overclocked |

Publisher: Lighthouse Interactive, DTP Ent.

Developer: House of Tales

Release Date: 4/7/2008

Available Exclusively On

Overclocked is one of those rare indie games that goes unnoticed but is really good. This is a simple point-and-click adventure where it’s so simple that you don’t even use your keyboard. The game has an easy-to-use menu. All your items are at the bottom of your screen. That’s it. You use your cell phone to record your sessions (more on that later), receive text messages, and make calls. You are David McNamara, who is a shrink and is called to Staten Island, where he has to find out what happened to five teenagers. The game also has you overlooking David’s personal life with a hard breakup with his wife.

The game’s story doesn’t really start picking up until 75% through the game. You just get bits and pieces here and there, and it becomes confusing until near the end. Most of the game has you going back and forth between five different cells in the hospital, recording sessions, and playing them back to other patients to trigger memories. During most of these memories, you have to play as the patient and figure out what to do with that memory. Some have you assembling a way to blow up a gate to escape by finding hoses, a flag, a bottle, gasoline, etc. You can also go back and forth to your hotel, a bar, and whatnot to trigger different cutscenes.

The story does keep you in it long enough until it really grabs you near the end. I just wish the animations for everything weren’t so long, though. Sometimes you’ll swear the game froze up because the character will pause for 5 seconds or so before going into another animation. The graphics are also pretty good, and most mid-range computers can run it on high settings. The game has pre-rendered backgrounds for this reason. The puzzles are pretty neat and aren’t really too hard to solve. If you can’t figure out a place to look, you can hold down Space, and it will show you every place on the screen you can investigate.

Overall, Overclocked is great for fans of storytelling and/or PC adventure games. This game isn’t for kids, though, because it is a very depressing and gory game. I would check this out if you have nothing else to do. Unfortunately, I couldn’t finish the game because I played 3 chapters I didn’t save, and my game froze, so I just uninstalled it. I didn’t get to see the ending, but I wish I could have.