1954 Alcatraz

1954 Alcatraz was a game I purchased on sale on Steam. I bought it in a bundle pack along with all the other Daedalic games for 15 dollars, which, for me, I believe was a pretty good deal. I have a soft-spot for point and click adventures and getting, like, 20 games 90% off isn't something to sneeze at.

Gameplay: 5.5

As with most point and click adventures, the gameplay mechanics of this game are rather simple. The game is maneuvered using the mouse and objects are interacted with using the left and right buttons. Players can combine specific items together to create new objects as needed and objects can be given to NPCs during certain moments to progress the game. 1954 Alcatraz does those elements fine. They work as they should. However, there are some glitches worth note.

Firstly, there are unnecessarily long and frequent loading times. By that, I mean every single time you change locations, however minor, it has to load the new area. The average load time is around 45 seconds, which at first doesn't seem too bad, but when you're on story-errand and you have to run through several areas all to just talk to a single person or get one thing, it gets rather annoying. Also, when beginning a new game, the intro animation is a bit laggy. Trust me, it's not my laptop; it's the game. Several people have complained about it. However, after the initial animation lag, I haven't had problems with lag since. One last thing, this only happened to me maybe two or three times, but occasionally the cursor will disappear making you unable to do anything. Unfortunately, you'll have to ctrl-alt-delete if this happens and end the game through task manager. It's super annoying, so be sure to save often.

Story: 8

The game's saving grace. It's really lucky it had a good story, otherwise, I wouldn't have wasted my time on it. The game obviously took a lot of inspiration from Noir films. It felt like a love letter to the fifties. It was fun to play. The characters were believable and the dialogue wasn't a chore to get through. Okay, well, the ending scene was a little sappy, but, other than that, it was mostly a gritty, very real game. I especially enjoyed the main female protagonist, as she didn't just sit in the background, she took charge and, I think, was far more interesting than the main male. Most NPCs were enjoyable as well because you could tell that the main characters knew them all very well. They weren't treated the way most traditional video games treat NPCs. A lot of video games get in the habit of making the NPCs tell you their life-story or just having the NPCs be there solely to offer you advice or items. I liked the happy medium that 1954 Alcatraz did. The NPCs tell you just enough to make them seem human but not enough information to make them seem robotic and unnatural. The game just did the story element very well, in my opinion.

Graphics and Visuals: 4

They sucked butt. Plain and simple. They were awful. This game definitely went in the wrong direction as far as aesthetics are concerned. For whatever reason, the developers of this game, instead of sticking with their traditional hand-drawn characters that mesh into the background like beautiful, moving drawings, they decided that this game would work better with PS1-like 3D models. They're ugly as sin. Even the supposedly “beautiful” main character still makes you shudder when you look at her up close. It's unfortunate, especially considering that the rest of the backgrounds and props are all very beautiful and stylistically drawn. The 3D models just really bring down the level of the whole game. They're clunky, unsightly, and don't match the gritty Noir motif at all.

Sound: 6

A big “meh”, as far as I'm concerned. The music was decent. The song that is played in Mickey's club, especially, is pretty good. The developers did a good job of picking music that is suitable for the game's time period.

Overall: 7

I liked the game. I mean, it was really really ugly and I haven't exactly been advertising the fact that I've been playing it to my friends, but I had fun. For 2 dollars, I can't really go wrong with this one.