Dead Reefs

Dead Reefs is a computer game by the Canadian game developer Streko Graphics, which is set on a fictional island off the British coast in 1727. The adventure was released in July 2007 for PCs with the Windows operating system .

action

The player plays Amadey Finvinerro, a special investigator for the governor who is supposed to investigate the death of Patrick Wyndham, the son of the local baron, on the island of Dead Reefs in the North Atlantic off the British coast. The island is a former pirate's nest, whose inhabitants lit beacons into the 17th century to allow ships to sail onto the reefs surrounding the island and then plunder them. Since a ship with monks was attacked in 1619 and an unspecified relic was stolen, the island has been said to have been under a curse that leads to an unnatural death every nine years. Locals also link the death of Patrick Wyndham to this curse. Finding out the actual cause of death is the main task of the player. This is made more difficult, on the one hand, by the fact that most of the island's inhabitants tend to be hostile to Finvinerro, and in the course of the game a murder motive emerges for each of the central characters.

Game principle and technology

The game graphics are displayed in 3D using the Virtools 3D engine and with a resolution of up to 1280 × 1024 pixels. The engine has already been used in Still Life and Post Mortem . It is controlled completely with the keyboard. The camera is fixed behind the character ( third-person perspective ) and follows him, so you cannot look around freely when moving around. A classic first person perspective can be selected as an option; In this the player can look around freely, but not move. The character moves using the WASD keys, actions are controlled using the cursor keys , and there are also special keys for special actions. If the player comes near a hotspot while walking around, this is indicated on the screen.

Production notes

For Streko Graphics, who had previously developed the two-part, Myst -like adventure series Aura , the financially less successful Dead Reefs was the last game.

reception

Metacritic aggregated 14 reviews of the game for an average rating of 51/100. The game magazine 4Players praised the exciting story and the gloomy ambience of the game world, but criticized the "impossible" controls, the camera work, the restrictive linearity of the game and the lack of narrative depth, which is also reflected in the superficial character drawing. The specialist magazine Adventure-Treff , on the other hand, saw detailed and realistic characters whose facial expressions reflect their current emotional state, and praised the detailed, atmospheric graphics that are only devalued by “a few edges and here and there washed out textures”. The magazine criticized “gross translation errors” in the comparison between the English original version and the German dubbing and otherwise also noted an exciting story, a strong linearity and a failed control. In a general slippage, IGN noted a story that "withered" during the course of the game, a "depressingly sad" control system and template-like characters, which were also awkwardly animated and had no lip-synchronicity, but had fuzzy and boring textures. Only the gloomy atmosphere of the game was positively highlighted.

The similarity of the player character Amadey Finvinerro with Johnny Depp in the films Pirates of the Caribbean and Sleepy Hollow has been highlighted several times in specialist media .

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ ^a ^b 4Players.de: Dead Reefs. Retrieved May 1, 2016 .
↑ ^a ^b AdventureCorner.de: Dead Reefs. Retrieved May 1, 2016 .
↑ ^a ^b ^c Adventure-Treff.de: Dead Reefs. Retrieved May 1, 2016 .
↑ ^a ^b IGN.com: Dead Reefs. Retrieved May 1, 2016 .
↑ ^a ^b Metacritic.com: Dead Reefs. Retrieved May 1, 2016 .

[4P-1] 4Players.de: Dead Reefs. Retrieved May 1, 2016 .

[AC-2] AdventureCorner.de: Dead Reefs. Retrieved May 1, 2016 .

[AT-3] Adventure-Treff.de: Dead Reefs. Retrieved May 1, 2016 .

[IGN-4] IGN.com: Dead Reefs. Retrieved May 1, 2016 .

[MC-5] Metacritic.com: Dead Reefs. Retrieved May 1, 2016 .