Colossal Pictures, 1995
Psychic detective is a groundbreaking adventure game riding in the wake of interactive movie technology of the early nineties with a dark, but innovative storyline. In this fast paced game you play as Eric Fox, a private detective, who has a strange ability of transmitting his psychic self into others head to see and hear through their eyes and ears respectively, or just control their mind in order to find their opinion and observation for every move you made in the game.
The game starts when Eric Fox arrives at a small house party where all the game characters are invited to play "Black Diamond Game," a board game played with image pieces of the game characters or the items used in the game. Winning this board game depends upon your path selection, which you decide by reading peoples mind or by knowing their point of views for each path action. However, the main objective of the game is to investigate a strange and obscure death and to apprehend the murderer.
The solution to most of the game puzzles based on being at the right location at the right time and your different moves carry the storyline to different paths and endings. Visually, the game has film-like quality full motion videos of real actors displaying mediocre acting performance. The video clips are shown in the center of the screen captured in a colorfully designed graphical frame, which shows the thumbnail images of the characters currently present in a particular scene or as and when they interact with each other. Sound and voice acting is bit better than the visuals. The game also has some obscene scenes only recommended to our mature adventure gamers. The controls are annoyingly clumsy and make the gameplay dull and boring. All in all, I would only recommend this game if your life depends on playing adventure games no matter how bad they are, but if you have recently switched or started playing adventure games then I would suggest you to play some classical point and click, 3rd-person games from LucasArts and Sierra.
