The Charnel House Trilogy (TCHT) looks kind of like an old SCUMM engine game, and pretty much plays like one, too. Key differences include it’s far shorter than those old classics, and it’s much easier. You might call it a lightly interactive visual novel. Still, I believe that anyone who enjoys a good point and click adventure in which story, characters, and atmosphere take center stage, will find a superb value here. In under three hours, you can play through TCHT, picking up all eighteen Steam Achievements along the way, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better value for $6 (or even less as the game is on sale right now). The story is due to continue in 2016 and I’m already very much looking forward to it.
Split into three distinct chapters, TCHT begins in the apartment of Alex, a mid-twenties girl who is just having a tough time in life right now. She’s lonely and several months ago had a bad break-up with her boyfriend, Gavin. I know, on paper this does not sound like something I would be interested in playing either, but I’m a fan of point and click games and Owl Cave did a great job of getting you hooked early on (in part due to the cool music, by the way). The scene in her apartment sets the stage and it concludes with her leaving and getting aboard a mysterious train. The second chapter has you playing as Dr. Lang, another person aboard the train that, somehow, is involved in this. There’s just something about mysteries aboard trains on cold, snowy nights, you know? It’s a classic atmosphere that still appeals to me, supplemented beautifully here with good dialog and voice-acting, excellent music, and a slowly unraveling plot that compels you to push forward to which I happily obliged. There’s a constant sense of uneasiness, like your characters are in a bizarre dream state that I thought was very nicely done.
While I can appreciate a tough adventure game — Grim Fandango for example — there’s something to be said for one that doesn’t let traditional game mechanics and design get in the way of a compelling story. TCHT is easy to navigate through and progress is constant, you cannot die and knowing where to go and what to do is never an issue, but it’s not like you have a compass or something that overt telling you what to do next. Usually the ‘path’ comes up in conversation or through aural cues, so while I had no problem figuring out what to do next, I also did not feel like the game was holding my hand. On the same token, the sense of immersion fostered by the story, characters, and atmosphere was maintained rather seamlessly because I didn’t have to “worry” about anything, if you get my meaning. For an adventure around the length of this one, that works great, for a much longer game I would probably like to see more challenge. And by challenge I don’t mean the kind in which you’re combining every item in your inventory with every object in the world and talking to the same NPCs over and over again, but just something that adds that extra bit of tension and thinking to the experience. But as is, given the length and price of TCHT, I think what Owl Cave did here was perfectly fine.
And with that, let’s head on to the summary…
