The Carson Stiles Theater
just couldn’t win for losing.

It
was a small, older theater. It was beautifully ornate with a real
balcony, but could only seat a couple hundred people. The modern Multiplex
at the Mall had left its box office and profits dwindling. Things
were looking bleak, and then Claude Ferucil showed up.

Claude was an independent
producer/director of low budget films. That’s a nice way of saying
that he was a B-Movie hack. He made a deal with the Theater and made
it the sole venue for his productions. His movies may have been cheesy
and cliché riddled, but there was something about them which
held you as though time itself stood still.

Word
got around and people started to fill the little theater. Profits
soared. It was unfortunate about the various staff members who had
died. In fact, it seemed like one theater employee would die a gruesome
death just before the release of each new film. Finally, the owner/manager
himself died in a small fire in his office and the Carson Stiles Theater
was closed.

That was eight years ago.
This morning I received an invitation from Claude Ferucil to the grand
re-opening of the Carson Stiles Theater including two tickets to his
latest movie, Primal AtmosFear. Strange I hadn’t seen anything in
the Papers about it. But it sounds like fun…

The
Filmmaker is the third offering from independent game developer
Christopher M. Brendel. His first two games, Lifestream
and Shady Brook, were story-centric games. The
Filmmaker is his first attempt at a puzzle-centric game.
Oh, there is a story here – Ferucil is a demon who kills people
and uses their souls to empower his movies. You must free their souls
and stop Ferucil. But that’s it. No in-game exposition. No clever
plot twists. Just lots of puzzles to play with.

And the puzzles are just
wonderful. There are inventory based puzzles all around plus a couple
dozen logical puzzles. Most of them are classic. All of them are fair
– they can be solved if you think about it. Most have their
clues scattered around the game. But be forewarned, many of them are
quite advanced. Unless you solve the NYT Crossword using only the
Across clues, you will want to get the Official Guide and Walkthrough.

Are
there any down sides to the puzzles? Well… there is a slider, but
it is only a 3×3. There is a maze, but is easily mapped – every
wrong turn quickly becomes a dead end. There are a couple of timed
sequences. There is one arcade game. So no, not really.

The graphics in adventure
games tend to fall into three categories: Cartoon, Professionally
Rendered and what I call Home Brew. A look at the screen shots will
tell you that this game is firmly in the Home Brew camp. But this
is good. Chris’ express intention was not just to use B-Movies as
a backdrop, but to make the game itself into a B-Movie. And it works
quite well.

The game play is traditional
first person point-and-click with all of its advantages and disadvantages.

The
background music is cheesy. The voice acting is cheesy. The movie
sets are cheesy. Perfect for a B-Movie celebration. I loved it. I
expected to see Tor Johnson come for me at any moment. My only disappointment
was the sci-fi spoof. The bridge of the spaceship looked like Star
Trek: The Next Generation, which was a big budget production. Original
Series might have been a better choice. But the cheesy captain made
up for it.

So what do we have here?
We have a tribute to B-Movies with all of their desperate charm. We
have a collection of superior puzzles which will make you feel really
clever when you solve them. We have an independent developer who created
a game which was more fun to play than many of the professional offerings
out there.

System Requirements:

• Operating system: Windows
  XP/Vista/7*
• Processor: Pentium
  733 MHz
• Memory: 64 MB RAM
• 2 GB hard drive space
• 1024×768 resolution
• 24-bit color display
• 4x or faster CD-ROM
  drive
• Windows compatible sound
  card and mouse

*Note
to Windows 7 users