➤ The interactive thriller? 🎮

Many know that the ESRB, or the US body that classifies video games and decides from what age you can play them, was created to regulate Mortal Kombat and other violent video games. In reality, its origin is not only due to Sub Zero and company. Among the terrible dangers that dragged the poor souls of underage players towards eternal damnation there was also Night Trap, a game in which you had to protect beautiful high school students from the attack of very bad vampires by monitoring the security cameras and setting traps at the right time. . What interests us today, however, is not so much that Night Trap was treated like a new Sodom, nor that among the protagonists there was Dana Plato who at the time disturbed the sleep of adolescents, but the fact that it was one of the first games to make intensive use of digitized films. In fact, between the '80s and' 90s the graphics were absolutely not comparable with today's so, thanks to the arrival of CD-ROMs, the top of the technology lay in the possibility of using video clips mixed with interactive moments in which the player had to solve puzzles or deciding what to do. This trend that at the time was very popular and started with the Dragon's Lair cartoons, passing through Phantasmagoria, 7th Guest and Gabriel Knight came to inspire today's Heavy Rain and Life is Strange. Over the years the use of movies has been lost, however apparently there are those who still believe in it: we are talking about the Canadians of Zandel Media and their Missing: An Interactive Thriller, recently landed on Steam thanks to the Greenlight program.

An interactive thriller that vaguely smacks of retrogaming: will we be able to defeat whoever wants us dead?

A rude awakening

Sometimes it can happen that you wake up badly, but the real problems start when you do it in an unfamiliar place, hanging, with your wrists handcuffed to the ceiling and a picture of your family pasted on the wall with the words "Play with me" underneath. .

These are the premises with which Missing: An Interactive Thriller welcomes us, which immediately confronts us with a series of questions: where we are? Who imprisoned us? Why is he angry with our family? And most importantly, how the heck do we get out of it alive? To answer we will have to face puzzles that involve our deductive, logical and spatial abilities in more or less complex challenges, interspersed with filmed moments that tell us what happens. From time to time we will also have to use our reflexes to overcome some quick time events, pressing the right button at the right time to avoid an early game over. The story, however, is not told only from the point of view of the poor man hanging by the wrists, but also through the eyes of the investigator who is looking for him to save his life and who obviously, given the vaguely noir tone of the story, has the vice of drinking.

Click all!

The best thing about Missing: An Interactive Thriller is undoubtedly the cutscenes. The sets are essential but well done, without bleak computer graphics scenarios. The actors are not dogs, on the contrary, some in the cast are full-blown professionals with many interesting roles behind them and even the hand that moves the camera manages to give a decent photograph.

On the other hand, Zandel Media has as its main objective the diffusion of video games that mix the pleasure of video games with that of TV series, thanks to high quality videos, on every type of platform (and in fact the game has already been released on mobile). , therefore it is evident the commitment and care in wanting to give the public something that at least surpasses the standards of the German detective that you see every now and then on Rai. To manage it all is Simon Tremblay who has gained experience in Ubisoft working on projects such as Splinter Cell, Prince of Persia and Assassin's Creed, to then decide to go on his own and found Zandel Media. After the first few minutes of trying to figure out how to solve the first puzzles, it is inevitable to get caught up in the story of Missing: An Interactive Thriller trying to discover every possible clue hidden in the environment that surrounds us and who will prove to be fundamental to move on to the next phase . In fact, the game has a strictly sequential structure in which each filmed segment anticipates a part in which we will have to explore the space around us with the mouse or by touching the screen to open lockers, move objects, collect clues or use what we have previously found. Since the interactive parts of the screen are not marked (also because otherwise everything would be too easy) we inevitably end up falling into the nervous tic of every graphic adventure: touching every possible area in search of something that works or an object to collect that gives us the enlightenment to move forward.

A taste that leaves the desire

Missing: An Interactive Thriller puzzles are quite varied; some resemble an evolved version of the 15 game, in other cases we will have to analyze the environment to find the right password.

In most cases, however, it will simply be a matter of finding the right item to put in the right place. The quality of the puzzles is quite fluctuating and in general we managed to solve them all without too many problems; only in one situation did we have to rely on chance by clicking on the environment until a door that contained the solution magically opened. Simple puzzles aside, the real problem with the game is its durability. An average player will take about an hour to get to the end of this first episode which leaves many questions open about the continuation of the story. Among other things, we will have to wait until the end of 2015 to find out more as the production of the game is quite expensive. In summary, for about 4 euros we take home a trailer rather than a thriller and obviously, being a puzzle game, its replayability is zero. A real shame because the game is fun and made with attention to detail and we are sure that in the hands of a studio with more funds it would have been a really interesting title capable of relaunching a long-forgotten genre. However, this has not prevented the game from obtaining a moderate success which is even making developers consider the possibility of making a bundle purchase available for all episodes, thus reducing the price for individual chapters. If the package with the whole adventure was sold for around 10 euros then it would be a must buy for all lovers of interactive stories. For the moment, however, Missing: An Interactive Thriller can be for you only if you are looking for a title that makes you spend an hour different from usual; if you want something that really makes you smoke your brains maybe it is better to fall back on the last pages of The Puzzle Week which moreover costs even less.