Adam’s Venture: Chronicles

Cathy’s notes on Adam’s Venture

I’m supposed to be taking notes when I game for reviews now. Stupid brain. It used to soak up information like a sponge. Now it soaks up information like, I dunno, a washcloth or something. Stuff still clings, but it gets wrung out whenever I have a seizure. Now I have to write down everything like a fucking savage. And what is my first game I’m doing under this primitive system? Some piece of shit religious game that feels like it fell out of a time warp from 1999. Oh, and get this, it’s called Adam’s Venture. The only problem is, the character is called Adam Venture. It’s Adam Venture’s Venture. Works for me. My name is Cathy Vice. Cigarettes are my vice. They’re Cathy Vice’s Vice. I should use that in the review. It’s fucking clever.

9:18 AM: Okay, well let’s just fire this fucker up. Yes, I’m aware that this game autosaves. What kind of idiot just randomly turns off their console when a little circle-thing is spinning in the corner, indicating that the game is saving? Oh shit, Judge Judy is on. A…….. oops.

10:11AM: All system errors are now fixed. Stupid short attention span. Now I feel like an idiot. Later today, I’ll go on Twitter and get all preachy and self-righteous about Nintendo or how much cooler I am than everyone else. That always cheers me up. Okay, onto the game.

Da nanana, nu nu nuuuuuuuu. Da-nana, nah nu nah nah nah.

10:30AM: Ugh. I can’t believe they still make games like this. The character moves like he’s shit his pants. He jumps like he’s liquid-shit his pants and it’s seeping through his underwear. Dude, I have epilepsy. Been there, buddy. I’ll save my own panty-oopsie stuff for later, when I say something stupid on Twitter and need to get sympathy. Suckers. So easy to manipulate.

12:15AM: Adam’s Venture is trying to do the Indiana Jones thing. In fact, it reminds me a lot of Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine. Which was an alright game back in 1999, when I was stupid. All kids are stupid. I was STOOPID stupid. I watched Big Bad BeetleBorgs. Oh, set a reminder to bring that up on Twitter at some point, preferably when someone talks about their superior 80s shows. Even though I found their shows better, I will stand my ground and insist my shows were better. Hell, the retweets I get for mentioning BeetleBorgs will up my geek cred and probably land me at least six new followers.

Anyway, the set pieces are nice. It really does kind of feel like I’m exploring a vast, abandoned, booby-trapped cavern. If not for the Dreamcast-era graphics, I might be positively immersed right now. Oh, and I’m now being followed by an evil cloud-monster-thing that reminds me of Dark Heart from Care Bears II. But it only shows up in cut scenes. There’s no enemies or combat. It’s just about getting from point A to point B by solving rudimentary math and logic puzzles. It’s really linear, so it’s almost impossible to get lost. In a way, I appreciate that. But it all comes back to those controls. It’s like the designers of this game went into full-on panic mode as the millennium neared and locked themselves in a fucking bunker for fourteen years to escape the Y2K fallout. Then they spent the next fourteen years kicking themselves for not hanging the “We’re in here, Jesus!” sign that they had lovingly quilted and figured the rapture had passed by without them being saved . Then, one day, they emerged, blurry-eyed, and discovered the world hadn’t ended. After the initial disappointment, and trying to figure out their cover story for why they only waited two weeks to cannibalize their buddy Harry when they had plenty of rations, they tried their hand at game making. They had a PlayStation 1 and a copy of Tomb Raider and Legacy of Kain to play endlessly to pass the time, and that shit was so cutting edge that there was NO WAY the format was improved over the last fifty-six seasons. Oh, and this is a religious game, so stick a snarky “what a surprise, a religious game that disproves the theory of evolution” quip in the review. Maybe too obvious and lazy a joke, but fuck it, I’ve got shit to do today.

12:20PM: Brian just pointed out to me that I, in fact, don’t have anything to do today. Whatever. You know what? Fuck him. No sex for him tonight.

The settings are the best part of the game. A lot of care went into them. It makes it look like the game will be exhilarating. It’s not. It’s very slow-paced.

1:15PM: There’s really not enough story to sink my teeth into. Just lots of vague religious stuff. Some of the puzzles involve arranging three lines of scripture in the correct order. I’ll bring up that I’m actually a practicing Catholic here, even though I don’t actually believe that shit. Just hedging my bets, in case when I repent on my deathbed God sees my fingers crossed. Still though, it’s not horrible or offensive. A little old-fashioned, but then again, so is religion. You know what? Maybe I was wrong. Maybe this will win my seal of approval after all.

