My Quarantine Diary: Adam’s Venture Origins

We have A LOT of time on our hands at the moment which has led me into looking at older games that I happened to download as part of one of the online services or was on sale at one point. As I clicked through my library on my PS4 I saw a game I downloaded a few years ago called Adam’s Venture Origins. I remember playing for about ten minutes in the past and thought that the game played like the Uncharted games. Seeing as I’ve beaten all the Uncharted games, some more than once, I decided to see what Adam was up to in his budget game. Well let me tell you it was nothing as epic as what Nathan Drake or even Lara Croft were doing.

You start off in asleep in your father’s library and you can literally do nothing and continue to sleep. The game actually rewards you for doing such. Once you get up off your ass you go find Dad’s new hottie assistant and attempt to solve a puzzle. This is the first of MANY puzzles you will have to solve, this game has NO combat and is basically a walking simulator with random weird puzzles thrown in. Some of the puzzles are so simple you laugh, others you need to find a YouTube walkthrough because you really don’t need to spend more than four hours playing this “game.”

The graphics are good for a low budget PS3 game, the animations are non existent and when you use the camera to look at your surroundings the digital tiling is insanely noticeable. The animations are terrible during what passes as a cut scene and there is no difference in the enemies you kill. The world is bland and you just want to get to the next checkpoint to finish this game. The voice acting is laughable at best, it’s jarring and seems to have had the budget of only one take per line.

Story-wise the game isn’t terrible, you’re an adventurer in the early part of the 20th Centrury, looking for Solomon’s Mine. What makes the game cringeworthy is the lousy dialogue and weird self-awareness of this game. The only person who can be self-aware in games is Deadpool, let’s leave it at that! Most of what Adam says is also insanely sexist, now I’m not a member of the #MeToo movement and like a few jokes here and there but man most of them were insanely out of line. This guy Adam thinks that by being demeaning to his counterpart will land him her love, it is really strange really.

The controls are pretty rough as well. You mostly walk around an solve puzzles, but sometimes you have to press Square and use your grapple to get across gaps and such. Since it isn’t as responsive as most games you fall to your death a lot because the game doesn’t read the prompt or your signal to press Square is so instantaneous you miss your window. Thankfully there is no combat in this game, I don’t think I would have put the time in to beat it if I was getting gunned down due to bad cover mechanics. There are stealth missions though, which are laughably bad and annoying. If you can memorize a guard’s movement’s you should be good. They don’t vary from certain paths so you can navigate them pretty well. Keep in mind Adam is slower than a sloth when he’s crouched though.

I will be honest, I don’t like to bash games, it’s obvious people put in their time and effort to create something they hope will be loved. The developers obviously believed in what they were doing because the game is playable, it just isn’t fun. Puzzles are boring or too damn hard, the story really doesn’t engage me, and the dialogue is tripe. If you want an easy platinum or 1000 Gamerscore then grab this title, if that isn’t important to you then there are many other games this type that you can actually enjoy. Grab Tomb Raider or Uncharted, they are much more enjoyable and worth your money.