Overclocked
| Overclocked | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Studio | House of Tales | ||
| Publisher |
 DTP Entertainment Micro Application hell-tech Lighthouse Interactive Noviy Disk hell-tech Lighthouse Interactive      |
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| Senior Developer | Martin Ganteföhr | ||
| composer | Tilman Sillescu , Markus Schmidt, Alexander Röder, Alex Pfeffer | ||
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
October 12, 2007 |
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| platform | Windows | ||
| Game engine | Cougar | ||
| genre | Adventure | ||
| medium | DVD-ROM , download | ||
| language | German, English, French, Polish, Russian, Spanish | ||
| Age rating |
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Overclocked (full title Overclocked: A story about violence ) is an adventure computer game by the German development studio House of Tales from 2007. The psychological thriller lets the player investigate the fates of five psychiatric patients who are connected by a framework plot.
action
The player begins in the role of David McNamara, a forensic psychiatry expert from Washington whose marriage is on the brink of failure. McNamara is summoned to a mental health clinic on Staten Island by the New York City NYPD in November 2007 to examine five mysterious patients. The five, about the same age and apparently not connected to each other, were disoriented and without memory, but armed and picked up in different places in New York. McNamara sets out to reconstruct the memory of patients who also suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome. The player then slips into the roles of the five patients one after the other and experiences how the initial situation of the game came about. All patients were participants in a military research program and barracked together on an island in the catchment area of New York. With the help of recordings as triggers , McNamara allows the patient to step backwards into their memories. His work is made more difficult by the director of the institution, Dr. Young, a formerly prominent psychiatrist who sees his work in the institution as a demotion and openly expresses his jealousy of the younger and supposedly successful colleague McNamara. At the same time, McNamara's private life falls apart: his wife prohibits him from entering their apartment and files for divorce, a close friend turns away from him, and for some unknown reason his credit card is blocked so that he cannot pay the hotel bill. Gradually, the player learns that McNamara has a drinking problem and a tendency to eruptive violence, which ruined the relationship with his wife.
When McNamara begins to shed light on the affair of the five teenagers, events roll over. One of the patients is found dead in her cell, allegedly a suicide case. Dr. Young accuses the police against McNamara of having at least contributed to the death of the youth through his methods. Two unknown men try to drown McNamara in the harbor basin, which McNamara barely survives. The policeman Moretti weighed in on him finds out that the clinic on Staten Island is financed by the US Department of Defense. A little later, Moretti is also dead, and McNamara alone takes on the fight against an overpowering opponent. During a final therapy session, he was able to identify the military complex in which the teenagers were staying as Fort Tilden on the Rockaway Peninsula across from Manhattan . He frees the young people from the institution and goes to the fort, which he finds apparently abandoned. It turns out that the young people were participants in a psychological experiment by the US Army, which on the one hand was supposed to increase their will to fight by means of sublime messages from game software and on the other hand to block their memories of what they had experienced. While collecting evidence, he is caught by a government official who explains to him that McNamara himself is part of the test series - his outbursts of aggressiveness are the result of training with software combat simulators during his time in the army. The government official tries to kill McNamara as a pesky witness, but in turn is shot dead by one of the teenage patients who followed the psychiatrist unnoticed.
The end of the game leaves room for interpretation: McNamara and his wife seem to be reconciling in New York's Central Park , while a police vehicle approaches the couple in the background.
Game principle and technology
Overclocked is a point-and-click adventure . For polygons composite, three-dimensional figures act against pre-rendered scenes. 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. He can find objects, apply them to the environment or other objects and communicate with NPCs . McNamara can communicate with distant people using a PDA , which can only be used depending on the situation. Dialogues run automatically and are controlled by a single choice selection of topics that are given by the game and match the situation. As the story progresses, more locations will be unlocked. The camera shows what is happening from a fixed perspective; if the player leaves the current room, the camera is transferred to the new room and again takes a fixed position there.
