Adventure games are not dead — certainly not in Europe, they aren't. In fact, adventures may nowadays be the third pillar of PC gaming right behind MMORPGs and strategy simulations over there, and every year a number of big name releases from Germany, France and the Czech Republic guarantee that adventure game fans never run short of puzzles to solve. It is often argued that titles who even come close to the greatness of a Monkey Island or Gabriel Knight are few and far between. In actuality, the same was true in the 90's for games not made by Lucas Arts or Sierra, and both just happened to stop investing in the business. Imagine Marvel and DC Comics abandoning the superhero comic market all of a sudden.

One of the games that stood out as exceptionally good and became a true classic praised no less than the genre giants was Broken Sword by the British Revolution Software. The mystery thriller won the hearts of adventure game fans and casual gamers alike not only through its many solid gold puzzles, but also an enthralling plot that took the best of both Gabriel Knight and Indiana Jones, and not the least because it put the loveable character of George Stobbart into the mix, American tourist and the most nosey smart aleck of an amateur detective ever.

It only seems fitting that one of the series that come closest to the good old times — other than Telltale Games' competent episodic Lucas Arts sequels — is so deeply in love with Broken Sword. It seems almost as if the guys at Animation Arts and Fusionsphere Systems wondered what it would be like if Broken Sword didn't jump the shark with the third game and become a 3D Sokoban clone with stealth elements. Secret Files relies on the same proven ingredients as its big role model: Wise cracking protagonists that constantly stumble into big mysteries and conspiracies, as well as travelling between interesting locations all around the world. But can it manage to hold up to its great ancestor? Let's have a look.

German Wii Cover

UK PC Cover

Secret Files: Tunguska betrays its plot already in the title, at least to X-Files veterans and suckers for unsolved phenomena. On June 30th, 1908 a region near the Podkamennaya Tunguska river was shattered by a huge and devastating explosion, said to make the Hiroshima bomb seem like a firecracker in comparison. Reportedly, the whole night that day was illuminated in all of Europe. Fast forward little less than a century. Nina Kalenkow comes to visit her father at his working place at the museum, but all she finds in his office is a huge mess. The authorities show little concern about the assumed disappearence of Wladimir Kalenkow, but Nina finds help in form of the young assistant curator Max. Together they soon discover that all hints point to Nina's father's former research on the Tunguska event in service of the Soviet Union. Soon they find themselves in the firing line of russian intelligence agencies while they travel — of course — all around the world in search for clues to Wladimir's whereabouts and his past research project. But what is that mysterious group of people in black robes that show up everywhere up to?

Tunguska's basic controls are exactly that: basic. Left click triggers interaction with any object or person, right click is for observation. Nina's walking speed is rather slow but thankfully the next room can be usually accessed instantly per double click on an exit. Items can be used and combined like in any other point & click adventure, no surprises here. The novelties of the control system were its options to aid the player in times of cluelessness. One of Secret Files' big advertisement points was the "Snoop Key" feature. Pressing the space key will mark every hot spot on screen with a magnifier icon, sparing the player an elongated pixel hunt. Purists may dismiss the feature, after all searching for the right objecs to interact with can be part of the fun in an adventure game. Detailed high resolution background nowadays tend to make that search a major pain, though, and Secret Files would annoy as well with some nearly invisible items if it weren't for the Snoop Key.

Matters are further simplified by the fact that those items that items that can't be combined with each other don't offer the option to begin with. So after selecting one of the items in the inventory one just needs to hover over the bar too see immediately which combinations are possible. One one hand, that saves the player a lot of tedious experimenting when stuck, but also seems a bit lazy on the writer's part. After all, in truly great adventure classics making the characters comment on stupid actions can be almost as satisfying as progressing. Equally streamlined are the dialogues. There's hardly ever more than three or four topics to chose from during the course of an entire conversation, with very few "useless" lines. In case one misses or forgets any details, important findings are recorded in a journal, which oddly is written in third person, despite being designed like an actual personal journal. The journal has also an additional hint system built in, but it doesn't work as well as the other features.

But now to the essence of any adventure game. Its puzzles are where the game really takes one back to the good old days. The vast majority are based around item combination, only very rarely a logic puzzle is thrown in for a change. Everything is as traditional and down-home as can be. Nina and Max cannot die, and while some scenes are staged to mediate a sense of urgency, there's never any time limit to your actions. Most challenges are designed better-than-average, and especially later in the game some will get your head smoking. There's no downright nonsensical puzzles, but make sure to take along a good portion of ye good olde adventure logic, or you'll never get ideas like taping your cell phone onto a cat to abuse her as a mobile wiretap.

Secret Files: Tunguska (PC)

If the puzzles are the meat, the writing serves as the flavoring in the art of adventure game cuisine. And this is sadly the point where most more recent attempts fall short. Secret Files: Tunguska has its issues in that department, too, but it's no total failure. The two heroes, especially Nina, are written as a pair of loudmouths and smart-asses, and the writers felt obligated to make them comment every observation with a clever, funny sentence. The humour in those lines is pretty hit-and-miss, and loaded with popculture references. Max and Nina are noticeably genre-savvy, not only for adventure games, but also mystery and spy thrillers. This makes for a rather nerdy humor, which could have used a little more subtlelty regarding its references. The main plot itself, however, is written consistently well and the mystery case is genuinely intriguing until right before the end, when it pulls an Indiana Jones and an X-Files at the same time and becomes almost batshit insane. A patch for the game (which was included in the English retail version) vastly extended the ending, but did little to make it less crazy. The low point of the writing is definitely the "romance" of Max and Nina, though. It just comes out of nowhere after ten lines of dialogue between the two and feels wildly misplaced. Here the writers should have taken more lessons of the carefully developed relationship of George Stobbart and Nico Collard in the first Broken Sword.

Even the best writing (which Secret Files doesn't have) can only do so much when the voice acting is bad. The German dub was pretty solid with its main characters, only the minor roles were a bit of a letdown. The English voiceover, however, is an entirely different beast. The voice of an annoying yankee brat just doesn't cut it for the educated character of a russian-german immigrant, nor does the apathetic voice of Max help anyone to get exited over the plot. Despite the many, mostly European locations visited, there's a total lack of accent variations, everyone just sounds North American, even the Irish characters (given, a similar problem existed with the German version as well). A German-dubbed, English-subbed version does not exist, unfortunately.

If anything, Secret Files sure looks good for an adventure game. The 2D background are full of little details, and the character models fit in quite well, as long as they don't get too close to the camera and reveal their low polygon count. More care has been taken for the protagonists to make them look attractive at any angle. Some key events are shown in short prerendered clips in which the characters look slightly better than the main game, but not to an extend where it disturbs a consistent overall impression.

So while Animation Arts and Fusionsphere System didn't create the new paragon of adventure games, Secret Files was still better than most of its kind in its age. It was vastly successful in Germany and at least reasonably so in the rest of Europe, enough to secure a sequel and porting to the two "adventure game consoles", the Wii and DS. Both are identical in terms of content, but of course there were compromises to be made on the technical side.

The Wii version runs in a lower resolution, but still looks mostly similar to the original. It offers 4:3 and widescreen modes, the former results in cropped backgrounds that require scrolling even when they fit on one screen on the PC. Additionally, Nina can be controlled directly with the Nunchuk. Backgrounds on the DS look surprisingly good, but the characters are hardly recognizable. To compensate for this, their faces are displayed as still images on the upper screen during dialogues. Since there's no right clicking with the stylus, the desired action has to be selected with an extra click. The biggest difference in the portable version, though, is the lack of voiceover. Well, at least compared to the English talkie versions that isn't too big a loss.