Discworld Noir

Written by Kyle Coare in PC Game Reviews, Thursday 21 August, 2008

Discworld Goes to the Movies

Anyone that has read any of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series will know that they are humorous semi-fantasy type books, but maybe you didn't know that he has actually released a few computer games based on the series.

Discworld Noir is the third game in the series (fourth if you include the old Spectrum type in adventure 'The Colour of Magik'). Unlike Discworld One and Two, which both featured Rincewind the trainee wizard, and some very colourful and cartoony graphics, this game takes us down a much darker shadier alley and threatens you with a switchblade.

The Discworld series of books has received many fans over the years, with about 30 books in the series it also shows how prolific a writer Terry Pratchett is. The books tend to be parodies of movies or music, basically anything really, Pratchett tends to take real life mix it with a bit of magic then sprinkle in a nice amount of humour, then let it boil for a few hours and you have a Discworld book.

Well the games are no different, in that they take their influences from movies and real life situations, this game takes its cues from the world of film Noir, hence the title, with obvious references to Casablanca and various other films.

The game opens with a nice animated movie, showing your death, which is a very interesting way to start a game indeed! Then in true Film Noir it goes back to a week earlier, and here we first get to meet our character (Still Alive that is!).

Unlike the earlier Discworld games, this one has an all new lead role, you play as Lewton, the first private investigator in the Discworld's main city of Ankh-Morpork.

The first section starts like any good detective movie, with our hero sat at his desk with no work to do, not a single job, but again like any good detective movie, in walks an interesting looking brunette woman by the name of Carlotta, this is where the case begins...

Carlotta is searching for a man that she was seeing previously, this man has mysteriously disappeared and its up to you to find him, which is going to take quite a lot of brain power.

Over the course of the game your going to come into contact with some very interesting people, such as Trolls Dwarves and Werewolves, and over time you will pick up on the trail of the mysterious vanishing man.

The game features many different plot twists which will keep you entertained for hours, this is a vast game, with a lot of very clever moments. A word of advice though, never trust anybody and expect the unexpected, this is the Discworld of course!

The game plays like most Point and click adventure games, where basically you use your mouse to control a little arrow and point at objects on the screen to tell Lewton what to do, anyone that has played on the old Sierra games will know what I'm talking about!

Unlike most adventure games this one isn't really object orientated, whereas most games of this genre see you searching for various objects to progress further into the game, this one sees you searching for clues like any good detective, this is where the game really gets interesting.

These clues are mostly things that people say to you, or notes etc that you find, and these will all be stored nicely in your notepad which can be brought up at anytime by the click of a button.

The clues may need putting together to give you a bit more knowledge or you may need to talk to one of the 70+ people in the area and see if the clue means anything to them.

The game features over 70 different areas, which makes this quite a big game, and you might find yourself getting a little stuck at certain points, but that's half of the fun!

The game will have you pulling your hair out at certain points, and it may be a bit difficult for younger gamers, but it is beatable, and it will provide hours of fun.

Aside from the darkness and the deep thinking involved on some of the puzzles the area this game really shines is with Pratchett's trademark humour, which is here in huge amounts, you will find yourself laughing out loud at some of the scenes during the game, and this is something that is really missing from the modern day computer game scene, humour in games.

The graphics are pretty top quality, with some nicely animated movies and each area is interestingly drawn and coloured, giving a good impression of how Ankh-Morpork should look. All of the characters in the game are well animated and all look about as odd as can be expected from a Discworld game!

One downside to the graphics is that they are dark, really dark, in fact you might not know you've turned your computer on at some points, but then again this is based on the Film Noir movies and they were all shadowy and gloomy, so its obviously intentional. It does give the game that eerie sense that something could happen at any time, and gives a lot of atmosphere to the proceedings.

Soundwise this is very good, I usually ignore sound in my reviews as it doesn't normally add anything to the games, I mean why listen to a couple of bleepy tunes when I can play the new Mr T Experience album? But with this game sound is fairly important, as you will want to listen to the conversations and such.

The voice acting is pretty good, although it seems a little over the top at points and a few of the people sound a little wooden, but not to the point of irritation. Musically it has some nice tunes, some of which tended to be a little loud be you can always turn the music volume down a little.

One word of warning, this game is huge, 3 CDs worth of hugeness in fact, so be warned you might need a fair chunk of hard-drive space available for use, although you can play from the CDs, it still puts a lot of info on your computer.

Other than that most newish computers should have no problem playing this game, it only really needs a pentium 166MHz with 32MB Ram and a semi decent graphics card, most newer computers will easily beat these requirements.

This game really is worth investing some time in, the interesting funny conversations and plot twists will keep you hooked for a good few hours. It doesnt matter if you havent read any of the books previously as this game doesnt follow a story from one of the novels, this was a new story by Pratchett.

The game has also been released on a budget label, so it should only cost between 5-10 pounds from your local computer shop, although it doesn't feature any instructions as they are kept on the CD, which is great for people with printers, but us printerless people are up a certain creek without a wooden thing to help row with!

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