Technically based Overclocked on developed by Tobias ducts Cougar - Engine , which even for the House-of-Tales games The Mystery of the Druids and The Moment of Silence was used. Cutscenes are decorated in game graphics. The use of partly interactive split screens in some scenes in which the player and NPCs act in parallel is unusual for adventure games .
Production notes
The inspiration for author Martin Ganteföhr was the fact that he had worked in a psychiatric clinic for a while.
In December 2014, THQ Nordic took over the rights to all House of Tales games from the bankruptcy estate of the former publisher DTP Entertainment . In April 2015, THQ Nordic published a version of Overclocked that ran on modern Windows computers via the digital distribution platform Steam , followed by publication on GOG in December 2015 .
One song used in the game is from the Swedish band Soilwork . Publisher DTP published a 62-page strategy guide to the game in October 2007, which explains all the puzzles of the game to the reader.
speaker
| role | German speaker |
|---|---|
| David McNamara | Stephan Schwartz |
| Jonathan Bayt (patient cell 1) | |
| Laura Fawcett (patient cell 2) | Brit Gulland |
| Ray Thornton (patient cell 3) | Norman Matt |
| Victoria Montgomery (patient cell 4) | Gisa Bergmann |
| Cliff Mandrake (patient cell 5) | René Oltmanns |
| Detective Morietti | Hans Bayer |
| Kim McNamara | Susanne Reuter |
The German voice recordings were made by the Düsseldorf studio Translocacell, which had already made the recordings for The Moment of Silence . Author Martin Ganteföhr himself directed the dialogue.
reception
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Overclocked received positive to mixed reviews. Metacritic aggregates 19 reviews to an average of 70. The specialist magazine Adventure-Treff praised a complex story, well thought-out, profound characters and a film-ready staging with technical effects that are unusual for adventure games. Low-detail textures and interiors as well as a less demanding puzzles were criticized . The magazine pointed out that the complexity of the characters and their relationships to one another can overwhelm the player and ensure a somewhat slow start to the game, as the game's potential only unfolds gradually. The game magazine GameZone worked out that Overclocked plays obstructive puzzles like an "interactive psychological thriller" because of the renunciation of the flow of the game, which is unusual for an adventure game, but acceptable because of the focus on the narrative. In addition to the story and character drawing, the magazine also praised the intuitive controls, but criticized weaknesses in animation, less demanding puzzles and the work of voice actor René Oltmanns , who spoke his character Cliff Mandrake as if he had “overdosed on laxatives”. The Games world lifted story, characters and narrative structure out positively, but criticized the game end up being predictable. The German magazine 4Players praised the authentic implementation of New York locations and the gloomy atmosphere of the game, but criticized the linearity of the gameplay.
Overclocked won several awards from the trade press:
- Innovation prize of the jury at the German Developer Prize 2007.
- 4Players Game of the Year 2007 in the “Best Story” category.
- Aeggie Award 2008 from the trade magazine Adventure Gamers , category "Best Writing - Drama"
literature
- Markus Müller: Overclocked - The official solution book . Medienagentur Müller, Berlin 2007, ISBN 3-89956-569-X .
Web links
- Overclocked at MobyGames (English)
- Overclocked in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- Jump up ↑ AdventureGamers.com: Martin Ganteföhr - House of Tales. Retrieved December 20, 2017 .
- ↑ a b 4Players.de: Overclocked. Retrieved December 20, 2017 .
- ↑ Adventure-Treff.de: Overclocked. Retrieved May 21, 2019 .
- ↑ a b Gameswelt.de: Overclocked: Much brilliance and many errors. Retrieved December 20, 2017 .
- ↑ a b GameZone.de: Overclocked: A story about violence in the Gamezone test. Retrieved December 20, 2017 .
- ^ A b Metacritic.com: Overclocked. Retrieved November 26, 2018 .
- ^ DeutscherEntwicklerpreis.de: Prize Winner Chronology. Retrieved December 20, 2017 .
- ↑ 4Players.de: Spiele des Jahres 2007. Retrieved on December 20, 2017 .