spin. The game’s plot is very highly developed, especially
for a computer game, with lots of magic and murder–and I would say it’s at least
as good as Jane Jensen’s stories for the Gabriel Knight games. It manages
never to lose track of itself, even through numerous convolutions, and most, if
not all, of the loose ends get tied up by the end of the game. I grade the
plot A+.

Graphics are pretty spotty. Some of the cut scenes are fantastic,
especially since this is one of those ugly 3D-type games with polygons, but I
feel like the designers skimped on the rest of them. Throughout most of the game,
you get a background scene with characters superimposed on it, bobbing as if listening
to a private little tune, moving their lips and waving their arms, but all the
while no on-screen action is taking place. Everything is also too dark for my
taste. There is a gamma correction option that adjusts the brightness, and I turned
it all the way up, and the game was still too dark. I guess they weren’t kidding
when they said “noir.” I really liked the way the characters were drawn,
and I liked the way the whole look of the game, down to the characters and camera
angles, all fit well within the film noir theme, but I mostly felt like I was
listening to the radio because outside of the cut scenes the graphics did not
add much, what with staring at the same background with the same characters wiggling
and waggling in the same spots for a really long time, sometimes up to five minutes.
I guess if there had been a little more animation, I would have been inclined
to give a better grade, but as it is, I feel I am being generous with my B-.

Gameplay
is kind of spotty, too. I really liked the hot-spot cursor that would light up
an on-screen description of whatever you were supposed to interact with, and I
really, really liked the fact that there was no dying. (Well, Lewton sort of dies,
but it’s part of the story.) The game is largely mouse-controlled, with a couple
of function keys to bring up options and inventory and the ever-so-valuable “escape”
key to skip scenes or conversation. And there is a whole lot of conversation (more
about this a little further down) and very little in the way of puzzles, actual
or integrated, and what puzzles there were were pretty obtuse. DWN was just crawling
with bugs, too–at first, every time I tried to change locations, I inexplicably
would get booted back to my Windows 98 desktop. Then I learned that if I got rid
of all TSRs except for Explorer and Systray, there weren’t any more crashes, but
the game would stutter, sometimes for a couple of minutes straight. About halfway
through, I got so fed up with how hard it was to actually enjoy the damned thing
that I gave up and followed a walkthrough just to see how it ended. Back to the
topic of conversations: better than 90% of the game involves talking to everyone
about everything, much like in the Broken Sword games, and then 90% of
what you hear is just dumb jokes. Actually, the jokes were pretty funny and cute
at first, but the humor wore thin after the first few scenes. Now, I do realize
that classic old-style adventure games rely heavily on conversing, but there was
simply too much in this game, especially since there was nothing to watch except
the bobbing heads and waving arms of Lewton and whomever he was talking to while
listening to what they were saying. Okay, I’m done ranting now, and I give
gameplay a D purely for bugginess and tiresomeness and the soreness of my
escape-key pinkie.

Sound effects, music, and voice acting were all first-rate,
or they would have been had it not been for the broken-record-skipping (or for
you whippersnappers, that would be rap music) effect that just got worse the further
I got into the game. In particular, I would have really enjoyed the music–each
scene had a different, appropriate tune to go with it. The voice acting was kind
of silly at times, much to my delight–Lewton is played by an Englishman trying
to sound American, and some of the pronunciations had me cracking up–he always
said “Clark” for “clerk,” “I have some more quest-eons,”
and “trall” for “troll”–in fact, I thought “trall”
was some kind of unique Discworld beast for the first half of the game, until
I saw it in writing on the screen. And then on top of that, except for the exaggerated
foreign accents of a couple of the characters, all the rest of the voices were
undisguised British. Anyway, that is not a criticism, it was just amusing, and
I give the sounds category an A.

I really hate to be very critical
of one of the few true adventure games that will be released this year, but DWN
was a big disappointment to me, largely because it was such a pain in the
ass just to get it to run, and so my final grade is going to be the lowly but
still somewhat respectable C+. I probably would have graded it B+ or A- purely
for atmosphere–DWN fairly reeks of atmosphere–had it not been for the
bugs (and before you ask, my computer, while middle-of-the-road in these PIII
days, far exceeds the stated requirements in every respect).

System
requirements: P166 or greater IBM compatible computer

32 MB of RAM
8X CD-ROM drive
Windows 95/98