Back To The Mountain : Trüberbrook

I finished Trüberbrook. It took me just over eight hours. I didn't use a walkthrough until the penultimate chapter. On the few occasions I did go for help it almost always turned out that all I needed to do was exactly what I thought I needed to do, only in a slightly diferent way.

That's a problem I'm very familiar with in aging MMORPGs, where quests have been designed and implemented by different developers over the course of many years. You don't really expect those kind of inconsistencies in standalone games but as flaws go it's a very minor one.

Overall, I'd rate Trüberbrook quite highly. Without a doubt its greatest strength is the visuals. Every scene is beautifully rendered, with a wealth of detail, but it never indulges in the kind of complexity for complexity's sake that turns an adventure game into "spot the hidden object". 

Almost every location would make a fine book illustration or jigsaw puzzle. There's a great illusion of depth created by the use of actual scale models for the sets and backdrops. Possibly for that reason, compared to almost any game of it's kind that I've played, Trüberbrook has very few locations.  

Far from feeling limiting or claustrophobic, it genuinely works in the game's favor. Hans, the protagonist, moves fairly slowly, even when you force him into his stoop-backed, shuffling run, so you wouldn't really want too many long treks. Even with the relatively small number of transitions, when you acquire a map late in the game that allows you to travel instantly from location to location, it comes as a welcome surprise.

One thing that makes the game feel more extensive than its limited number of scenes would suggest is the creative and satisfying way those scenes are re-used. As you progress through the narrative, places you've already explored demand further visits to see what may have changed. 

In other adventure games I've played re-tracing your steps can become tedious but in Trüberbrook it never does. The game lets you know quite plainly if there's no point returning to dead location but chances are you won't even try, since almost all the changes feel as though they're a natural consequence of the actions you've taken or the way the plot has turned.

There are a couple of occasions when something entirely unpredictable happens and that's when I would have welcomed a clue to point me in the right direction but mostly I found myself returning to the correct place to check on something I had an inkling about. More often than not my hunch was correct and even when it wasn't there was usually something else new instead, something that hadn't occurred to me but easily could have.

Obviously I'm being vague here because if there's one thing you don't want in an adventure game it's spoilers. It's possible I'm being too circumspect. If there's one area where Trüberbrook could do with some serious tightening up it's the plot.

I'm not saying it's bad. (It's pretty bad). It's no worse than any number of video game plots I've raised my eyebrows at over the years. If it wasn't for the claims made on the website ("a gripping sci-fi storyline", "a puzzling sci-fi mystery") it would be easier to ignore the fact that at no point does the plot threaten to make the slightest sense whatsoever. 

Much more accurate are the assertions that the narrative deals with "universal themes like love, friendship, loyalty, rootlessness, self-discovery and dinosaurs". It kind of does, although in an oddly eliptical fashion. This could be construed as a spoiler, in the way that just announcing a movie has a twist is in itself a spoiler, even if you don't say what the twist is, but Trüberbrook ends with a straightforward moral choice that I found surprisingly affecting. And it's certainly some time since I saw not one but two character arcs satisfyingly concluded through emotional commitment to inanimate objects.

Trüberbrook is very much a game that's more than the sum of its parts, which is just as well because some of the parts don't add up to much on their own. Those would mostly be the "game" parts. There were quite a few moments when I felt certain scenarios and set pieces existed more to justify selling Trüberbrook as a game at all than because anyone believed they would be inherently entertaining. 

Given that the team had gone to all the trouble of making the scale models and the sets I did occasionally wish they'd just doubled down and made an animated movie instead. They would have needed a better plot, though. Movies aren't as forgiving as games when it comes to that sort of thing.

Even so, I did have a lot of fun playing. There are plenty of times when something you do has an effect that's funny or surprising and that sense of agency is one thing no movie can give you. 

There's also a lot of genuine curiosity to be satisfied by poking around. Unlike most adventure games there seem to be an unusual variety of examinable and even useable items and objects that don't appear to further the plot in any way. 

