Weekend Fun Purgatorio
The game for this weekend is a rather dark adventure called Purgatorio created with the Adventure Game Studio. It features an Irish soldier of the peacekeeping forces who gets shot in his arm during active duty only to wake up wounded in a strangely familiar looking town not able to remember how he went there.
The players task is to help Frank, that is the name of the soldier, find out what happened during the blackout. The style of the adventure consists of a mix of hand drawn and photographed objects which creates a unique visual style. I would suggest to start the configuration tool before playing for the first time to make sure all settings are the way you want them to be.
You only need the mouse to control the game.A right-click cycles through the options like walk, talk and use that are available and a left-click performs the action.
Features of Purgatorio
- 800x600 resolution with 32 bit colors.
- A mixture of photographed and hand drawn characters and backgrounds, tailored into a common visual style.
- Animated characters, locations, and effects.
- Interact with the inhabitants of Purgatorio.
- Inventory and conversation based puzzles, as well as some lateral thinking.
- Explore over 25 unique locations, indoor and outdoor.
- There's a couple of Easter Eggs to be found, and a few sly references to other games and genres.
- All music is original and created solely for this game. 8 different tracks add atmosphere to exploration and puzzles.
- Simple, easy to use interface.
- Not really a feature but occasional bad language and strong, implied violence.
- Finally, an interesting storyline and game world.
As I said before the game is rather dark and disturbing which means it is not that suited for minors at all. If you still believe this is the right entertainment for the weekend for you head over to the thread in the AGS forum that has the announcement and a download link.
Update: The forum thread, while still available, links to a dead download of the game. You can download it instead from the Free Game Archive website.
Some Tips to get you started
- The game ships with a user manual in pdf format that you can read through. It explains all game play related mechanics including navigation, speed and cursors that you can cycle through.
- The four main cursors that you will cycle through relate to the following four actions: move, examine, interact and speak.
- The inventory tile is in the icon bar and the item window. You can bring up your inventory by clicking on the inventory tile in the game interface.
- The last three tiles of that bare are for saving, loading and exiting the game.
Looks interesting. I’ll try it out later; it looks like it’ll run on this old laptop of mine I’m using =D