The Arrival is yet another somewhat obscure title reviewed by
me, this time based on a movie of the same name. I vaguely remember hearing of
the movie The Arrival, but I never saw it. No matter, the game stands alone
quite nicely.

The
Arrival, the game, begins with the nameless hero standing in a field observing
some kind of strange activity, and then he is abducted by aliens. Then some aliens
are about to perform some invasive medical procedure on him when suddenly the
ship shakes and the power flickers; the aliens all drop what they are doing and
run off. The hero comes to in a prison cell. This is where the game begins. The
cell has no bars, just an impenetrable green force field. The hero (the player)
looks around a bit and finds a disk left behind by the previous inhabitant of
the cell, another human. The prisoner on the disk, Jenkins, talks about a plot
the aliens have for terraforming the Earth to suit their needs, meanwhile destroying
all current life forms. Jenkins talks about a couple of things he managed to discover,
thereby setting your first tasks. You are to escape from the prison and destroy
the alien space station, meanwhile making sure you are able to escape so you can
return to Earth and tell about your experiences.

A
sidebar: Early in the game, you must assume the form of an alien so that you are
not instantly killed when you encounter the real aliens or their robots. When
I try to imagine what aliens would look like, I can’t. I always conclude that
their appearance would be so far outside the realm of human experience that we
might not even recognize them as life forms were we to encounter them. And so
I always get a laugh out of aliens in movies or games–they seem to almost always
have a head with two eyes, one nose, one mouth, a torso, two arms, two legs–in
fact they look positively humanoid. The aliens in this game are no exception.
The quirky thing about these ones is that their knee joints bend in the back,
like a grasshopper’s. Too bad they weren’t green and didn’t have feelers and compound
eyes–they would have been ever so much more icky! Plus they could’ve leaped about
1,000 times their body length in a single bound.

Perspective is first-person,
with third-person cutscenes and the occasional overhead view of yourself a la
Sanitarium. A couple of times I was confused by this last–it took me (more
than) a second to realize that was me standing there, not some other alien. The
interface is standard point-and-click using the left mouse button; right-clicking
brings up your inventory, a “look” feature, and the options interface.

Throughout
the game you must solve puzzles to gain access to new areas or get inventory items.
(This is one of those games where you have a bottomless inventory in the form
of a backpack that you are never shown actually wearing. Very improbable, what?
But a device that’s employed in many a game besides this one.) The door- or cabinet-opening
puzzles are not unique–they are basically just standard brain-teasers overlaid
with a thin visual veneer to make them appear to be alien technology. One thing
great about this game is that when you are doing one of these types of puzzles,
you can get three “instructions” and then you are offered the chance
to skip the whole thing. For the most part, I did not take advantage of this because
I like puzzles, but I did skip two puzzles, once on a switch-the-colors-to-the-other-side
peg (quivering plasma blob, I mean) jumping puzzle and once on a jump-on-each-chessboard-square-once-and-only-once-using-knight-moves
puzzle (using an alien fetus in a jar), both types of puzzles that which I just
hate.

The inventory puzzles, on the other hand, are unique and fun. For
the most part, even though you pick up some mysterious stuff along the way, you
know where to use it when you see it. This is a very nonlinear game–except for
the very beginning and the very end, you don’t really have to do anything in any
particular order. The only times I got confused were when I had an inventory item
that I didn’t know what to do with, but every time it turned out that I hadn’t
gotten to that point yet. There are no tricky puzzles like those in Monkey
Island–they’re all very straightforward, and you get something good every
time you do something right. There are some red herring inventory items, a shiny
turd, for instance, that never get used.

There
is occasional dying in The Arrival, and you don’t get any do-overs, so
you’d best save often. Some of the death scenes are spectacularly gruesome, usually
involving some part of your body splattering all over the place, followed by a
laughing Death’s-head. This game is rated for mature audiences only because of
these scenes and because there are a couple of rotting corpses or body parts of
one species or another that you must retrieve items from. I let my eight-year-old
son watch it but only after I gave him the speech about “it’s only pretend,
they can put whatever they want in a [insert here: video game, TV show, movie]
blah blah blah.” (He always says “I knooow, Mom, I’m not a baby!”)

The
graphics are simply fantastic. The whole game environment is photorealistic, and
the cut scenes are almost movie-quality. Stands to reason since this game is based
on a movie. The space station and other places you visit are very richly imagined
and lushly detailed. The flying-through-space scenes are breathtaking. There was
one thing that I and my junior scientist son were wondering about, though–sometimes
when your spaceship takes off, the jets (or thrusters or whatever they’re called)
spurt flames. Our question was, would this actually happen in space? How can there
be flames in a vacuum? Well, whatever the case, it looked nice–we just suspended
our disbelief and enjoyed the game.

The music is nonexistent. I don’t know
if there is any music or not–’tis rumored that this game will not play under
Windows 98 and that you must have some certain version of Windows 95. Well, I
was able to play it with no trouble whatsoever under Windows 98 by disabling the
CD Audio in the game options, but if there had been any music, I suspect that
would be what was meant by “CD Audio.” There are plenty of sound effects,
all very well-done. There is a little bit of voice acting, and it’s fine–not
good, not bad–just there.

The
Arrival is a fun, compelling game experience … wait, I forgot to tell you
about … the dreaded maze! Yes, I’m afraid so. About two-thirds of the way through
the game, in the form of a mine. This is a great big one, too, but at least it’s
logically laid out and easy to map. What a pisser, though. In my opinion, there
is no surer way to leech the fun out of any adventure game. Well, maybe arcade
sequences … no, I’m not going to get into a discussion of my pet peeves here.
Back to the topic at hand: this whole huge maze added about ten stinking hours
to the game just to map the maze and find the measly three things in there. However,
since I am such a big-hearted person, I will let you look at my
map for free. Armed with the map ahead of time, the maze part should only
take about half an hour or so, and the game will be much more fun for those of
you (you know who you are) who also hate mazes.

So, as I was saying, The
Arrival is a fun, compelling game experience. It’s a big, juicy game you can
really sink your teeth into. The story is exciting, there is a real you-are-here
feel to it, it’s challenging but not so hard that you need a walkthrough (one
of the few games I can say that about), and the puzzle-skip feature is a real
bonus for those of us, all of us, I’d guess, who have certain puzzles we just
can’t bear, because this game has about every type of puzzle (except sliding tiles–hooray!)
ever invented. I would have given it an A, but I am going to be a big meanie and
downgrade my final grade to a B- just because of the maze.

The
Arrival can be ordered from Playing
Games. Visit their web site for details.

If you liked this game,
Watch: The Arrival (of course)
Read: The Siege of
Eternity by Frederik Pohl
Play: The Crystal Key; Cydonia/Lightbringer

System
Requirements:

PC:
Pentium/Windows
95
4X CD-ROM drive
8 MB RAM
Video card with DirectX support
Windows
95-compatible sound card

Macintosh:
Power
PC
16 MB RAM
4X CD-ROM drive
hard drive with 4 MB free
System 7 or
higher