Aconcagua

Aconcagua is a pretty all right adventure game for the PS1, originally released in 2000 exclusively in Japan but has a fan translation in English released about a week before this review.

You play as a cast of 5 survivors of a plane crash over the Andes mountains in South America as they try to make their way back down to civilization, each character with their own motives for being on the plane that may or may not have been tampered with as an attempted political assassination. The narrative is okay in what it sets out to do, but as a Japanese-developed interpretation/love letter to disaster survival and political action movies of the 1970s and 1990s it has a lot of charm to it, despite the sometimes weird script writing and line deliveries. The plot beats and character tropes are about what you'd expect and you won't really be on the edge of your seat in anticipation for what happens next, but the story is told in a logical sequence of events and has some pretty impressive cinematography for a game of its time and a bombastic soundtrack to the point that you really could call this an interactive action film which is pretty neat.

The gameplay is fine, but there's an asterisk by that. It's a literal point and click adventure much like the Clock Tower games with you dragging a mouse cursor with the directional buttons and moving your characters from scene to scene as you look for points of interest to interact with. You get to switch between the 5 different characters freely, and a great majority of the puzzles in the game are tied to figuring out which specific character to use so they can use their skill and progress the scene. The characters all have individual health bars that function as how many "redos" you are allowed for interaction mistakes before having to reload a save completely (which if you do, is almost never more than having to roll back 5 or 10 minutes as the game prompts you to save at the end of each scene), and the game is pretty generous with not letting you run to you death without confirmation so health conservation never becomes a real issue.

Unfortunately the point and click interface comes with a lot of really bad drawbacks. The puzzles and their solutions are mostly telegraphed pretty well, but the control scheme really just doesn't work as pathfinding isn't too great and it can turn into an almost literal pixel-hunt with finding things to pick up or interact with, or even just to find the appropriate camera angle to get the interaction prompt. The full 3D backgrounds aren't great at telling you what leads where so some areas unintentionally end up being confusing to navigate, though most "scenes" aren't bigger than several rooms wide so it doesn't end up dragging pacing down too much. You are also restricted to controlling one character at a time, which can be a literal frustrating when you have to keep flipping and moving two specific characters across several screens or if you can't figure out what to do and have to hunt through every screen because oops you missed this specific camera angle that lets you turn on this specific thing that only the engineer dude can mess with.

Overall though I think Aconcagua is a worthwhile experience, and its frustrations aren't too limiting as it's only about 5-6 hours long for a full run. I'm honestly not sure if there's alternate routes or endings since the story and how it ends seems pretty linear, so I don't think there's a lot of replayability after finishing it once (though researching on the internet seems to show that maybe it does have alternate endings so perhaps I'm just an idiot which is also likely). But, for what it is as a mostly tight package, I can't complain too much.