O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
Scratches was originally released in 2006 (with updated Director’s Cut being available since 2007) at just the right time. By that point both adventure games and horror titles not focusing on action became somewhat rare, and a change was yet to come. It was far from being the first attempt at a screen-by-screen transition first person view game (like Myst) that focused on horror, but unlike a lot of its competition it was really well made and told a simple, yet genuinely engaging story. Returning to this game 12 years later certainly feels interesting.
Despite the low even by 2006 game resolution, rather weak animations when involving anything but room transition scenes, the game manages to still feel good. The sound design is great, the music by Cellar of Rats is amazing and the way the story unfolds is really well made. You get more and more caught up with the mystery of the mansion and the events that transpired there along with the simplistic and somewhat incompetent but quite believable main character. And for a very long time the game even avoids a lot of the problems common for Myst-like adventures like being too vague about what to do and what does what and where.
Though, in time, that comes and comes in spades. It is rather unfortunate, but after a slightly overbearing beginning, where you spend most of the time running back to the phone to call a friend and, essentially, get a next objective, and several slight missteps of the first hours, the game is exciting to play. And then several hours in it starts making all sorts of poor decisions. There’s a pixel hunting “puzzle” that’s so picky about the spot to click that even if you know where it is, it’s hard to do it. There are moments that have completely non-obvious solutions, because while there is logic to it, it’s too far fetched to feel right. And there are moments where you simply cannot do the thing that you know you must do until the game wants you to do it (and that moment doesn’t feel any more special than anything before that). It’s hard ignore how the game gets worse in it’s closing act. After which you might play a particularly weak bonus epilogue story added in Director’s Cut that feels unnecessary and isn’t particularly interesting. Which can leave you with a less fond memory of the game, than what it deserves.
But now it’s time to put the things into perspective again. As mentioned, the timing for the game release was incredibly lucky. The same year saw Penumbra Tech Demo release, which would signal the change that was coming in first person adventure and horror titles and was already experimented in Half-Life 2 mods or even realMyst. And 2007 brought Penumbra and Portal – games, that has shown people that first person adventure or action adventure titles can work amazingly well with a more FPS control approach in a fully realtime rendered environment. So did it feel weird to return to the screen by screen prerendered gameplay of Scratches in 2018? Well… yeah. It didn’t feel bad, as the way the controls and transitions are handled in Scratches is really smart. But given it’s focus on excitement of exploration of this 3D environment of a mansion and its territory, I couldn’t help but feel that would it have been done with the “post-Penumbra” approach, it would’ve fit the game much better. Slowly creeping through a dark hallway would’ve felt more natural, then just clicking the mouse several times.
Which, i suppose, is going to be the challenge Asylum would face – the next project from the developers of Scratches that has been in development for a very long time and features the same prerendered point and click approach. As for the Scratches – while it hasn’t aged as gracefully as I have hoped and it does have some rather unfortunate annoyances closer to the end of the game, it’s still a very good horror adventure title with a solid story and a mystery that knows how to peak your curiosity.