review

By flotsam

Amos Green’s Final Repose (Carol Reed 17)

MDNA games

Off we go again on another of Carol Reed’s investigations. After a short reflection on the past year and some rummaging at home, Carol receives a call from her friend Stina. The long dead body of a man has been found in a recently re-opened part of a National Park, and Stina’s name and address was in his pocket. She does not know him, so there was really only one person to call.

If you have played any of Carol’s earlier games you know how they work, and will be right at home here. If not, (and to borrow from an earlier review), the game is first person point and click, utilising photos of real people and places in and around Norrkoping in Sweden to create the game world. Click your way through, point to point, looking for items and clues to move on. At each point you can turn left and right, and perhaps also move forward or occasionally look/move in another direction.

Each screen is a single static image, explored with the mouse. Explore carefully, or press the space-bar to reveal all hotspots. Finding one will generate a relevant icon indicating what you can do at that spot, generally look, pick-up or use another item, but there are things you can move, and a variety of objects (drawers and cupboards for instance) that you need to open.

Items collected will be in the inventory ribbon which appears top of screen in response to the mouse. Right-click lets you examine an item further, left-click allows you to use it, either in the game world or with another inventory item.

Every location has an exit screen, which will take you to your map. New locations will appear here, and a large pop-up icon will confirm that another one has been added. You don’t have access to the map other than through an exit point, something I would prefer to have. But it isn’t too big a deal, and it does accentuate the notion of having to go back to where eg. you left the car/got off the bus etc. rather than just zapping out of somewhere. Just make sure you remember where you accessed the location initially, and make a note of how to get back there.

(To avoid any doubt, to my knowledge none of Carol’s games have had that feature, so it isn’t something that has been changed here).

As with all these games, conundrums and puzzles abound, and are Carol’s stock in trade. Follow the breadcrumbs to find the bits and pieces to progress. It's fairly gentle as puzzles go, but be prepared to go back and forth, by both design and in search of things you might have missed.

Your journal will assist, and warrants regular checking. It’s the first item in your inventory ribbon.

Accessing the journal will give you your current objective, which will likely indicate the location you need to be exploring. If that doesn’t get you what you need, the available hint (more of an answer really) will further assist. You can ignore it completely if you want, and rely on your own capacity to search meticulously, or dip into as required to provide appropriate direction. If you need a particular object to progress, it can be anywhere and in any of the locations, and if you don’t want to re-search all of them your journal will your friend.

On one occasion I knew where I had to go, and both the objective and the hint said as much, but trying to access the location resulted in Carol saying something like “not yet”, meaning there was more to do but exactly what wasn’t clear. Then its just up to you, but generally the hints should ensure you are only ever as stuck as you want to be.

Of course, if your initial searching is impeccably thorough the hints won’t be needed to find items. They can though provide solutions to the out and out puzzles, should you be stuck on one of those.

Not everything you find can be taken, and not everything you need can be taken the first time you find it. Some things you just pick up and put down, being of (seemingly) no further interest The game mixes things up, so take notes as you go.

The puzzles are a varied mix; find and use the right items, run errands for people, solve combinations, and engage in a scavenger hunt or two are some examples. None of the straight puzzles are terribly hard, but they are thoughtful and require more than just trial and error. Some of the environmental puzzles will also not let you solve them without having gathered the relevant information or carried out the relevant investigations. I went back for instance to an earlier save point for one puzzle having worked out the answer, but inputting the correct information wouldn’t work until I had “found” the relevant information in the game world. Good puzzles should do that.

The game also provides relevant feedback at times. I have already mentioned the “not yet” comment, and it popped up again when eg. I was tasked to clean graffiti in various locations. Trying to return to the relevant character without having found and cleaned it all generated the response, so off I went to look for where else might need a clean.

The navigation did get me a bit muddled as to where I was going from time to time (why I found Carol’s house so tricky I don’t know), but like everything be thorough. Check whether eg. turning to your left will indicate a new path forward, or enable you to see something new. Even big things might not be visible until you turn in that particular direction, and the hotspots only occur in the screen you are looking at. So even if you can “see” something relevant in your peripheral vision, it won’t be active until you are looking directly at it.

As the website says, this game (like all Carol’s adventures) contains no swearing or graphic violence. You can’t die, you can save at will, and it is entirely mouse driven. It is in English, and you can play with subtitles or without, and tweak the volume settings for speech, music and effects. I tend to turn music down low so can’t tell you how prevalent that was, and the speech and effects are limited but perfectly fine. When conversing with another character you don’t hear Carol speak, rather you read her side of the conversation but hear the other character’s response.

That this is Carol’s 17^th outing is testament to the franchise. As I said last time, fans will be pleased, and newbies may well discover something to their liking.

I played on:

OS: Windows 10, 64 Bit

Processor: Intel i7-9700K 3.7GHz

RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 32GB

Video card: AMD Radeon RX 580 8192MB

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