dmarusz's Full Review: Frankenstein: Through the Eyes of the Monster for ...
I received Frankenstein free along with a purchase of "The Mummy." You can't beat that. However, since I played Mummy first, I was immediately leery of it (see Mummy review).
At first, all I saw were tons of mazes, a limited play environment (outside of the mazes) and a main character that I did not agree with in term of motivations. His first motivation was to do an experiment to determine if he was brought back from the dead. He was constantly harassed by Dr. Frankenstein who went from conceited but nice too belligerent. Through a good portion of the story, I thought why bother with experiments and mini-quests when I should really take my crowbar, smash Dr. Frankenstein over the head with it and get the heck out of there. Even when I completed some of my known tasks, I would ponder what am I to do now. There seemed to be several gaps of directionless actions in the game. I sometimes just wandered from room to room hoping to find something that would trigger some type of desire to accomplish something.
And the Mazes! Too many would be an understatement. Interplay, the publisher of this game, uses a click to transition (move) navigation scheme similar to Myst. You don't move in real time. This coupled with the fact that you don't have many maps and the ones you get are awful. You never know how far you've walked. Direction is almost non-understandable. Not only that, but the game reuses scenes per visual frame giving you an identical look in totally different places. Why does Interplay think that I would want to negotiate through mazes when I have no idea where I am due to lack of continuity in space? Frustrating.
The limited environment ended up being a mistaken assumption on my part. There was much more to do and pick up than I had originally thought. This is what turned the game around for me. Instead of getting a small area of space, it ended up being a wonderful playground of seemingly unending places to go.
Once I was able to explore, plot increased dramatically. I could also look at many different aspects of the plot. So, I wasn't on a simple tunnel visioned expedition.
The best part of the plot was the interruption of Dr. Frankenstein who was played by Tim Curry. He did a great job, and this was a great addition (and idea) by Interplay to use him. So many time games like this are bogged down by shoddy performances from second rate actors. Curry actually made me feel tense when I should have, worried when I thought he might be coming in and very angry when he waxed on about how great he was.
Soon, I was forgetting all about the mazes and soon agreed with Frankenstein in his motivation (As you can guess this was not a short game.) The environment had a lot of nice gadgets to play with, some scarily resembling Myst (I also did a review of Myst if you are interested). You could do much and keep occupied with intense puzzles as opposed to some games that give you one morsel at a time. One flaw was that there was an irreversible switch I had turned that prevented me from going on to the next step. Luckily I had multiple saves to go back to.
The crowning note was that there were many possible endings depending on what you did. Sometimes people lived, sometimes people did not. At this point, the game managed to win me over enough to recommend it to others. Not an easily completed feat.
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