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Gadget: Past as Future (PS1)

Gadget: Invention, Travel and Adventure PSX
Before swap CD, save state to file, next CD, upload save state file.
Genre: Adventure
Perspective: 1st-person
Setting: Cyberpunk / Dark Sci-Fi
Published by: Synergy
Developed by: Synergy
Released: 1997
Platforms: PlayStation (PSX, PS1), Windows 3.1

In this case, we have before us an improved version of the "Gadget: Invention, Travel & Adventure" that appeared three years before, already the pinnacle of Sono's creativity, which at last combined various mechanisms with which it was allowed to be played in "L-Zone" with a plot of an appropriate degree of phantasmagoric. Some rational suggestions can be derived from user guides: events unfold in some gloomy and authoritarian is not the past, not the future, in urban empire controlled all-powerful dictator Paulo Orlovsky (reference will again and again to Eastern Europe). Because prospects are exclusively in the first person, we do not see the image of its protagonist, and who he is, we can only guess: probably some investigator or an official for special assignments, which the powerful Supreme Commander of the armed forces of the Empire Theodore Slouslop instructs find some Frost Horslaver, leader of a group of seven scientists. Before Orlovsky came to power, they conducted research in the Imperial Academy of Sciences, and now went underground - and are engaged in an incomprehensible thing: some say they are trying to save the Earth from an alleged imminent death due to an early confrontation with the comet; others argue that the "eggheads" are only concerned with their own safety and are preparing to escape from the planet by building a spaceship called the "Ark"; but a third believe that behind all this lies a large-scale anti-government conspiracy ... In this we have to understand, of course, to the extent that the mysterious and surreal world of the game will allow it.

Compared with the first edition, the graphics were radically improved, the animations were heavily added to the weight and the full color of the palette (which affected the volume in four CDs instead of one), and the English text became a little more elegant (strangely enough, for its improvement was the French company , but the most that neither is legendary - Cryo Interactive). A pleasant surprise and a redesigned interface, if in 1995 our hotel was only a standard for Windows upper edge of the window with a pair of banal menu items now by pressing the Ctrl key (or mouse clicks on one of the two wheels that appear when the cursor is over the bottom part of the screen), we open an entire interface panel with not just stylishly and colorfully implemented save or load buttons, but with a couple of optional "sessions", and even changing as the game progresses.

But the actual gameplay has not changed: if we try to characterize it understandable for fans of adventure way, you get something like "of Myst" no puzzles "(more precisely, the puzzle will be here, but only one, and not just the most that neither is" mistoidnaya " - driving in an underground labyrinth). Interactivity in «Gadget: Past as Future» reduced to a historical low level later "simulators walk" in the manner of «Dear Esther»: the gameplay is extremely linear, mistaken or even getting lost is impossible, and almost all of the passage can be described by the formula "was held a couple of screens ahead - clicked on the character who shared three mysterious phrases, alluding to the meaning of everything that is happening, - watched the video. " The characters here, by the way, are a couple of dozen - they only talk subtitles, although you will also have to listen to the radio and talk on the phone - on the contrary, with the compulsory perception of English by ear. And yet we sometimes give to play with the very same put forward in the name of the gadget and other ingenious mechanisms (and sometimes such studies are even purely optional), and author of a lot of work to a variety of devices and vehicles, for all the similarity of their style, a little yes differed in the variety: some trains here a few pieces, and in fact there will be also ... yes, a spaceship!

The final rating in this case is as much as possible: for someone here there is no lesson and one minimum score, and for someone to evaluate "Gadget: Past as Future" in less than twenty of ten possible means to roughly spit on the entire imperishable the history of computer art. One is indisputable: this edition is the best example of Haruhiko Sono's creativity, which should be strongly recommended to all lovers of adventure exotics, various mechanisms, surrealistic fiction and, of course, just original projects.