The Samaritan Paradox

Nice thing about old-style point-and-click adventures: since they're usually dollar bin material, you don't feel guilty not bothering to finish ones you don't like. They also display the inevitable stagnation of a genre decades past its heyday even in 2014. The Samaritan Paradox feels like someone just set out to make AN ADVENTURE GAME and later filled in the blanks as to what that might mean. Long story short, don't bother. Spoilers follow.

 

You are a cryptologist/librarian in '80s Sweden. Your apartment contains bookshelves, piles of books, a phone, alarm clock, television, newspaper. Your friend sends you a journalist's last book, dedicated to his daughter in Stockholm. Your character notes its ISBN looks weird, broken up into single/double digits.

Can you:

- call your friend to ask him what's up with the book?

- call your library workplace to ask about inconsistencies in ISBN codes or materials by the same author?

- find a map and compare the funky ISBN dual-digits to map coordinates, parsing as you go?

- find a map of Stockholm and look for significant patterns? maybe street numbers?

- find a biography of the author and compare the numbers? maybe dates?

- find a cryptology book and look up two-digit ciphers?

- translate the digits into alphabet letters by number?

- listen to a TV/radio newscast for more details about the death of a famous journalist?

- click and drop the curious volume to make it interact with your piles of books or bookshelves to look for matching topics?

Hell no. None of the above. Open your bookshelf, ignore the cryptology texts despite all dia/mono-logue so far have been cryptology-this and cryptology-that and click the chemistry book. This isn't about looking for logical solutions and gradually narrowing the scope of your task. It's about flatfootedly word-matching "chemistry" from the newspaper as the daughter's occupation out of twenty tones of white noise. Except good, engaging adventure game puzzles don't just front-load all the information to sift through aimlessly. In an interactive medium, your hints and clues are supposed to work with the player's input, commenting, correcting, providing some feedback on whether ANYTHING is happening.

 

The second puzzle has me showing every item in my inventory to a senile old bat until she says something relevant, after which I'm supposed to simply guess that I should alternate directions.

 

The third puzzle... well... let's just say there's a crucially important item in this image you'll need to advance.

 

Do you see it? Do you see the crucially important item? OMG how can you not see it, what are you, blind? How can you not immediately recognize it it's so blatantly obvious it's right in your face it's

It's... roughly 20 shapeless pixels by my estimate? And superimposed on another clickable item so 50/50 not even a tooltip will give it away when you're scanning the image. Yeaahhh... then you're thrown into a completely imaginary world pertaining to the plot of a novel. Which begs the question of why the game wasn't simply that novel. Aaaaand, uninstall, another Bozo for the pile.

Weirdly, The Samaritan Paradox isn't even the worst of its breed, just monumentally uninspired. You can practically see a checklist being ticked away as you play. An adventure game obviously needs:

- quirky characters (old soldier girl)

- cultural pursuits (art galleries, novels)

- hidden objects

- counterintuitive solutions

- red herrings

- exotic locales (even if imaginary)

- some justification for why this was made into a game instead of the mystery novella the author obviously wanted to write? Nah, screw that last part.