15 days
| 15 days | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Studio | House of Tales | ||
| Publisher | dtp entertainment | ||
| Senior Developer | Martin Ganteföhr | ||
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
November 20, 2009 | ||
| platform | Windows | ||
| Game engine | Cougar | ||
| genre | Point-and-click adventure | ||
| control | mouse | ||
| medium | DVD-ROM , download | ||
| language | German, English subtitles in French, Italian, Spanish, Czech |
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| Age rating |
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15 Days is a point-and-click adventure from the Bremen development studio House of Tales . The political thriller was published in November 2009 by the publisher dtp entertainment for Microsoft Windows.
action
The three friends Bernard, Cathryn and Mike are political activists and criminals: They commit art theft around the world and donate the proceeds to good causes. International Police inspector Jack Stern is sent from Washington to London to investigate the death of British Foreign Secretary James Henston. Over the course of 15 days and nights, the paths of the trio and the inspector overlap - while the three thieves are preparing to steal an apparently moderately valuable Churchill portrait from their London flat, Stern gets on the trail of the trio in the course of his investigation. As the situation worsens for Bernard, Cathryn and Mike and they visit London as well as Paris and a Caribbean island nation ruled by a dictator, their friendship begins to crumble.
While the player ostensibly controls the fortunes of the four protagonists, the game refers to topics such as the surveillance state, political activism and globalization. According to the author Ganteföhr, the political echoes were integrated as a "meta-plot" in the background of the story - in the course of the game it becomes increasingly difficult for the actors to differentiate between good and bad, and their own principles have to be questioned.
Game principle and technology
15 Days is a so-called 2.5D adventure. Characters that were created as three-dimensional figure models move in front of pre-rendered 2D backdrops. The player can use the mouse to move his character through the locations and use the mouse buttons to initiate actions that allow the character to interact with his environment. The game character can find objects, apply them to the environment or other objects and communicate with NPCs . As the story progresses, more locations will be unlocked; Outside of closed rooms, the character can quickly go to places they have already visited using a map. On computers distributed throughout the game, the player can use a simulated web browser for research that contains information on certain topics specified by the game. It is characteristic of the gameplay of 15 Days that the player experiences and controls the story alternately from the perspectives of the four protagonists and occasionally also takes on the role of Inspector Stern. In contrast to the majority of other adventures there are no dialog options in 15 Days ; In principle, dialogues run automatically and are accompanied by appropriate film sequences.
Internet research is simulated in the game by providing the player with an in-game browser that imitates a search engine and provides information on topics relevant to the game.
Production notes
The production of 15 Days took about a year - significantly less than the production of the house-of-tales adventures The Moment of Silence and Overclocked . It was the last full-fledged adventure of the Bremen company, which after the departure of the founders Ganteföhr and Tobias Schachte only published a hidden object game and was then liquidated by the owner dtp. After dtp went bankrupt in 2012, the rights to 15 Days 2014 were acquired by Nordic Games .
Markus Schmidt, who composed the soundtrack for the game together with Tillman Sillescu, subsequently worked as a composer for games like Anno 2070 or Risen 3: Titan Lords .
reception
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15 Days received mixed reviews. The review database Metacritic aggregates 6 reviews to a mean value of 63. The GameStar described the story as "in the second half [...] really captivating" and praised the in-depth character drawing, the authentic dialogues and the graphics, but criticized the puzzles as closed simple and choppy animation transitions. The specialist magazine Adventure-Treff emphasized the high narrative speed and the successful presentation despite small weaknesses, but also stated that the story remains superficial despite a promising beginning and that the principally interesting character biographies are ultimately irrelevant for the game. The magazine drew the conclusion that 15 Days lagged behind its predecessors The Moment of Silence and Overclocked in terms of quality. The entertainment magazine Gamona praised the voice recordings and noted the beginnings of an exciting story, but criticized "clumsy or even faulty" changes in camera settings and noted "mistakes and weirdnesses". The Austrian magazine Gameswelt criticized the linearity and lack of puzzles of the game and described it as an "interactive film".
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Adventure-Treff.de: Interview: Martin Ganteföhr. Retrieved March 29, 2018 .
- ↑ Adventure-Treff.de: Visit to House of Tales. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on February 6, 2016 ; accessed on March 29, 2018 .
- ↑ a b review on Adventure-Treff.de. Retrieved February 2, 2016 .
- ↑ a b review on GameStar.de. Retrieved February 1, 2016 .
- ↑ a b review on Gameswelt.at. Retrieved February 7, 2016 .
- ↑ a b review on Gamona.de. Retrieved February 6, 2016 .
- ↑ a b Metacritic.com: 15 Days. Retrieved January 1, 2019 .