1:16PM: OMG, fuck this game. Fuck it in its mouth with a hepatitis-laced rusty scrub brush.  It has timed environmental puzzles. And the timer is too short. For this one puzzle, you have to light two torches, climb a rope ladder, jump up on a platform, and duck under a door before one of the torches goes out and it closes. Why that sucks is, lighting the torches is done via context sensitivity. Simply pressing the button doesn’t light the torch. When you do press it, the game takes over movement and gingerly stumbles back and forth until the character is locked into place. Then, it slowly lowers your torch into the torch you’re trying to light. This whole thing DOES NOT STOP THE TIMER, which wouldn’t be an issue if there is only one torch. But, because there’s two, if you don’t hit the button in the very small space that is lined up most ideally, you’re going to watch while the game operates your character like it’s trying to not break a nail.  Mind you, even if you do it correctly, you still have to line up correctly with the ladder, get up it fast enough, then get to the ledge and jump on it. Jumping on it isn’t smooth either. In the very first part of the game that required you to jump, I had to try five times to jump up a ledge that was about six inches off the ground. This is not a game designed with dexterity or speed in mind. I spent forty minutes trying to get this room correct. I was convinced I was doing it wrong and looked for an item or something else I was missing. I can’t believe this made it through play testing without the poor sap playing throwing down his controller in disgust and converting to Scientology. Suddenly, the whole religious thing makes sense. By the time this room was over, I was praying. “Please God, don’t let there be another room like that.”

2:04PM: There was another room like that. This one had four torches that seemed to have even shorter timers. They were all spread out in the corner of a large room. The only thing I had to do was light the torches. No other hoops to jump through. It took me another thirty-minutes to do it, just because of the animation thing. It felt like one of those plate-spinning gags, only it would be like if the plate spinner had to tie his shoelaces before spinning the plate more. 

2:35PM: I’m finally done with Adam Venture’s Venture. Well that was short and…………

2:36PM: Shit. I forgot this is a compilation of a game that had been released episodically on PC. Well, I’m done. I can’t take anymore. If they patch the torch thing, which I’m sure can only be done by increasing the timer on the torches or stopping the timer while the auto-animation is going, I’ll come back to it. I don’t even know if there are going to be more rooms like that, but the fear of it is stronger than my fear of cigar-smoking clowns. Damn that Are You Afraid of the Dark? show. Twenty years later and I still have nightmares. Those sections really were the only things remotely challenging, but not in a good way. I’ll wrap up the review by reenforcing that Adam’s Venture Chronicles is far from horrible, but it really is too old-fashioned for anyone expecting a game released in 2014 to have control-sensibilities from the last ten years. Maybe this would have been a terrific game in 1999. But it’s not 1999. 

Seriously, Vertigo Games. Patch those timed-puzzles and I think I would be ready to award this my Seal of Approval. Also, you guys need to flog yourselves with a cat o’ nine tails for committing such a sin in the first place.

I bet if I had been a kid when this came out, Mommy and Daddy would have gotten this for me. I mean, assuming they could find out about it. How do you find out about games of this nature, anyway? The religious aspects of the Adam’s Venture Chronicles aren’t even mentioned on its PSN profile. Imagine if a militantly secular family accidentally bought this. It seems like it wouldn’t go over well. More over, to not boast of the nature of the game itself defies the scriptures. Timothy 2:15 tells us “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.” Of course, it also tells us to kill every mouthy child, homosexual, or person who works on a Sunday. Grand Theft Auto isn’t this bloodthirsty. But it would be facetious if I put that in the review, even if the liberals who read me would lap it up. In truth, if parents only want their kids playing games of this nature, the kids life wouldn’t be ruined by Adam’s Venture. It’s mostly only a bad game because it’s so outdated in the way it’s executed. Had this controlled like Tomb Raider 2013 did, it wouldn’t have been amazing or anything, but I probably would have liked it a lot more. Hmmm, executed wrong. I should probably work in some kind of really inappropriate joke here. Something involving Jesus and an electric chair or something.

Now for the crappy part: I have to turn these notes into a review. I could just post them like this, lazy as it would be. But then people would realize I’m an aloof, pompous, self-indulgent, self-righteous, stuck-up bitch, instead of the awesome crusader for indie developers people think I am. Hey, wait a second. I’m a game critic. I’m SUPPOSED to be those things.  And…. published.

Adam’s Venture: Chronicles was developed by Vertigo Games

$9.59 with PlayStation Plus discount ($11.99 MSRP) probably didn’t stick to the concept behind this review well enough in the making of this review.

There are two Vertigo Games as far as I can tell. One of them should consider changing their name to avoid market confusion. The link above points to the guys behind Adam’s Venture. But these guys are also Vertigo Games. It’s an uninspired name anyway.

A review copy of Adam’s Venture: Chronicles was provided to Indie Gamer Chick by publisher Playlogic before the game’s scheduled release on February 4, 2014. At Indie Gamer Chick, all games reviewed are paid for in full by the writer. Upon the release of the game, Cathy provided a $20 PSN card to a friend who purchased the game. The friend has a PlayStation Plus subscription, meaning the purchase price was $9.59. For more on this policy, check out our FAQ.