Today, I’m bringing another game of yester-year into review. This time it’s Normality, a 1996 3D point-and-click adventure game by the late British game-developer, Gremlin Interactive, known for their many colourful and quirky titles.
In Normality, you take control of Kent, a happy-go-lucky guy living in a dystopic world with no sun or fun in sight (a.k.a. a semi-futuristic UK). Kent joins a group looking to overthrow their depressing dictator, stop the pollution that’s blacking out the sky and get the people stuck to their TV screens off their asses.
Normality is available from Good Old Games.
On with the review…
Gameplay: 4/5 – The game was really ahead of its time with a first person perspective to add depth to the point-and-click control schemes. While moving may feel a tad awkward at first (and I think the mouse-walking in particular is just plain useless), after a while you adapt and the playing feels natural. However, having the look up and down options on Page Up and Page Down was a bit of a pain and I did hate that you couldn’t move while Kent was talking without causing the text to disappear off-screen.
Graphics: 3½/5 – The game uses a Doom-esque pseudo 3D look, where the environments are 3D but all the items you interact with and people you talk to are 2D sprites. Admittedly the game hasn’t aged very well in this regard, but there’s still a lot of production quality though the pre-rendered character models can look a tad awkward. There is, however, a lot of detail in the game’s dystopic world which I think shows that they certainly put a lot of effort into the game.
Animation: 4/5 – Animations are also a mixed bag. In-game animations are not really worth writing home about, but the cut-scene animations are actually pretty impressive and there’s a lot of them. Sure, they’re all pre-rendered CGI and admittedly the characters look very rough, but the physical comedy and the great execution of camera-angles and the like is what makes them stand out.
Music: 3½/5 – The music is delightfully cheery and cartoony but with occasional darker themes giving it a bit of an edge. The recurring main theme really sticks in your head and I think all the background themes really fit well into their respective locations. However, the music stops short of being excellent, but I certainly never got bored with it.
Sound: 3½/5 – The voice-acting is a mixed bag and it even took me a while to get used to Kent’s voice (provided by Corey Feldman). The acting performances are fairly memorable, if a little cheesy and over-the-top, but I think that’s what gives the game its strength, especially given that the in-game animations aren’t anything special. However, some of the supporting characters (especially Brian) sounded pretty pathetic.
Plot: 3/5 – While interesting on the off-set, the game’s storyline doesn’t have a whole lot of depth. Still, the game keeps you reasonably motivated for your next task, but all the events occur in a very straight-forward fashion without too many plot-twists.
Difficulty: Erratic – It seemed to me like Normality couldn’t choose whether it wanted to be a brain-draining puzzle-fest or a leisurely adventure title with logical puzzle solutions. What you get instead is an uncomfortable mix of puzzles that require fiddling about with the play-controls, puzzles which seem to solve themselves without much effort and some puzzles where the logic is just not inherently obvious. I think the opening, the capture scenario and the finale are the most logically designed parts of the game, while the others drift between frustrating and bizarrely simplistic.
Score: 72% – Normality has definitely not aged too well and it perhaps tried a lot of new things that hadn’t quite been perfected (3D game engine, voice-acting, CG cutscenes etc.) but at the same time, you really have to admire Gremlin for their boldness in trying to push the point-and-click adventure game forward. There’s a lot of things Normality could have done better from a gameplay and puzzle design point of view, but I think adventure game fans are going to find it an interesting and fun title never the less.