An awful lot of work has gone into some of them, too. It's by no means uncommon in an adventure game to come across a journal or a guest book or some photos but to create ten or a dozen pages of a ledger filled with names and dates and times and notes, most of which don't have any obvious narrative or humorous value and none of which relate in any meaningful way to the plot seems to be taking verisimilitude to an almost obsessional level.

 It does make the place feel real, though. I'd rather they did it than not, even if it does feel odd to have spent five minutes reading something that isn't funny and doesn't help.

I have no such reservations about the superb set piece that happens late on in the game and which also has no discernible relation to the plot other than to leave a single item behind to be picked up and used later. That item could just as easily have been acquired through any regular conversation with an NPC but instead we not only get  to watch one of the better in-game musical performances I've seen anywhere but also to engage in some on-the-fly songwriting!

I was so taken unawares by this event I didn't have the presence of mind to save before it started so I could replay that segment and video the performance. Fortunately someone else did. This is definitely a spoiler in that I found the unexpected appearance of the event itself  to be the highlight of the whole game but it doesn't really spoil much, if any, of the plot.

 

Actually, the song wasn't the highlight. Here's another spoiler. 

There's an after-credit sequence. I knew there would be. The game just has that feel. There had to be one and there was. 

What it was, though, was completely unexpected and really quite beautiful. I took some screenshots and I was going to use one here but on second thoughts I don't think I will. It really would be a shame to spoil the surprise.

I'm generally not much of a one for re-playing games to see alternative outcomes or endings. I probably won't replay Trüberbrook. I might, though. The choice you have to make at the end is so stark the outcomes have to be very different. I am curious to know what would have happened...

Or maybe I'll just watch it on YouTube. I did say the whole thing would work better as a movie, after all.

I Can Take A Hint

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As Flosch pointed out in the comments, Trüberbrook was actually last month's free adventure game on Amazon Prime. Or something. It wasn't available to download any more by the time I wrote my post, anyway. 

There's an adventure game most months, or it seems like it. Good for me.Apart from rpgs (mmo or regular), adventure games are about the only video games I really enjoy.

This month's free adventure game on Prime is The Inner World, also available for £11.99 on Steam, although since you could sub to Prime for £7.99 and then cancel you'd have to be pretty crazy to pay that much. Except, oh no, wait, that won't work... it was free, but only until 11 September! So now you do have to pay for it after all.

We've all been there, right?

 

 

Seriously, are they trying to make it difficult? It used to be so simple. Just four or five games each month, for a month. Now look at this list for September, courtesy of Gamespot. 

If you parse that, (thirty-two games in all) you can see the original five free games per month are still there, available all month and only this month. Then there's some obvious tie-in with SNK, whoever they are, where you can get what's probably ever game they ever made (twenty-two of them and not one I'd take for free) any time from the start of September through 'til the end of March next year.

Finally, and crucially, there are four "bonus games", all of which you can have for nothing from the beginning of the month, only each of them drops out, week by week in turn throughout September, until the last one's gone by 2 October. Most of those same "bonus games" were also bonuses in August, as was Trüberbrook, which doesn't even appear on Gamespot's September list, even though I installed it on 4 September. Then again, maybe I confirmed it in Augusrt and didn't get around to downloading it until later...

I 'm going to have to do a whole lot more fact-checking before I post about these things in future. Recommending something that's free is one thing but £11.99 is very much another and £24.99, which is what Trüberbrook is currently going for on Steam, is something else again.

I'm not sure that's technically accurate.

Those are not unreasonable prices by any means but I wouldn't pay them. I'm only playing both games because they come free with a service I already pay for and use. Then, I'm really enjoying both of them, so does that make sense? Shouldn't I be more pro-active? Seek out games like this and buy them immediately, rather than passively wait for Amazon or some other subscription service to throw them my way?

Yes, well, maybe. And maybe not. I am enjoying them but my enjoyment is qualified, significantly, by the fact I didn't have to pay for them. That has a lot to do with both of them being adventure games. It's a genre I claim to like - and I do - but it's also one I find problematic at times. Most of the time, really.

