Art of Murder: Cards of Destiny Review

City Interactive has certainly been active of late. Cards of Destiny is the third installment of their Art of Murder series and a few weeks ago I reviewed the second part of AoM’s sister series, Chronicles of Mystery: The Tree of Life. Only a few years ago it felt like the commercial adventure was on life support. Nowadays, any number of good-quality efforts are reaching the digital shelves. Many, of course, now come from central Europe, which has adopted the graphic adventure after the major American game publishers booted it out into the snow in favor of the FPS and all those other loud, annoying console titles — War of This, Battle of That. Well, no point in replaying that battle again here. We should simply be grateful that the Germans and the French and the Poles have stepped into the breach.

Of course, this new world order of the adventure game does have its drawbacks as well as its benefits. For the English speaking portion of the world, I mean. First off, graphic adventure games now tend to be written in some European language and then, if we’re lucky, translated to English. Second, we get these games, if we’re lucky, a year or two after they’ve been released in Europe. Two elements which have remained consistent are the graphics and the music, because visuals and sounds don’t need translations. The problems, if any, tend to come from the story and the dialogue. Of which case City Interactive is a good example, and Cards of Destiny a prime example.

CoD again has great graphics. They’re the kind that make you stop playing the game to snap a screenshot so you can use that nifty warehouse or wharf or palazzo or whatever as a desktop. And, again, CoD has excellent sounds and soundtrack. Well, one would expect the Europeans to be good at symphonic music. However, once again, the script and the dialogue leave plenty to be desired. In CoD the dialogue ranges from serviceable to tedious and on occasion attaining the bizarre. I simply don’t understand why City refuses to put more effort into their scripts. Sure, the translation from, I think, Polish, or maybe German, is part of the trouble, but that doesn’t explain all.

I know that City is trying with both Chronicles and Murder to add novelistic depth to their respective heroines, Sylvie Leroux and FBI special agent Nicole Bonnet. The aim is admirable, the results perplexing. In Cards of Destiny, they have “Nicky” bantering with the FBI lab guy, Wang, and they have her blue-collar father phone her at one point to break the news that her mom’s been hospitalized. She’s also got the usual adversarial relationship with her strictly-by-the-book station chief. You know, this is all okay, but the implementation is a disaster. Much of the dialogue is stilted, when it isn’t downright misplaced, and way too often there’s simply way too much of it. I wonder if anyone bothered to edit the first-draft script at all. Then when Nicole starts mixing item descriptions and subtle gaming hints in with her conversations with colleagues and suspects, things get weird fast.

The basic plot of Cards of Destiny is fine. Nicole is a serial killer specialist at the Bureau and some nutcase is sending her packages and messages, trying to show off to her as he bumps off a string of losers as well as — or so it seems — court her, or at least lure her over to the dark side by forcing her to become involved in the murders as they occur. Certainly no one will complain about the murderer’s choice of locations — an old movie palace in New York City, an abandoned paddle-wheel steamer in a Louisiana mangrove swamp, an off-shore storm-tossed lighthouse fort up in Maine. Maybe they should have let the serial killer take a crack at the script too.

I do like the way City tries in these games to mix up the puzzle offerings. Though there are no memorable puzzles in CoD, there are a number of nice tries. In the old movie house, Nicole has to get a projector up and running so she can watch the next clue from the homicidal lunatic. There’s also a fun treasure hunt of sorts set up by the killer in an abandoned New Jersey amusement park. The big finale at the Maine lighthouse is well done too, even if the actual ending feels like the last forty feet of the movie was lopped off. On the other hand, way too much of the puzzling involves Rube Goldberg-like assemblages of disparate inventory items. At times, I felt like I was in high school shop class. Does this go in here? Or down here? Where’s that Philips screw?

The game does try to give you the feel of an FBI field agent at work, especially when Nicole retreats to her Bronx HQ. There she runs analyses on samples and checks databases for matches, etcetera. Some of it is interesting but there’s probably too much of it. Nicky even gets to practice her pistol shooting on a range at HQ and later at a booth in the amusement park. Neither requires advanced twitch response, though you can go back and try the shooting gallery just for fun and a much steeper test of your aim.

There’s one lengthy timed sequence in an old power station. You, as Nicole, are racing against the clock. Mostly though, I was trying not to grind down too much of my tooth enamel. Nicole is supposed to be racing to save a woman’s life, but she doesn’t alter a drop of her usual unhurried behavior. Unless you remember to click to make her run from spot to spot. And click through her long, lazy speeches as the giant two-ton cog descends on the poor victim. You know, if you must put an action sequence in an adventure game, then don’t do it by halves. Change the character controls to match the objective.

The sounds and the music and the user interface and the installation and all that other standard stuff is quite similar to the other titles in this series, both Chronicles and Murder. I have not played Hunt for the Puppeteer or the Scorpio Ritual, but I have played three of the five now. My reviews of all three are fairly similar. Excellent graphics, good basic concept, nice score, and garbled script. It’s hard to assess the voice acting in CoD simply because the writing is so choppy. Let us say that the actors are not able to save it.

You know, while I was waiting for CoD to be released in English, I downloaded and played the German demo. It includes the first few scenes of the game, including that great sequence in the old movie theater. I thought, wow, this is really well done. But it was largely because I couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying. Total incomprehension proved more dramatic than ham-fisted English. I could pretend that the characters were saying clever things to each other. And I couldn’t hear Nicky telling me every few minutes what I should be doing next, like a nagging nanny. I don’t know if I could have gotten through the whole game in German, but I’m thinking now I probably should have tried.

I don’t usually break down the score of a game, but this time I think it will prove more informative. I give the plot, the sound, the music, the graphics, the puzzles and even the user interface of Cards of Destiny a B plus. Solid work. The dialogue, the acting and the script get a gentleman’s C. More messy than bad. Overall I give the game a B minus. Cards of Destiny, if you can ignore what the characters are yammering on about, provides a decent ten to fifteen hours of adventuring, and the usual dosage of nice eye candy, but it’s a step backwards from City’s last AG effort, Tree of Life.

System Requirements:

• Windows XP/Vista
• DirectX 9
• CPU 2.0 GHz (Dual Core 1.6 Ghz)
• 512 MB RAM
• Video card Nvidia GeForce or ATI Radeon 64 MB RAM, DirectX 9 compatible
• 4 GB free HDD space
• DVD-ROM, mouse, keyboard, sound card compatible with DirectX standard