The Moment of Silence - PC Game Reviews


	Platform PC Genre Adventure Publisher The Adventure Company Developer House of Tales ESRB T (Teen) Released March 2005

- Good story once it starts rolling - Simple interface - Nice graphics - Old-school adventure fans will be right at home

- Some poor presentation relative to other games in the genre - Awkward translations - Extremely linear

Review: Syberia II (PC) Review: Dark Fall (PC) Review: Broken Sword 3 - The Sleeping Dragon (PC)
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The Moment of Silence

Score: 7.8 / 10

The Moment of Silence begins with a disquieting scene. A heavily armed squad of “policemen” blow open a door and drag a “suspect” from the apartment. The group is followed by a small boy wielding a teddy bear and a woman in hysterics. It’s after witnessing this scene that you take control of Peter Wright (who lives just down the hall), a depressed boozer who spends a lot of time in chat rooms. Having nothing important to, he volunteers to help out his neighbor any way he can.

If you can forgive some occasionally really odd translations, once the story gets rolling The Moment of Silence (MoS) turns out to be a relatively solid, old-school adventure complete with pixel hunts and lots of dialogue to click through. Hell, you’ll even visit Alcatraz, which took me right back to Tex Murphy: Overseer.

The interface is straightforward: Move the cursor and click where you want to go; or slowly scan the screen with the cursor waiting for it to change to an action or “examine” icon. Peter walks slowly but if you double-click on a destination he’ll jog there. It’s all easy to grasp.

But if MoS has one major failing, it’s a severly linear path. You’ll run into this early on in the game when you have destination in mind – the police station – but the destination won’t show up on the taxi destinations until you have a critical conversation. Sometimes I went round in circles, exhausting all my option for each area before stumbling across an area I hadn’t noticed before, acquiring the vital info/item then proceeding. Which is a nice segue way to MoS’s other problem.

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MoS looks great though it may be a year or two behind in the graphics department; however, it suffers from awkward camera angles and a few zoomed out scenes that make it easy to lose Peter (or some other important item) on the screen. The character animation is also wooden at the best of times and lip-synch is practically non-existent.

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Besides the story, the biggest component of an adventure game is the implementation of puzzles. MoS features a lot of “try everything on everything” solutions that don’t make much sense but rather than feel frustrated I felt nostalgic for adventure games gone by. I’m a sad sack adventure fan so I know not everyone will feel the same way.

The Moment of Silence features a strong story, even though I get the sense something was lost in the translation, and almost based on the story alone I’d recommend it to adventure gamers. Just be warned: My feelings of nostalgia could easily be frustration for you.

- Omni

(March 11, 2005)


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