Real World Multimedia, 1997
Ceremony of Innocence is the most unusual game I have ever played and its hard for me to decide the exact nature of this game in the adventure category for it is mostly an interactive presentation of the literary letters and postcards exchanged between two artists, Griffin Moss of London and Sabine Strohem, who lives thousands of miles away on Sicmons Islands, situated somewhere in the South Pacific.
Basically, the game based on Griffin and Sabine trilogy written by Nick Bantock in the early 90s. These novels describes the letters exchanged between two postcard designers, Griffin and Sabine, who live thousands of miles away from each other, but Sabine mysteriously share the sight of Griffin and always suggests him her artistic opinions. The game presents these letters and postcards in a mysterious manner and each letter when arrives offers the player to solve a strikingly odd and obscure puzzle on the front of the envelope or the postcard before they are able to open it or turn to the text side in case of a postcard. In their correspondence both the artists exchange their emotions, liking and ideas, and gradually built up their relation from mere strangers to lovers. Other then the exciting and highly literary text of these letters the second most amazing thing that I found while playing Ceremony of Innocence was the par excellence voice acting of Paul McGann, Isabella Rossellini, who act as Griffin and Sabine respectively and Ben Kingsley, who voiced a third character that comes later in the game.
Ceremony of Innocence has a strange mouse-driven interface that takes some time for the player to fully understand. The game was produced by Peter Gabriel's software house, Realworld Multimedia and over 100 top-notch musicians, graphic designers and animators were involved in creating the excellent musical scores and obscure, but eye-catching graphics of this game and I believe these are the reasons that this title bagged tons of international awards, including the EUROPRIX Multimedia Award and BAFTA awards for Best Animation and Best Sound.
