Overclocked: A History of Violence

Overclocked: A History of Violence - (PC)
Developer: House of Tales
Format: PC
Genre: Adventure

Digging up the past can mean you get your hands dirty.

Out on Staten Island, locked down in a grimy and creepy mental institution, five very disturbed children require your psychiatric attention. As David McNamara, you team up with a NYPD detective to fathom the mysterious set-ups while getting your grey stuff pretty freaked out in the process.

Trouble is, at this facility the medical big cheeses tend to favour truckloads of meds rather than your head investigation techniques. You've also got the scary knack of getting right inside the patients' minds, so much so that you'll find yourself playing five different characters as you relive their dark memories through cut scenes. It's here that the puzzle solving leaps into play as you've got to try and help the little blighters escape the confines of the facility. Not an easy task by any means.

As the closely guarded plot and the game's secretes slowly unravel to your investigations, so to does your own mind. Having an unhinged missus bugging you all the time doesn't help either.

Overclocked is a very well executed point-and-click adventure. You really only need your mouse to control David and his quest, using a PDA interactive gimmick and drop down menus to move and snoop. With adequate voice-over, some great environments, genuinely disturbing sound and graphic effects and scenarios this moves along at a fair old pace. Longevity wise though and ending-wise it does come across as a little bit of a let down. And up against the release of GTA IV, any game released just now really has to shine.

It's unfortunate for Overclocked, eager to make a lasting impression, but that's the virtual state of play at the moment.

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