The Rocky Horror Interactive Show

Adventure 1999 Windows On-Line Entertainment Third Person Humorous

Bizarre but entertaining adventure

The legendary rock musical that is the Rocky Horror Picture Show might seem an unusual choice for a video game and in many ways, it is. However, its sheer strangeness actually works quite well on the small screen, and for fans of the musical or adventure games, this makes for an unusual experience. The game takes the form of an interactive adventure, where players must enter the home of Frank 'n' Furter in an attempt to rescue their other half. This is done by exploring the mansion, solving the various puzzles that you find within its twisted depths and collecting the nine pieces of the mysterious Demedusa Machine. Helping you out is the narrator (voiced by Christopher Lee) but hindering your progress is the 'game devil' (played by Richard O'Brien, the show's creator. Adding to the challenge is the strict time limit with only 30 minutes of real time available to complete your task. This is a surprisingly successful adaptation of the movie and musical. The puzzles on display retain the bizarre quality of the source material and are a mix of logical and crazy, but which are never less than entertaining to solve. The visuals retain the twisted charm of the originals too, with lots of detailed environments and character work that add to the appeal, while controls are a little tricky to get the hang of to start with but soon become second nature. While the game is perhaps not a classic adventure, in the league of Gabriel Knight, Discworld or Broken Sword, it remains one with a unique vision that offers a lot of entertainment if you're in the right mood.

An ok adventure with a twisted story

If you like campy movies, the ones that tell the kind of weird stories involving love and aliens and at the same time spouting blood and gore from its protagonists, then you'll find this game quite interesting. What this adventure manages to do well is to create a good enough story rollercoaster in this B movie setting. However, it fails quite miserably at a few other aspects. One such aspect is the kind of puzzles that it offers you. These are quite tame, not in the spirit of the adventure. And so, after a while you'll be taken out of the weird and campy atmosphere and taken to an absolutely different area, this time of mediocrity. It's a bad sign, because the game is otherwise nicely drawn, features, an interesting story but the interactivity is rather rushed and rather unsatisfactory. Thus, your play session will end rather soon, especially if you're more demanding with your interactive bits, with your puzzles. However, if you can make abstraction of them, settle in for a really cool B movie like story that's all sort of wacky and weird!

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