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To
be fair, however, I'm not sure I ought to review it
anyway, since it isn't, in my opinion, an adventure
at all. The idea is quite novel -- what you get is a
detailed picture of your location and a cursor. By moving
the cursor and pressing SPACE you can examine objects
or pick them up, or (once you've got them and they're
displayed in your inventory) use them. Apart from the
location and the icons representing the objects you're
carrying, however, the screen seems rather bare and
under-designed.
The
plot involves you travelling from your bedsit to Las
Vegas, there to win a fortune in the casinos and thereby
inherit an even larger fortune from your dead auntie.
The game loads in three parts -- In the Block of Flats,
At the Airport, and In Las Vegas. You can only load
the latter two parts if you've cracked the earlier ones
and noted the password.
I'm
not going to spend much tine on this one because it
really isn't an adventure. There is no text entry and
not an awful lot of text appears on-screen. Characters,
some quite amusingly drawn, flash up before you and
deliver one-line messages in rather terse and sometimes
rather stilted English. These sequences take rather
longer than necessary and hold up the action, which
is crucial because in every section you're up against
the clock.
[This screenshot was not in the original
review]
The
best thing about The Inheritance is the way you
can move the cursor around the screen picking on things
you'd like to get or examine. That makes it feel rather
life-like, with the cursor becoming your roving eye
and the space bar your outstretched hand. Like Kwah!!,
this system perhaps has possibilities but I didn't feel
that this game really exploited them to the full. The
whole of the first section, for example, relies almost
entirely on just one idea -- finding objects to hand
to your co-tenants so that they will allow you out of
the building. After a while it all gets a bit boring.
But then many very popular arcade games are based on
just one idea, so perhaps I really shouldn't be reviewing
this one. Ratings, I think, are out of place therefore
-- but if I was going to rate it as an adventure, it
wouldn't get more than 58% overall and well below that
for atmosphere and interaction.
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