Microids, 2005
Still Life is an excellent point and click mystery adventure game, which let the gamer plays two principal characters, related to each other, in two different lifespan, eras, and locations, yet following an exceedingly similar story-line that involves serial killings of prostitutes in very gruesome manners. The game mostly resembles Jack the Ripper themed games, but having a slightly unique and modernized touch.
The game starts in modern day Chicago, where you play Victoria McPherson, an FBI field agent investigating a series of gruesome murders of prostitutes. Later at home, while discussing the murders with her father, she comes to know that similar pattern of crimes took place in a series almost seventy-five years ago in Prague and her late grandfather, former Private Detective Gustav McPherson investigated those crimes. To know more about those crimes, she starts reading her grandfather's diary in her room and here the game setting rolls in the Prague of late 1920s, where you control Private Investigator Gustav McPherson. The game more often switches the story back and forth in time from Victoria to Gustav while building the relation between the two series of crimes that took place in two different lifetimes. While the game play is quite linear, the puzzles are mostly inventory based and vary from hard to very hard especially the lock picking puzzle, which took me few days to solve. The inventory is huge and easily accessible and the controls interface is smooth point and click, where double clicking makes your character to run to that point.
Graphically, the game flaunts stunning backdrops, excellent quality cut-scenes and animations. The game characters are stylishly rendered in three-dimension while taking care of the outfits for each era. Though the sound and music is quite ambient and meshes well with the game settings, but sometime become schizoid and disturbs the gaming mood. Overall, I highly recommend every adventure gamer to play this game, dispute some nude and gore scenes in the game, which I believe are not appropriate for our teenage audience.
