Adam's Venture: Origins

At roughly five hours in length, with a grand total of two missable trophies (one of which you earn by not touching the controller for 90 seconds), Adam's Venture: Origins might well stand as the easiest platinum trophy available on the PlayStation 4 right now. And the fact that I've tried to start this review on a positive note, and this is the best I can come up with, says it all.

I'm not a fan of breaking games down into constituent parts, seeing as it has that awful whiff of the bad old days when games were reviewed as if they were technical products, but I can't think of a better way to illustrate just what an across the board failure this is. The controls are stilted, desperately lacking the fluidity that this genre needs to function; the puzzles veer wildly between insultingly easy and outright annoying; the voice acting is so infamously bad that watching just one YouTube video to get the solution to one of those puzzles was enough to make 'TOP 10 EPIC VIDEO GAME VOICE ACTING FAILS!!!' appear in my recommended videos (and I literally never watch videos about gaming that aren't made by Yahtzee); bits of the environment disappear and reappear at random, sometimes inbetween the camera and your character so you can't even see what you're doing any more; the odd design decision to take out combat completely but still leave enemies in adds nothing and detracts plenty from the gameplay; the enemy AI is basically non-existent; the environments are apparently undiscovered by humanity but are filled with clearly man-made structures; the game gives you a tutorial on how to control a minecart and then never actually requires you to use those controls; and the characters are so lazily written that the main character's name is Ad Venture (ugh), his partner is called Evelyn, and they find the biblical Tree of Life because OF COURSE THEY DO THEY'RE LITERALLY CALLED ADAM AND EVE. Most would be happy with that mound of cheese, but not the writers here - Evelyn's surname is Apple, because of course it fucking is. That's the kind of commitment to heroically unsubtle character naming that would make Ayn Rand envious. Evelyn is certainly the worst thing about this game, though - her dialogue and the way she's written into the plot is an absolute train wreck. One minute she (quite understandably) thinks Adam is an idiot and you think she's going to bring some necessary common sense to the plot, and then the next she's somehow his girlfriend, basically because somebody else calls her that and she thinks 'welp, guess I'm his girlfriend now'. Then she starts weirdly fawning over everything he says to her like a giggling schoolgirl even though the game had taken pains earlier to point out how educated she is, and spends a couple of hours see-sawing back and forth between thinking he's an idiot and fawning at random. Then she storms off for a bit in a huff with him, and the game basically goes 'women, am I right lads'? Then she returns and immediately starts fawning again. It's jarring and weird and I feel desperately sorry for anybody who ends up dating any of the men that wrote this.

And yet. And yet. For all that, for all the game's glaring, obvious failings, it does have a weird sort of charm to it. It's shit, but it does at least seem to be aware of how shit it is and have some fun with it - Adam's dialogue has some occasional quips about how lazy and unlikely the puzzles and environments are, the bad guy ends up being a moustache-twirling cartoon caricature of evil, the minecart sections are pure B-movie nonsense, the scene where he reveals his motivating for blowing up the Tree of Life (lmao) is hammed up beyond belief....and hey, maybe I'm giving out too much credit here, but this all feels knowing rather than accidental. Gives it the feel of those SyFy films about tornado gorillas with knives or whatever the hell they're doing these days, y'know?

Not quite a Bubsy 3D-esque unmitigated disaster, then. But my word, it was a close call.