Lockdown

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Delron - "Review Compilation"
I think this is aiming to be a psychological thriller, but it doesn�t have quite enough going on in either department.

On the psychological drama side, this is a story about a mass shooting/suicide, told from the perspective of the shooter. The shooter has serious mental health problems and a great deal of resentment, and uncovering this is a major focus of the game. Most of this doesn�t add much to �serious mental health problems and a great deal of resentment�, though. On encountering the dead bodies of his former co-workers, we get a little information about how he didn�t like them.

The media res opening suggests that it might be intended as that venerable old saw of psychological thrillers, the Dreadful Past Conveniently Obscured by Amnesia, but � thankfully � this turns out to just be the effect of the player�s limited knowledge, rather than the protagonist�s.

And on the thriller side, there�s kind of a lack of thrills. You�re fortified inside a base, with The Authorities hammering on the door � that�s a reliable premise for building tension over the course of a story, but beyond its initial introduction, it�s basically ignored. You have an objective at the outset of the story, and advance steadily towards that objective until you accomplish it. That�s OK for gameplay purposes, kinda, but really bad for story.

The story isn�t hugely interested in the SF part either; we never really learn what the science guys are studying or why. The parts you can interact with are all rather pulpy: Big Machine With Buttons, Huge Shiny Crystal � but the overactive enthusiasm and melodrama that I generally take as hallmarks of self-conscious science pulp are absent. The principal reason to situate the action in a science base, rather than in any other workplace, is so that puzzles are required to complete the action.
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