Casebook: Episodes 0-3 Review
Played on:
Windows
It's been over a year since New Zealand developer Areo Games first introduced us to Casebook, their unique, live-action adventure game series. The series follows the exploits of James Burton, a straight-laced and admirably beard-shadowed police investigator, dedicated to bringing the bad guys to justice.
These days, live action games are a rarity; by using the live-action approach, Areo automatically pays homage to the quirky Full Motion Video games of the '90s—a genre that quickly died out due to an excess of well, crappy FMV games. Seeing the potential in this long-abandoned cinematic method, Areo created its own proprietary Areograph technology, which uses a robotic photographer to shoot hundreds of thousands of photographs and then stitch them together. It's a method that makes for a compelling degree of realism and is perfectly suited to their true-crime-style games. Having thus far released only three Casebook episodes, Areo's got us on tenterhooks as we wait for the fourth. Luckily, with the Special Edition re-release of the first three episodes, we have a little something to keep us busy.
The feather-light and humorous demo Episode 0 showed us the softer side of Burton as he did some investigating for his elderly aunt, but Episodes 1-3 show Burton at his most hard-boiled. Anyone who's played Casebook before will find the gameplay very familiar because not much has changed from the original versions of these episodes. They still follow the pattern of cinematic/gameplay/cinematic, you're still playing Burton's nameless, faceless “partner”, and you still spend the game photographing crime scenes and analyzing trace evidence. You still need to be meticulous and vigilant in order not to miss anything, and you still have to play various mini-games in the lab van and match bits of evidence in the evidence folder. What's different is the addition of a couple of new mini-games, as well as a Skip button that lets you avoid them if mini-games aren't your thing. Also new is the ranking system where you can become anything from Lab Technician to Forensic Expert. The better you are at gathering relevant clues and matching evidence without hints, the better your rank. And in response to complaints that the games were too easy, the evidence folder has become more challenging, allowing players to ask for hints rather than being given them by default.
These are all good changes; unfortunately, what hasn't changed is the graphical resolution of the game. Granted, Casebook is made by a small team with new technology so allowances must be made. Even so, the video sequences are extremely washed out and fuzzy and in order to make the game files of a reasonable downloadable size, the crime scene images are compressed to the point of being unreadable. Your job is to photograph trace evidence, but oftentimes you'll snap a photo of an area more because your camera reticule says to, rather than because you have any clue what it is you're looking at. Also problematic—the bugs. In Episode II: The Watcher, I encountered a couple of ugly, show-stopping bugs; one where I couldn't progress due to a cutscene that wouldn't trigger, and another where an error message insisted I had more evidence to analyze when I indeed had none left. In addition to these issues, a bug that intermittently haunted all of the episodes was a crash caused by clicking the crime computer when lab experts Pete or Anja were talking onscreen. These glitches, while certainly a nuisance, weren't insurmountable since all of them could be fixed by shutting the game down and starting it up again. (Also, a word of caution to all Casebook players—minimize the game at your own risk.)
While the Casebook series definitely has some graphics and stability issues, it also has a lot of fun to offer and forensics nerds (like me) will love getting to step into the trenchcoat and ugly black shoes of a forensics specialist. With the new ranking system, more is at stake as you try and achieve the title of Forensics Specialist by avoiding hints and figuring things out on your own. For movie lovers, the acting too is a big reason to enjoy the game. All of the Casebook games are really well cast and acted, the standout being the main character, James Burton—played by actor Julian Temple—who looks like the love child of David Duchovny and Eric Bana and steals nearly every scene with his squinty, Clint Eastwood delivery. (I say “nearly” because he loses out whenever Pete, the funny and charismatic Scottish lab technician comes on screen.) Each episode is as well written as it is acted, with convincing dialog and character exchanges that really fire you up to catch the criminals and really build loyalty to your partner, Burton. The episodes are OK to play as standalones but are much better when played together, in sequence. Each ends with a clever lead-in to the next, and after the dramatic end of Episode 3, I for one am totally fired up to play Episode 4.
The Casebook series isn't without flaws; it has some troubling bugs and its low res graphics are bound to disappoint eye-candy enthusiasts. Adventure purists too, might kvetch about what they see as a low difficulty level. Despite these things, the series' high entertainment quotient far overshadows any technical issues the individual games might have and gamers willing to try them will be treated to some of the best casting, acting and writing seen lately in interactive entertainment. Fans of the now extinct (and much-maligned) Full Motion Video games take note--this is a live-action dream come true. The new Casebook Special Edition trilogy is available now for $19.95 on the Casebook website.
