The adventure game is not what it used to be. In the early days you typed in a command in the vain hope it would be recognised by the game’s limited vocabulary, to the days when all that was replaced by numerous point and click systems. The most famous being those of Lucasarts classics. Back in the days of the Amiga I owned pretty much every single point and click game around and have been one of those people who have welcomed the revival of the adventure game.

Fahrenheit is the latest game that attempts to bring the genre bang up to date, but it’s far from a point and click experience, and is just about as far removed from an island of Monkeys as you can get.

The mouse is your unique way of interacting with the world and the objects in it. When you are near something that you can interact with, you get a few icons appear at the top of the screen. For example you may stand next to a table, so you could (a) sit down (b) look what’s on table or (c) search under table. Each one of these icons gets a corresponding mouse action, so for the first option you may hold down the mouse button and move the mouse down. Whilst looking at things may involve moving the mouse left or right. It’s a small innovation but within the game works very well.

Another change from the adventure game norm is that there are no puzzles as such. This game is very story driven and is designed to make you feel like you actually are the characters involved. Instead of puzzles you get mini reaction games which pop up every now and then and success or failure in these reflect how the story progresses. To start with they are a neat addition but towards the end of the game they become plain annoying. More on that later though.

Fahrenheit is a good game and the unique added elements are a brave attempt. However the game does have more than its fair share of problems.

Secondly the game claims to be ‘branching’ – the choices of conversation threads and the ability to succeed or fail in the reaction games are all supposed to take the game off on a different track. The problem is that you never feel as if this is the case and also there is never any incentive (especially come the end) for you to go back and see what happens should you make a different choice.

Another problem is the reaction games. Used sparingly they would just be there to keep you on your toes and to break up slower parts of the game. As it is though it seems that they are used to make up for lack of ideas in the story. Pretty much the last hour of the game is made up almost entirely of these games and it just becomes annoying.

Those problems aside though, Fahrenheit was mostly enjoyable and when the story worked it worked well, it’s just a pity that it feels a game of two halves and just like an England friendly, nobody really put much effort in on the second one. Starved adventure game fans wanting to try something a little different may want to check this out though.