Enter the world of FBI Special Agent Victoria McPherson, as she discovers the dark side of both our world and the human condition. A series of grisly murders following a similar patter has McPherson scrambling to stop a serial killer before they strike next, or worse, before the killings escalate. Join Special Agent McPherson on the streets of Chicago as she tries to catch a killer who seems to get more and more brutal with each murder they commit.

Prague in the 1930's

Sound like a plausible idea for a storyline? Having played through the press demo for Still Life, the answer is a resounding yes. Distributed from the folks at The Adventure Company and created by the French company Microids, Still Life seeks to take the adventure and criminal investigation genre and mix a large dose of surreal imagery to create a game worthy of praise. If Microids sounds familiar, it’s because it should. They’re the folks responsible for the widely successful and critically acclaimed Syberia series as well as the lesser known yet equally engrossing Post Mortem.

Featuring absolutely beautiful backdrops you’ll find yourself in awe of, Still Life is very dark, very grizzly, and ultimately, very violent. It brings to mind the mood and imagery of a movie like Saw, which, oddly enough, I watched before playing through this demo and was again captured by the uneasy feelings it evokes with its haunting and often ghastly visual images. I must also give praise to the cinematics used to help tell and advance the storyline. These early scenes combine to produce a very pretty and again very dark, gritty cinematic feel to them. You definitely get the feeling that, at times, you’re actually part of a movie, an active participant in this macabre story. I do have to note that Victoria bears a passing resemblance to another shorthaired heroine named Kate Walker, again of Syberia fame; still, the resemblance isn’t so close that you would mistake the two.

Evidently sunshine was outlawed in Prague

The game is controlled in what can be termed your standard, tired and true, third-person point-and-click perspective. Although I did find myself doing a little bit of pixel hunting, the areas that utilized it will make sense as you are actually deeply scanning an area looking for differences between a picture and what you are faced with. In the few areas that I played through, I faced four solid puzzles that, with only one real exception, were very intuitive. I enjoy adventure games which focus on storylines and puzzle solving instead of using only one form of adventuring exclusively. The puzzles can be separated into two kinds, your Myst-like puzzles (the four I spoke of earlier) which often involve either skill or luck or just plain intuition to pass them and your standard adventure game ‘fetch quests’ where you find and use items to help progress through the game. The second type, though rare, are littered throughout the game, often logically solved or, at the very least, readily apparent when you sit down and think the problem through. I can certainly appreciate an adventure game that neither insults my intelligence nor makes me feel like an idiot and thankfully this game finds a happy medium between casual and hardcore adventure gamers.

Just one of the many gruesome bodies seen in this game

The voice acting was not only competent but very appropriate for the characters and situations. From the slow witted goons, the bumbling officer who cannot seem to keep his food down, the streetwise and witty, to the not so witty as annoying Victoria McPherson, I was pleased how much the acting added to the story and the cinematic experience. The music score was also incredible, featuring the appropriate beautiful albeit dark music one would expect from such a game.

You will start the game as Victoria McPherson, but will, after a short while playing, take the role of her grandfather, Gus MacPherson. She recalls a story he told her when she was younger, due to the similarities between his case and her current one. He was investigating a series of murders which took place back in the 1930’s involving prostitutes. Due to the fact that all of the victims found were prostitutes, Gus MacPherson was the only person interested in helping these ladies. Victoria also discovers that at the very least, her latest victim was likely a prostitute as well. It becomes apparent in this demo that throughout the game you will switch roles as you find out the answers to not one but two series of grisly serial murders.

Where there is a killer, there is an S&M Club always nearby

A church/morgue, who says you can’t cover all bases