I've been playing adventure games on and off since the very early eighties. In all those years I'm not sure I've ever finished one without a walktrhrough. In the days before the worldwide web, when I bought my adventure games on cassette and played them on a ZX Spectrum, there were no walkthroughs unless maybe a magazine printed one or there was a hint sheet you could send off for, either of which might take weeks to turn up, by which time I'd be playing something else and wouldn't care any more. 

Back then, when I got stuck, and I always would, that was it. I didn't finish the game at all. I just bought another and played that until I got stuck again. And so on.

Who didn't?

It made buying adventure games an ambivalent process. I'd be excited at the prospect of a new game and for a while I'd have a really good time, problem-solving and exploring. And then I'd bog down on some puzzle I couldn't fathom and I'd get frustrated and fed up and the game would go on a shelf and never be played again. 

If I'd made it a good way through I wouldn't really mind. The stories were generally not so good you'd care whether or not you ever found out how they ended. It was always more about the process than the content. If I'd gotten stuck before I'd really got going, though, I'd feel I'd been ripped off, somehow, even though it was as likely to be my fault as the game's that I couldn't work out what I was supposed to do next.

The arrival of free, instantly available walkthroughs effectively removed the issue of buying something I'd never be able to finish but it brought with it another set of problems all its own. Once you start resorting to a walkthrough to play an adventure game you can't help but notice that what you're really doing is watching a very badly-paced movie or reading a very stilted and awkward book. 

You never think of these things until it's too late, do you?

 

For me, playing an adventure game these days is a balancing act. I try to avoid using walkthroughs as much as possible. The further I get without having to look anything up, the better I feel about the game and my experience playing it. When I get stuck I try to figure it out for myself but only up to the point where I start getting annoyed. 

At that moment I do one of two things: stop playing or consult a walkthrough. Taking a break sometimes allows my brain to reset. When I come back to the game the next day I won't necessarily slip back into the same groove. I may see something I'd missed or think about the situation from a different angle. Stopping like that is a risk, though. Sometimes I just never come back to the game at all.

Going for the walkthrough is more likely to keep me pushing on through but it, too, has risks. I try to skim-read so as to do no more than catch the hint of an idea that pushes me over whatever hump I'm caught on. Oddly, games that have actual hints built in really irritate me. Go figure.

Pretty much the whole genre right there.

If I can finish an adventure game while skipping through the walkthrough like a stone across water, I'll end up satisfied. If I find myself having to read paragraph after paragraph of instructions or, god forbid, watch a YouTube video every time the game moves to a new scene, the whole thing starts to feel pointless in the extreme. 

I played The Inner World for the first time today, for a couple of hours. There's a lot I like about it. It's visually appealing, it's well-written, it's funny and the voice acting is mostly excellent. The controls are very comfortable, too, which always helps. 

The puzzles are of the middling kind. So far most of them have what I'd call fair video-game logic. Clearly anyone who tried to do almost anything that happens in an adventure game in real life would find themselves detained for their own safety in short order but action in The Inner World does have the necessary internal consistency to make sense in context. 

So far I would estimate I've been able to solve about two thirds of the problems myself and of the remaining third I generally have the correct solution, I just haven't been able to put together all the necessary intermediate steps. Only a couple of times have I had to say "well, that would never happen!".

I'll take "Things a psychopath would say" for $500

I've had to use a walkthrough a few times but it's been interesting to see that the solutions suggested aren't necessarily the solutions I've ended up using. There seems to be plenty of flexibility in what order things can be done, which is good design.

Even though I'm well within my personal tolerance for acceptable interventions, though, using the walkthrough has made one aspect of the game even harder to ignore than it would otherwise have been: The Inner World really would work better as an animated cartoon than a game.

Or possibly a radio play or a podcast. There's an awful lot of of dialog. A big part of the gameplay is talking to characters multiple times about multiple topics. It's fun because, as I said, the writing is good and the voice acting better. What's not so great is that the majority of my time is spent either clicking to make someone say their next line or sitting back and listening to them say it.

