Sunday, November 6, 2011

TRAUMA

TRAUMA is a point and click exploration game.  The story is fairly simple: the main character is hospitalized after a car accident.  You're playing through four dreams she has while in the hospital.


The game is available on Steam for $6.99 outside of a sale.  I got it through the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle.

Each dream has its proper ending and three alternate endings.  The proper ending is usually the easiest one to find, but on a couple of occasions I got an alternate ending first.  This is due to the photos you find in each dream.  Some of them give you gameplay hints or clue you in on the main character's life before the accident, but a few of them give you hints for obtaining alternate endings in other dreams.

Gameplay is mostly point and click, but with a twist.  There are some mouse gestures you can use as well.  There are some for moving around, which are necessary from time to time to get a certain point of view and find a photo.  The others are hinted at in each dream, and do special things within all the dreams.  I messed around with it and discovered two of them before finding where they're hinted at.

The dreams can be played through in any order, as many times as you like.  On the main menu, each dream also has a button you can click to show what endings and photos you've found.  I would stress getting the endings first if you can, because getting all the endings for a dream gives you the ability to sense when you're nearby a photo.  Once you have this, when you bring up the photo panel from within a dream (simply by moving the mouse towards the top of the screen), hovering over a photo you haven't found yet will tell you how far away from that photo you currently are.  It doesn't blatantly give away the location of the photo either, so you still have to look around and exhaust your navigational options to find them.  On more than one occasion this meant I had to find a viewpoint I'd never found before, and usually required the mouse gestures.

Time-wise, the game is fairly short.  I beat it and got all endings and photos in, according to Steam, 2.3 hours.  After you get everything, there isn't really much replay value.  If you want to view the movies again, there's a menu for that.

The game is done in Flash, so if you run some form of Flash cookie control you'll have to make sure it won't delete your save file.

Overall, it's a pretty decent way to spend a couple hours racking your brain looking for that last freaking photo or trying to find the exact viewpoint you need to trigger an alternate ending.

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