Cruise for a Corpse

Developer: Delphine Software	Graphics:
Publisher: US Gold	Sound:
Year: 1991	Difficulty:
Genre: Adventure	Replay value:
Number of players: 1	My overall rating:	8/10

A thriller that takes place in the 20's on a cruise ship. You are Raoul Dusentier, guest, and incidentally a police inspector. When your host is found stabbed to death in his office, you were logicaly entrusted with the investigation.
When you arrived on the crime scene, someone knocked you out! You woke up several hours later and the body had disappeared. . . .

Your job is to interrogate the other passengers. They will tell you as little as possible and you'll have to come and go to confront their testimonies. As the plot unravels, curiously, the suspects gets more chatty, and begin to accuse one another.

The specifics of this game are, first, the "huis-clos" feeling. You're on a boat at sea and cannot go anywhere else for as long as your investigation lasts.
Inside the ship though, you are free to move, and unlike Mortevielle Manor, you can do things in any order you like, loose yourself, harass people with questions without losing any chance of solving the case.
Freedom and non-linearity!

The inventory system is very simple and there are plenty of items to look at, although very few useful evidences. This brings a bit of realism, certainly, but it quickly becomes daunting to search systematically every cabin, every corridor, every piece of furniture, for nothing most of the time.

If you eventually find something interesting, the hand of your watch moves ten minutes. Time passes like that, jerkily, and the protagonists live their little lives, move around, leave clues behind, forcing you to return tirelessly in places already visited. The map is very useful to go quickly where you want, provided you know where to go. . . .

The story is prettily packaged, and not without humor (and references to Tintin). Still, there are inconsistencies difficult to understand: the body disappears under the nose of the butler, no explanation? no witness? We are looking for evidences, motives, but we don't ask suspects where they were and what they were doing when the crime took place? And the epilogue is outrageous, you'll see.

Graphics are very tidy and the characters are smoothly animated (3D vector). However, the soundtrack is a little behind.

One thing I did not understand, it seems that the original version was written in French and was later translated into English. Yet both versions suffer from huge grammatical mistakes. Even in French, it smells translation. So either I came across a version translated back into French, or the script was written by a trainee doing a language course, anybody knows?

All in all, if you like "Poirot-esque" detective novels and "point & click" games, I'm sure you'll find thisone boring to death quite convincing. Right?

Places to download:
Amiga Island
Amigaventure
Amiga World
Emuparadise
Planet Emulation
The Game Archives
The Old Computer

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