Introduction

Remedy is the first adventure game offering from the husband and
wife team of Mikeal and Eleen Nyqvist from Norrkoping, Sweden.

It is a delightful game
which I had a lot of fun playing. But, most impressively, Mikeal
and Eleen have given us the Adventure Game for
Anyone – anyone can enjoy playing it, anyone could have experienced
it and anyone could have created it.

It is rare to find a game so well made and yet so accessible. It
leaves us with the desire for more, yet also with the feeling that
we could also create a high quality game.

Let us take a look at what I mean.

Story

You play the part of Carol,
a Britain who is visiting friends in Sweden. While there, you receive
a letter from the sister of an old
friend – a private investigator whom you have helped in the
past. She regrets to inform you that her brother, your friend, has
just passed away from an apparent heart attack. His last earthly
act was to write a letter to you, which is enclosed.

Opening the letter, you find a plea from your friend to come help
him. He thinks there may be something fishy about his current case
and could really use your assistance. No kidding.

Stifling the groan over this cliched plot device, you decide to
help your deceased friend and continue his case. And then it starts
to get strange… There is no alien technology. There are no government
conspiracies. There are no magic crystals which open portals to the
Netherworld. Everything happens just as you would expect it to happen
in a small Swedish town.

What kind of game is this? Where are the gimmicks? Happily absent.
This is a simple detective story in a simple town. It is very easy
to believe that you are there and that this actually happened. Even
the requisite ending plot twist is believable and satisfying.

There was only one plot
hole which I personally found annoying. There were several times
in the game where you have evidence that
a crime has been committed. So why don’t you go to the police? I
don’t know about Sweden, but in the USA this is a good way to get
into trouble. A simple encounter with the authorities early in the
game (resulting in a “Go away little girl and don’t bother
us again”) would have removed the angst I felt through much
of the game.

The Nyqvists have shown
us that you don’t have to be weird to be wonderful. They took a
very simple story and made it compelling.
This mastery of the craft gets an “A-” from me.

Navigation

Remedy uses
Adventure Maker. It is a classic 2D static slide show engine
and is available to everybody.
The cursors were nice and large and changed nicely over the hot spots.

My only complaint was
the one common for this type of engine – you
don’t always know how far or in what direction you traveled when
you click to move. There was one especially bad area in the park
where all the paths were interconnected circles. It took me a significant
amount of time just to get oriented. Time I would have preferred
to use playing.

As a result, I frequently found myself playing Hunt-the-Viewpoint,
the evil sister to Hunt-the-Pixel. A little more planning of the
layout could have avoided much of this.

The frequent areas of
disorientation lead me to give a “C+” for
navigation.

Puzzles

Most of the puzzles are of the Inventory variety. Again, they are
common problems you would expect to encounter with the expected solutions.
But just because you need a key for the lock doesn’t mean they made
it easy to find. The difficulty went from easy to medium.

There was one puzzle box
which I found quite delightful, but otherwise it was a Grab-Anything-Which-Isn’t-Nailed-Down
type of game. Which
leads me to the second plot hole in the game – most of your
inventory is acquired through petty larceny. There is a bit of trespassing
as well.

Let us say that you need a screwdriver. Instead of returning home
for one, you go even further across town to the apartment house of
a suspect and ransack the common storage area for one. Remind me
again which side of the law we are on.

But all in all the puzzles
are well conceived and fit perfectly into the story. A solid “B” effort.

Graphics

The graphics for Remedy are a pure stroke of genius.

Traditionally, background graphics for adventure games have either
been hand drawn or 3D rendered. What happens if the independent designer
is not that good at either? Well, the results tend to be not that
good and we try to be forgiving. After all, they didn’t have a team
of artists to draw upon.

But the Nyqvists sidestepped the issue and came up with another
method altogether. They took photographs of their homes and the surrounding
town (where the game is taking place) and processed them with an
image filter which made them look like water color paintings.

The results were outstanding. If they had been left untouched, they
would have looked like simple snapshots. But the filtering gives
each scene the feeling of fine art. Again, Mikeal and Eleen have
shown us that you don’t need specialized professional skills to achieve
professional results.

Yes, I know that you could
not use this method for alien worlds or Space Station Oxnard. And
I have no doubt that I will now be flooded
with emails informing me that this method was used earlier in such-and-such
a game. But they did it well and this is the sort of innovative thinking
which deserves an “A”.

Sound

The music and sound effects are not spectacular, but just as good
as most of the stuff on the store shelves.

The voice acting is very
good. The average American male’s image of Sweden, if he has one
at all, is of the Swedish Bikini Team and
The Muppet’s Swedish Chef. You can see from the screen shots that
no money was wasted on super models. And the voices fit the people.
No great dramatics. No Shakespearian delivery. No “bork, bork,
bork.” Just what you would expect to see and hear from people
in the neighborhood.

And yes, I have visited both England and Sweden and this is how
the people really talk.

A solid “B” for
sound.

Playability

Playability was good.

First, I usually had no problem figuring out what to do next. You
interview someone, they mention another person and suddenly a new
location opens up on your map. There were only a couple of times
towards the end of the game where it was not obvious what needed
to be done and I found myself revisiting everyplace just to see what
would shake loose. I’m sure some people enjoy that type of game play
and it wasn’t so much so as to ruin it for the rest of us.

Second, the story opened
up one clue at a time just as it should in a good detective story.
This kept my interest up throughout the
game. This, unfortunately, is not the norm in adventure games and
the Nyqvists deserve a solid “B” for their superior effort.

Conclusion

Remedy is a delightful game. It is neither fancy nor fanciful, but
it delivers a solid story in a solid way. It left me feeling that
it could really have happened to me and that it might be within my
power to create a professional game as well.

My concluding thoughts
were, “That was nice. May I have another,
please?”

Final Grade: B
(find out more about our
grading system)

System Requirements:

• Pentium 400MHz
• Windows 98/2000/XP
• 32MB RAM
• 2MB videocard
• 300MB hard drive space