Trüberbrook, by contrast, isn't as well-written or as funny and the voice acting isn't as good but it's a better adventure game. There's a more even balance between the watching and listening part and the gameplaying part. The difficulty of the puzzles is also pitched almost precisely in my comfort zone. I'm about halfway through now, I think, and I haven't had to use a walkthrough once. Ok, once. Just the tiniest glance that confirmed I was doing the right thing already. Hardly even counts.

I'd recommend both games. They're each strong, fun experiences. Would I pay to play them, though?

Nope. But then I don't have to, do I? 

This is the modern world. No one has to pay for fun any more.

Didn't Know I Wanted: Trüberbrook

Life is weird, there's no denying it. Remember a few years back when we were all talking about how subscriptions were dead? Some of us were happy about it and some of us were angry but almost no-one pretended subscriptions had a future. (Yes, okay, maybe one or two...).

Now here we all are with subscriptions to everything. Music, television, movies, games, delivery services, phones... you name it, we're signing up to be billed monthly. And it changes things, doesn't it? The what and the how.

Yesterday I was writing about Stargirl. Would I have watched it if I didn't have a subscription? Well, maybe. But not the way I did, or when.

I'd have waited until it came out on DVD then I'd have put it on my wishlist and then I'd have waited until someone bought it for me for my birthday or Christmas and when they did I'd most likely have put it on my huge stack of DVDs waiting to be watched. I'd probably have gotten around to it about five years from now.

Did they really have palm-sized portable dictaphones in 1967?

This afternoon I spent the best part of three hours playing Trüberbrook. If Trüberbrook wasn't one of the games that comes free with Amazon Prime, not only would I not have been playing it, I would never even have heard of it.

This is far from an original observation. Quite a few people have pointed it out as part of the ongoing discussion over the wisdom of buying things on release, before release, at full price, in sales, in bundles and to which list we can now add getting them for "free" as part of some kind of membership or subscription.

I just mention it to put the core content of this post into some kind of historical perspective. I'm about to give my first impressions of a point-and-click adventure game that I neither sought out nor paid for. How did we get here?

Of course, on one level I did seek it out. Amazon Prime gives away a bunch of games every month and most of them I don't even download, far less play. I picked this one because it's a genre I generally enjoy, the thumbnail caught my eye and the short text description I read threw in a couple of keywords that triggered a Pavlovian reaction in me.

And why does it say "Gas Satation" up there in American English when we're in Bavaria?

"Inspired by TV series like Twin Peaks and The X-Files" will do it every time. Well, Twin Peaks will.  It's marketing shorthand for "we made this for people like you". Same thing goes for blurbs on the back of books that mention Catcher in the Rye. They're usually terrible but at least I can rely on them being my kind of terrible.

Trüberbrook is not at all terrible. It is peculiar, though. For one thing, it subverts the Twin Peaks trope by setting the game in 1960s Germany. 1967, to be precise. It's mostly made by Germans, I believe, so that explains the locale if not the time period.

Having played through the prologue and Chapter One, I'd have to say the game feels neither partiularly sixties nor especially German to me. It could be set in any generic central European country as imagined by someone who'd once spent a week or two staying in alpine guesthouses, doing a bit of hiking in the foothills. Some of the interiors look like pastiche Americana to me.

Not even when it's damn fine coffee?

As for it being the mid-sixties, other than a battered VW bus and a black and white cabinet tv, there's precious little that would have looked out of place on several recent holidays I've taken. Scenery is timeless and so are small hotels. And fashions don't really give much of a clue if all the characters wear either suits or windbreakers, hiking boots and blue jeans. The first world war spiked helmet is a giveaway, though, I'll give them that.

The milieu may not live up to the billing but the graphics most definitely do. Trüberbrook has an unusual design aesthetic, with all of the scenery and backdrops constructed as miniature scale models, then captured with a 3D scanner. The characters are digitally animated over the sets and the effect is odd, charming and delightful.

Graphically, the game is also fluid and functional. Moving from place to place is simple and straighforward with very few of those annoying stutters when you run up against somewhere the animators didn't intend for you to go. Character animations reminded me somewhat of stop-motion or possibly even puppetry. They're convincing without striving for naturalism.

