Culpa Innata Preview

It’s been a long time since I’ve played an adventure game that actually has a good story. Culpa Innata promises to be a pretty good adventure game, making up for the dull or silly adventures I’ve seen lately.

Culpa Innata begins in the future, a future where poverty and crime have almost been eliminated in a new world order called the World Union. This new alliance is founded on the premise that focusing on what makes a nation prosperous will also make the people happy, and therefore eliminate their need to commit crimes. The downside to this is that a consumer mentality is paramount, and everything is judged by money and financial power. People even have personal index ratings that reflect these values.

The World Union consists of several allied countries. Countries that haven’t joined are either considered Rogue States, or are “unexploited” regions (whatever that means). In order for individual people from other countries to join the Union, they must become students and learn how to be good citizens. Shockingly, a new citizen has been murdered and the Global Peace and Security Network state police must move quickly to solve the crime. A young and ambitious officer, Phoenix Wallis, is selected to lead the investigation. Another young officer will also help in the investigation.

This sets up the scenario for an interesting and involving murder mystery. As Phoenix, players will spend much of their game time investigating by interviewing people, searching locations and solving puzzles. The main locality is the GPSN office, with other locations scattered around town. Phoenix will be talking to lots of people, gathering information about the murder victim. While the initial story setup isn’t very believable (why would two obviously young officers be assigned to such an important case, and why only two? We also have to wonder why a police officer would be wearing a uniform that shows her belly button), the ensuing drama quickly grabs attention. I also had to laugh at the politically motivated statement in the game’s introduction that the World Union had adopted Westernization, presumably as a bad thing.

Besides well-written dialogue, the story features good voice-acting and characterization. We find ourselves caring about what Phoenix thinks and does. The general atmosphere of the game is carefully crafted, with a fine attention to detail. The various localities are full of visual objects such as posters and pictures that depict the political and moral viewpoints of the current society. The comments that are voiced when objects are clicked are informative and believable.

A few possible problems exist, one which involves the dialogue method. When interviewing people, several dialogue choices appear, but the branching is badly designed. Often players will have to begin a conversation again to get to an original statement. However, because of a strange decree by the designers that only one interview can take place with a suspect per day, this process can quickly become annoying. This really needs fixing in the final edition of the game. Another minor annoyance is the placement of directional arrows for movement, there appears to be no rhyme or reason for their location. Sometimes there is a white arrow, sometimes a blue, and sometimes no arrow, even when Phoenix can walk to a certain area. And finally, players will have to click more than once on objects, because the “use” icons change.

So far, the puzzles are fun and not too challenging, but I haven’t gotten much further into the game than several game days. These early puzzles fit well into the story line and don’t appear to be arbitrary.