FT234

Apparitions is the latest offering from Star Mountain Studios, the brainchild of three ex-employees of Vivendi Universal: Richard Sternberg, Briar Lee Mitchell and Adam Ryan. This, their first full-length adventure title, was made in conjunction with The Atlantic Paranormal Society (more comm­only known as TAPS) whose co-founders, Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson, are best known for the Sci-fi Network’s popular show Ghost Hunters.

In Apparitions, you play an investigator from the Pete Wren Paranormal Investigation Agency sent to the Florida Keys to carry out an investigation of The Red Reef Inn, a long abandoned business which has recently been bought and is now in the process of being renovated – the trouble is, a number of strange things have begun to happen throughout the old building.

Okay, it’s hardly the most imaginative of premises, but few other adventure titles have rid themselves completely of cliché to produce an authentic experience. It soon strikes you that a huge amount of work has gone into producing an engaging back story for the game, as shown by the files stored on your character’s laptop, access­ible by clicking on its icon at the bottom lefthand corner of the screen. The laptop stores all the evidence, both audio and video, that you collect as you go about your investigations, but to begin with only contains extensive accounts of the building and its associated incidents of paranormal activity. Anyone approaching this game for the first time would be well advised to spend time reading through these files, as not only are they engagingly written, but they will also point you in the right direction to begin your ghost-hunting.

The involvement of TAPS in Apparitions can be seen from the very moment you begin playing. A brief tutorial introduces the user interface, which is reassuringly simple, and goes through all the tools you will need to detect paranormal activity: a camcorder, temperature gauge, infrared camera and electromagnetic field (EMF) detector, amongst other things. Once you have picked something up with your equipment, you can enter the laptop interface and assess each piece of evidence in one of three ways. And this is where the game’s strongest feature comes in. Not every piece of evidence you discover is necessarily of paranormal origin, and there is plenty of room for sceptical debunking – perhaps the fluctuation in your EMF detector was caused by your proximity to a power socket rather than a ghoul. You can mark each piece of evidence in your interface as ‘Could be paranormal’ until you make up your mind, changing it at any point to ‘Invalid’ or ‘Proof of paranormal activity’.

I felt the inclusion of such potentially false positives accur­ately captured the process of a paranormal investigation or ghost hunt. Once you have compiled enough evidence – recordings, video and photographs – you can submit your report to TAPS and gain a score, which can then be posted on the Star Mountain Studio website. You lose points each time you consult Lucy, your resident psychic, for help; this will probably be the downfall of less patient gamers.

For me, the biggest highlight of the game was finding out exactly how I would perform as a ghost-hunter… and the answer turns out to be: not so well. Having spent large amounts of time walking around the inn recording evidence, the sceptic in me found it easy to dismiss most of it as definitely in the ‘false positive’ category, even when a humanoid shadow crossed my field of vision. After getting over the initial chill, I watched the shadow’s progress until it disappeared into a door frame only realising then that I’d missed an opportunity to get some footage of something I couldn’t explain.

Apparitions is presented in old-school adventure format, an environment made up of 2D images, which – however well drawn and atmospheric – remain painfully just that. It’s possible to move the camera using the mouse, but essentially you are rooted to the spot. Movement between locations is achieved by using arrows that appear, sometimes reluctantly, to indicate that you can go that way, and each time you move to a new room or area there is a brief loading screen. The movement is badly done and the load times detract a little from the gameplay, which is a shame as so much time has been put in to create an authentic experience in all the other features. Had this been a free-roaming adventure (even within the limited confines of the Red Reef Inn) with some added voice acting, then I would not have been able to fault it on any level; but as it only costs .95 – or a little over £10 – to download, it’s hard to be too crit­ical of its failings.