Review

Culpa Innata

The year is 2047. Most of the world is united under the World Union, espousing the principles of selfishness and ambition. Crimes, particularly murder, are a thing of the past. So when a Union citizen is killed for the first time in years in the Rogue State of Russia, it falls to Peace Officer Phoenix Wallis to uncover the truth. The plot sounds riveting, and the underlying ideas are intriguing, but the implementation falls flat. This results in Culpa Innata not living up to the standards set by the great adventure games of the past.

I love point-and-click adventure games. My first PC games were The Secret of Monkey Island and Space Quest (over a quarter of my PC library was developed by LucasArts and Sierra). Culpa Innata’s inability to follow through on its promises prevents me from adding it to that collection. It manages to fall short in every area, from graphics to audio to gameplay.

While I normally disregard graphics, feeling that games should be fun rather than pretty, the visuals of Culpa Innata are bad enough to be distracting. The character models are blocky, the animation is jerky, and the screen is always either too bright or too dim. Outfits and backgrounds are full of clashing colors, and the overall effect isn’t that of a futuristic city, but a badly designed 80’s nightclub. During close-ups on the characters, the technology used on the faces is impressive; the lip-synching is near perfect, and the characters show a wide range of emotion; but Valve achieved the same thing in Half-Life 2 and kept the models and environments smooth and realistic. The characters in Culpa Innata look less like people and more like the 2000 release of the first Sims.

Poor graphics can be excused by solid gameplay, especially in an adventure game. Point-and-clicks survive on their storytelling, characterization, and puzzles. And none of it matters without an intuitive interface. Culpa Innata proclaims to have a user-friendly interface, but the extent of its simplicity ends up being detrimental. While all adventure games allow the player to interact with only select objects in the environment, Culpa Innata draws extra attention to this, killing immersion. Objects can only be interacted with in a particular manner (certain things can only be looked at, others can only be touched). Additionally, it skips over objects that draw the player’s attention (a brightly-colored toy train on a table, for instance, is in the center of screen, yet Phoenix won’t say anything about it), pulling him out of the game’s painstakingly created world.

All of the characters feel flat and one-dimensional. Phoenix’s best friend’s only characteristic is her obsession with dating. Her partner is anxious to outperform and replace her. No character can be described in more than one sentence, which spells out disaster in this genre when not used for comedic effect. Phoenix, as the protagonist and main character, is far too shallow as well. She has none of the intelligence or poise for her position, essentially the World Union equivalent of a detective. Instead, she acts like a high school girl, constantly gossiping, rambling, and presenting no evidence of any brains at all.

The empty characters show heavily in the dialogue, which feels forced stiff. A conversation between two characters reads like an intentional attempt to recap the plot or unload backstory rather than a discussion between two people about the events of the day. Every character has the same literary voice; they all use the same slang and form their sentences the same way. Whereas each character should speak differently to cement themselves as individuals, they instead sound as though one person is attempting to play every part. The scattershot voice acting further confuses things. Some of the actors breathe life into their characters, somewhat covering the deficiencies, while others sound lifeless.

The weak dialogue can be blamed for the pacing, which manages to be mind-numbingly slow and impossibly fast at the same time. Over half of the dialogue ignores the central murder case entirely, focusing entirely on how the characters love the World Union or how much sex they are having. The investigation dialogues should be about why the victim traveled to Russia or who could have wanted him dead, but they’re instead focused on whom he was sleeping with and how well he performed in bed. All of these conversations as limited by the game’s “real-time clock”, meaning that no conversation can advance beyond a few branches before Phoenix returns home for the night. The end result is a rapid-fire series of pointless, dull conversations that have no bearing on the plot and do little to develop the characters.

These discussions crowd out the puzzles, which are simplistic and nonsensical. The puzzles, which aren’t immediately obvious (to turn off the power, open the electrical panel and pull the switch from “on” to “off”), require very little logic to solve. Rarely did the puzzles seem to have any connection to the rest; they tended to try to provide clues and leads towards the murder case, which Phoenix promptly ignored to gossip with her friend about the cute lawyer she questioned. In most adventure games, the puzzles exist to further the plot and provide the enjoyable bulk of the gameplay. In Culpa Innata, the puzzles exist to pad out the time between conversations.

All in all, my final thought on the game was that it just wasn’t fun. I couldn’t play for more than half an hour before my mind wandered and I wanted to find something better to play. It took serious concentration to convince myself to pick it up again and give it another chance, and I usually ended up regretting the decision. Maybe someday someone will write another great adventure game, but that day isn’t today.