Spookiest scene in Chapter One. Actually, the only spooky scene in Chapter One...

Point and click adventures live or die by the ease with which objects can be manipulated to solve problems. In that respect Trüberbrook is exemplary - providing you're not one of those people who thrives on picking up every possible object then stuffing them all in your voluminous backpacks so you can sort through all of them over and over before "using" everything on everything else until something clicks.

This game won't let you do that. Firstly, there really isn't all that much you can pick up and secondly if something can be used on something else the game generally tells you so. What's more, if a combination of different objects is required, the interaction will select all of them for you. 

I found that very helpful and perfectly satisfying. To an extent it does push the gameplay further down the slope towards "interactive movie" than some prefer but I always found plenty to think about and plenty to do.

Look away now if you don't want to know how to catch a fox in a box the hard way.

Another crucial component of a good point and click adventure is the puzzles. Without those you don't have any gameplay at all. My preference is for puzzles to be as logical and naturalistic as possible.

I do not favor the "pick the lock with a fishbone" approach. Far less do I favor those overly complex acquisition chains that expect you to first fashion a fishing rod from a car aerial and the elastic from an elderly aunt's surgical stocking so you can catch a suitable fish, before boning it with the twiddly bit on a Swiss army knife (the one that's usually reserved for removing stones from horse's hooves) which you won earlier in a game of gin rummy with a passing stable-lad.

When it comes to puzzles, Trüberbrook manages to be both simple and complex at the same time. The eventual solution to several of the puzzles, when played out, turns out to be positively bizarre and entirely unguessable. That would have been infuriating -  if I'd had to solve them myself. But I didn't.

Must have been some weasel!

What I mostly had to do was be assiduous in collecting the few useable items I found and diligent in using them when the game told me I could. At the point when I'd collected the correct items and was in the right place the game rewarded me with a sequence of events that on more than once occasion had me laughing out loud. Plus I got to feel clever without having to have done very much, always a nice feeling.

The final remaining pillar of a good point and click adventure is the story, along with which, for the purposes of this first impressions piece, I'm including dialog and voice acting. Let's take those three components in reverse order.

The voice acting is good. Everyone other than the nominal protagonist has a German accent of sorts. Probably an authentic one, given the game's provenance. The lead character is American, although given he's called Hans Tannhauser the nationality on his passport seems almost immaterial. Also I could have sworn he tells another character he's from Berlin at one point...

Fancy meeting you here!

I call him the "nominal" protagonist because he's not the only, or even the first, character the player gets to be. The pre-credit sequence, which I guess is a form of tutorial, all takes place from the perspective of Gretchen the paleoanthropologist. The two of them reminded me quite strongly of Nico and George from the Broken Sword series, a happy similarity, at least in my eyes, although where George and Nico like to engage in would-be sophisticated repartee, these two mostly deal in playground insults and pratfalls. .

The dialog itself is solid. I did notice a few solecisms that I'd put down to the writers either having been translated or not working in their first language but by and large all the characters sound like people having believable conversations.

The game describes itself as being "permeated with a subtle humor" which on the evidence I've seen so far might be pushing it a little. It is quite funny but I'm not sure I'd call it subtle. The promised Twin Peaks atmosphere comes and goes. The X-Files motif seems more consistent.

Yeah, but it's still up a tree. Explain that, Doc.

As for the central narrative, I'm not at all sure I've spotted it yet. What little plot there is seems to consist a quantum physicist and a paleoanthroplogist behaving like two seven year olds acting out their favorite Famous Five adventures.

So far, I'm having a very good time. Three hours in and I didn't once have to look anything up online, far less consult a walkthrough. That's a recommendation in itself.

Last and most certainly not least, there's a fox called Klaus that everyone seems to think is a cat. He climbs trees and likes fish, so maybe he is a cat. That's got to be worth the price of admission on its own.

The price of admission in my case, of course, being a subscription to Amazon Prime. Which I was already paying. So it's free. Or is it?

I don't know any more and, frankly, I don't care.