I actually had not heard of Perils of Man before receiving an offer to do a review for it. It was previously, at least in part, released on iOS, too. It’s made by IF Games, who are Switzerland’s first “game agency” (developer?) according to their website. They’re obviously proud Swiss, as the protagonist, sixteen year old Ana Eberling, is Swiss, a fact that is pointed out in the dialog throughout the five hour adventure on several occasions. I would also point out that Bill Tiller, who worked on one of my all time favorite games, The Dig, was part of the Perils project.
So, no adventure game is worth a second thought without a good story, and in that regard, Perils does alright for itself. The premise is pretty cool and interesting, but, whether due to a lack of time or money towards the end, the potency of the story begins to dissolve in the last act and it gets a bit convoluted. Thinking back, it seemed somewhat long-winded, yet it ends a suddenly all at the same time (strange, I know). As the opening cutscene explains, several generations of the paternal side of the Eberling family have a long tradition of scientific exploration and prowess. Yet they also disappear mysteriously, but young Ana, daughter of the latest Eberling male to disappear (when she was six years old) refuses to let these mysteries go unsolved — she’s determined to find her father.
Her sap of a mother is of little help, but she at least is too pre-occupied with staying comfortable to prevent Ana from snooping around the Eberling mansion. The first puzzles in Perils have players delving into the depths of the mansion and it isn’t long after that that you awaken Darwin, the mechanical, somewhat sentient mechanical bird first created some four generations ago by Ana’s great-great-great-grandfather, Thomas. Together Ana and Darwin, with the help of a special pair of glasses called the Risk Atlas that are powered by rare gemstones, travel back in time to several key events related to the Eberling timeline.
Any story that involves time travel and consequences of altering events and so forth is automatically both interesting and open for the potential for ‘holes,’ but Perils did a decent job of weaving their tale. It’s not the most satisfying nor certainly the most memorable story, but it was enough to keep me interested for sure. This was in spite of some what I’ll call ‘obtuse’ puzzles that did not, to me at least, make a whole heck of a lot of sense. The first time I finally broke down after about twenty-plus minutes of being stuck to look at a walkthrough (thanks Nokzen N.!) was when I failed to use the ‘dark vial’ with the sky — yes, the sky, which was hosting a thunderstorm at the time. Not to make a big deal of just one puzzle, but Perils has other not-very-intuitive moments such as the first Darwin puzzle, odd room-exiting hitboxes, having to use an inventory item on an object when just observing the object should have worked, and so forth. There are not a tremendous number of these miscues, but for a five to six hour game, the ratio of these instances felt high.
I would also point out that any time you pull up your inventory, a reminder that you can click in the upper right corner to get a Hint pops up. Sadly, the hint system is somewhat broke, at times it does not have anything to say, other times it mentions something you have already done, but it usually has something worthwhile if you need it. At least a couple of times it reminded me of the Risk Atlas button in the lower left. When you click this, the game changes to a first person view, Ana dons the special sunglasses, and items related to puzzles are highlighted red, but the glasses do not highlight everything, they just provide some direction. This is important because certain world interactions and/or conversations with NPCs will not ‘kick in’ or activate until you examine them with the Risk Atlas.
So two key gameplay changes that I think could make Perils a better game (and these could be done with a patch I imagine) would have been to include what some other point and clicks do these days, and that’s the ability to zip across rooms by double clicking on their ‘exit icons’ and being able to press (and hold) a button (typically spacebar) to highlight all ‘things’ in a room. As is, Perils is a pixel-hunter, and while I have been through quite a few of these of the years, there’s just not a good reason to use these mechanics today. Let the player have the option to “spoil” the game for themselves if that’s even the argument to this idea, so that they can avoid the frustration of not finding all objects in a room simply because they didn’t pixel hunt long enough or the ‘hitbox’ for whatever object wasn’t big enough. The hitboxes for exiting a room (and sometimes the objects themselves, especially the prisebar (aka crowbar) item) are sometimes a little out of place in Perils, but the bigger issue is just having to literally scan almost line by line with your mouse to find all objects so that you can approach a puzzle with all the info. Having to pixel hunt and wait for your character to traverse the entire ‘room’ before transitioning to the next one are old school mechanics that should be left in the past in the interest of efficiency.
Old design or new, there’s something to be said for giving your on-screen text a little bit of attention. While easily patchable, the current text in Perils is as default and basic as it gets. I don’t get too hung up on “graphics,” when judging a game’s value, but the bland, Arial-like white font for all text in Perils is just more evidence that IF Games might have just ran out of time (or money) or both. The dialog system is similarly unpolished in that you get a list of conversation options, have to click ‘back’ to change subjects, and once you have exhausted all dialog, the original question will be grayed out. However, there was at least one occasion in which new, vital conversation options became available but these were “hidden” by the grayed out text, if that makes sense.
As I look over my notes, I am reminded of a few bugs I ran into. Nothing game-breaking fortunately, but, as mentioned already a few times, these bugs just show a lack of polish on the final product. Patches could mend these, but in the interest of disclosure, I ran into one or two situations in which Ana was interacting with a full screen puzzle and while I was clicking around, she was commenting on objects in different parts of the room even though they were not visible or at all relevant to the full screen puzzle itself. I had a bug in the Workshop as well with a game board (keeping it vague to prevent spoilers). Darwin also glides a lot of times, instead of walking, which is awkward.
Regarding presentation, the art style of Perils didn’t do much for me. I didn’t care for the awkwardly long and thin necks of the characters, Ana especially, and her accent seemed a little forced. Her responses to some ‘use x with y’ attempts was often asinine too, but that’s not too uncommon for the genre. Effects and soundtrack were not particularly memorable, which can be looked at as a good or bad thing.
Let’s wrap up in the summary…