With the success of Telltale Games has had with The Walking Dead game, a lot of people could point at the demise of the traditional way point and click adventure games are made. Xii Games and Wadjet Eye Games would like to point out with their latest game, Resonance, there is still some life left in the traditional ways.
Point and click adventure games are all about the story. The better it is, the more you want to continue to the end to see the story through. Resonance does an amazing job with the sci-fi/conspiracy theory story in that if this was fleshed out more and put out as a book, it would have done very well for itself. Since I don’t want to ruin the story, thus the game itself, I will be as brief as possible. Resonance’s story revolves around a breakthrough a scientist and his research assistant on a project they are both working on. What follows is a series of events that eventually brings 4 people together to solve all the mystery behind “Resonance.”
The way Xii Games introduces you to the 4 main characters is stunning. After the opening scene, you get a grid of 4 different panels with different pictures that all have timepieces in them. All of the timepieces have different times on them. You have the option of choosing any 1 of the 3 panels since one of them is the opening scene. Once all the panels are completed, I was delighted to see why Xii Games put that grid panel in the beginning. Delaying the title screen for your game is always a pleasure to see if done right.
Of course with a good story and presentation, you need some good voice actors to make the words and the world around those words come alive. All of the voice work was pretty good. There were times when the audio seemed to spike yet it happens very little that some might not even notice it. Anyone who has played Bastion will immediately notice Detective Winston Bennet. He is voiced by the “Narrator” himself, Logan Cunningham. Thankfully, the lines in the story that the Detective has seem a perfect fit for Logan.
At first glance, you would think that you could treat Resonance like any other old-school point and click adventure game. You will find out very quickly how wrong you are. Putting a twist on the formula, Resonance has a Long Term Memory (LTM) and Short Term Memory (STM). LTM is a consistent summary of the story as the player makes it through the story. I look at it as a log file of what I have done already and to help me remember important things that may or may not help me solve puzzles. STM is more limited in you can only have up to 5 things in your STM. These things can be anything you can interact with from any location. Anything you add after the 5th thing to your STM, the last thing added before that will drop off.
So what does this all mean? It means these memories will be essential to solving a lot of the puzzles you will encounter in Resonance. Clicking on everything to brute force the solution to the puzzle will not serve you well this time around. Using LTM and STM along the traditional point and click adventure tropes was a little daunting at first. There were a couple of puzzles that took me 30 minutes to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do. My conditioning to the old methods of point and click adventure games made me have a lapse in memory, thus forgetting that STM’s and LTM’s could be used as items and presented to other characters during the conversations trees. It will take a little to get used to so don’t worry too much at the beginning when you start learning the new mechanics Resonance throws your way.
The UI was one sticking point I had issues with Resonance. Having to click and hold while dragging items out of my inventory to use was very annoying. It made me feel like I had to work harder than anyone should using inventory items in point and click adventure game. Switching between characters also felt slow and cumbersome. The process during certain moments in the game was a lesson in patience for me. At the risk of being nit-picky, I wish there was more screen resolution sizes. Maxing out at 1280×920 made Resonance look a little hazy on my 24 inch monitor. Setting the game to run in window mode fixed the hazy problem but introduced new problems of me clicking off the screen and onto my desktop. Making these changes has to be done outside the game since that is the limitation of the engine Resonance is running on which is not that big of a deal for most people. So don’t be frightened when you don’t see an options choice in the main menu.
While other companies try to reinvent the point and click genre by making it more action oriented, some of the charm that makes a point and click game can be lost. With what Xii Games and Wadjet Eye Games did with Resonance, it shows you that there is still innovation left in the traditional way of making point and click adventure games. With only a few minor issues, the story, writing and interesting new mechanics make Resonance worth playing for anyone looking for a great adventure game.