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Provenance by Corey W. Arnett

Even though you know better, some unseen force draws you up the long path towards the house for a closer look. No good can come of this, you are certain, but the attraction is simply too strong. You must investigate. You are beginning to develop an uneasy sense that all is not right here, but that it is somehow up to you to find out. Church bells in the distance sound out four o clock in the afternoon. It will be dark soon. And with the night comes things that go bump.

I always laugh at that last sentence. The whole paragraph is incredibly overwritten. So much for good first impressions.

Before the game even starts you are hit with even more ridiculous lines such as:

The sun has breached the horizon and its fervent intensity warms the land, pulling the moisture from the ground in a sinuous miasma that rises up into the atmosphere like languid serpents.

Yes, the game is literary. Too literary for me. When the game finally does begin you are creeping around a house for no reason. In my case I was stuck wandering around for quite some time before I realized I’d missed a very important item. I had missed an item list that told me what I’d be collecting. That’s what the game is about. Collecting items on a list. You have to be kidding me.

Wading through room after room of stale (yet full) descriptions doesn’t interest me. Very little action progressed the story at all. In fact there’s a huge gap from the beginning to end where story advancement is concerned. You don’t learn much more about it except from these two points. This would be fine but there are no good puzzles to hold the story up. Most of the puzzles have been thrown in for the sole purpose of keeping the player busy. Actually all of the puzzles have been created for that reason. The flowery writing is the weak glue that keeps the game from falling apart to reveal what it really is. A tedious, story-thin treasure hunt.

To beat the game you must collect items off a list and travel to the center of a maze to win. If that sounds fun to you then this game will keep you busy for ages.

If I judged games on how good they look instead of how well they play this game would get a 9/10. But because presentation isn’t everything I give it a...

3/10.