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Earlier I mentioned Crystal Space, the cool 3D game engine that's open source, OpenGL, and written in C++. I even wrote about it recently on alwaysBeta. The demo for one of the first games made with Crystal Space to be picked up by a publisher, Keepsake, was released recently (you can get it here). I had the chance to play through it today. My impressions follow.

I was expecting big things from this game all around. I guess I want cheap new developers - like the people at Wicked Studios - to put a lot of thought into a game's mechanics and presentation if they don't have a multi-million dollar budget to spend on killer graphics. It just makes sense, like independent films, you would do the things well that you can afford to do well. The sad part is that Keepsake failed to do anything well, be it looks, sounds, gameplay or otherwise.

Graphics

They prerendered almost everything. The backgrounds, any lighting or water, any non-character animations at all were entirely prerendered with a really awful compression. I felt like I was playing Myst again with all its prerendered movies shoved in because computers couldn't handle a live engine. Computers have evolved, but the way Wicked used Crystal Space with this game is just sad. And, as a side effect of all this prerendering, you have no control over any graphics options (even resolution or textures) except for brightness.

Interface/Gameplay

The interface is all symbols and buttons - no words. It does reflect the King's Quest style adventure game feel well, but it's terribly unintuitive. That style also means that the interface to the game is essentially all of the gameplay as well. I wanted to do so many things that I couldn't. They mostly revolved around either waiting for a tool tip popup that never came or trying to use keyboard shortcuts (of which, of course, there are none). The complete abandonment of the keyboard for this mouse only game feels just like the graphics - a step backwards.

Presentation/Acting

The voice acting and character animations are just terrible. I could've put up with the bad graphics and rough interface if the script, story, voice acting, or presentation of the game would've been any good, but none of them were. Maybe Xenosaga has set the bar too high in this catagory, but when I'm being led through a mandatory tutorial by a fat man in a high pitched phony lisping accent, I can't ignore it.

So, I was sorely disappointed by Keepsake. If somebody tells me that its target audience is 4 year olds I'll probably say, "Okay...they may appreciate the asthetic aspects of the game more than me, but I guarantee you that they won't like the story or presentation any better." And that's the sad, cold, hard truth of it all.