Gray Matter 7: Review

Yes! Jane Jensen is back! Although it's only about half as long, if that, of her classic Gabriel Knight games, Gray Matter has the intrigue, the gameplay and especially the storyline to immerse players once again into a Jane Jensen world.

This time her world is mostly Oxford, England, with Samantha, a multi-pierced, hardbitten refugee from America’s foster care program.  Samantha makes what living she can as a street magician, although she has an ambition to perform at the mysterious Daedalus Club in London, a mecca for professional magicians. Samantha’s clunker motorcycle breaks down in a thunderstorm just outside a looming mansion, Dread House, where she witnesses a girl who claims to be the “new assistant” run off. Samantha steps into her place and winds up sleeping in a luxurious bedroom, with a job.

Ah, but the job is the problem. The other major character that players will control is David, an embittered neurobiologist who lost his wife in a fiery accident two years earlier. Scarred from the accident and in constant mourning, David doesn’t like to leave the house where he works on experiments that he hopes might allow him somehow to connect to his dead wife’s spirit. He demands that Samantha recruit six students as guinea pigs in his psi experiment.

And that is the player’s first major task. Samantha uses her magic tricks to convince the students, a ploy she’ll rely on for the rest of the game. Playing David, meanwhile, follows more conventional inventory-based play.


But while puzzles are fun, it's the story that really shines.

The Story, the Story, the Story

As usual in a Jane Jensen game, it’s the increasingly sophisticated  and constantly intriguing story that keeps us playing. You may be surprised. It isn’t your usual of-course-it’s-all-psi plot (although it may turn out to be just that--or not). Jensen juxtaposes the skepticism of the girl magician with the (oddly) more credulous scientist. She builds these two characters, especially Sam, with some real depth. One simple answer just doesn’t apply to either. Plus, the six students, although one-dimensional, and a few other characters provide some nice suspects in the unfolding mystery.

While plenty of suspense abounds in the game, I found Jensen’s handling of the psi-or-tricks issue most intriguing. She gives strong support for skepticism while allowing plenty of leeway for psi. I doubt that devotees of either position will be disappointed, Jensen handles both possibilities with respect.

These characters keep us interested in their fate. Sam has serious never-say-die spunk, although I wondered how she could possibly be comfortable in her tight-tight-tight clothes. David, with his Phantom-of-the-Opera mask, easily could become a bit difficult for players to take with his constant moaning over his dead wife, except that Bernd Reheuser, who voices the character, delivers a magnificent performance, turning maudlin moans into heartfelt pain. But David is an adult, a rare character type in video games, and his trip outside in one of his chapters also gives us the best scenery in the game.

The apparently all-German voice cast actually does an excellent job, hitting the various English accents with enough plausibility for most American players, at least. Daniela Better-Koch voices Samantha nicely, although her performance pales next to Reheuser’s. It was a pleasure to play a game that didn’t make me wince at the voice performances.

Gameplay

Yet the game is short, perhaps about ten hours. That’s OK. We definitely get enough interesting play to make it worth the money. But after the GK series I certainly expected to spend much more time with it. I note that although it was published in 2011, the game takes place in 2008, reflecting the difficulties Jensen had in finding a reliable distributor.

Puzzles tend to be inventory based, although Jensen adds a unique twist with Samantha’s magic tricks. These have a bit of a learning curve (compounded for me when I couldn’t get the necessary magic book’s pages to turn), but once you learn how the tricks work, it isn’t too difficult to do them. Two or three could be learned for use with suitable victims outside the game. Samantha also has riddles to solve for the Daedalus club, and these are fun and eminently solvable, although the solutions are divided across different chapters.

I found David’s shorter chapters to be much the easier of the two characters, perhaps because Samantha has more to do with her Daedalus riddles. David seems to be mostly filling out the backstory, while Samantha advances the current mystery.

However, Jane gives us another magnificent game toward the end of the adventure. She invents an elaborate multi-layered puzzle in the basement of the Daedalus Club that will challenge, but probably not defeat, most players who keep their eyes open and their observations sharp. That puzzle alone makes up for the sluggishness of the game. It’s worth the price of admission.

Glitches

Although this is an easy game by classic adventuring standards, if you miss just the wrong item you can find yourself in trouble. I managed to put the lie to the manual’s assertion that missing an object cannot end your game. I found, or rather, I didn’t find, one object that’s essential to finish a chapter. When I went back and got the item, I still couldn’t advance because I’d already completed a conversation that contains the trigger to one of the plot threads, and could not re-enter that conversation to get the trigger. Gulp. Two attempts, following good walkthroughs, to pick up the action failed. I had to start the chapter over.

However, that was the only major glitch I found. Well, that and the infernal slowness of the game. Yes, I played on a computer that met only the minimum requirements of the game: Vista with 1 gig of RAM. However, the game should have played far more rapidly. Samantha especially seemed to move as though she were underwater. It was maddening at first, although I got used to it. Even double clicking to start a character running worked sluggishly. Samantha would run for a step or two after multiple clicks, then lapse back into her usual slow pace, although David usually responded more quickly. I’m certain the sluggishness added an hour or two to gameplay.

Lights, Camera, Action!

Artwork, especially in a lovely park, just stuns. Marvelous pastel drawings pull us in. Dread House looks good, as does what we get to see of Oxford. We get graphic-novel style cutscenes between chapters, reminiscent of the all-cartoon first Gabriel Knight game, The Sins of the Fathers.

Jensen gives players an optional brief tutorial at the beginning of the first chapter and that helps, as managing that inventory system is not self-evident. We have to make items active before we can use them, a step I sometimes forgot to some frustration in the heat of finishing the game. Most items disappear once they’re no longer needed, but it takes some time to scroll through the icons and then remember that there’s an extra step required to select the one you need before you can use it. Really, simpler systems have existed for many years.

Jensen divides each chapter into five or six different threads, each with points to earn, as in the GK series. Players can view the chart of their progress in each chapter at any time, and can access the map to jump to different locations as soon as they acquire the map. Once players complete all necessary actions in a chapter, the game advances.

Robert Hughes again does the music, and again, the music is wonderful. I’m sure I detected a reprise of some well-known and loved GK themes, especially in the final major puzzle.

A Winner: A-minus

Well, what else can we expect from Jensen but a winner? It’s possible that this game will help bring adventures back into popularity. The easy puzzles don’t hurt, as they allow more players to enjoy the game without major frustration.

Yes, the major flaws are the game’s sluggishness and the overly complicated inventory system, but we easily forget those when we get caught up in the story, the story, the story. That’s always been Jensen’s greatest strength, and once again she doesn’t disappoint. Gray Matter definitely belongs on the shelf of any self-respecting adventurer, and on the shelves of many new to the genre as well.

It’s absorbing, sophisticated, and just a whole lotta great fun.