The Ward

Point and click adventures have traditionally been funny. Let me rephrase that. Point and click adventures are traditionally meant to be funny, with only a select few actually achieving their goal (such as most of LucasArts' output and the Discworld series), while their serious counterparts fall flat on their ridiculous faces for the most part - with the notable exception of The Last Express.

The Ward goes right back to such dead-on-their-feet classics as Beneath A Steel Sky or the more recent Sanitarium and In Cold Blood, going for a dark, brooding atmosphere, logical and unwacky puzzles and plenty of moments where the main character can get killed. The story is pretty unimpressive too: a mission to the Moon goes horribly wrong, all your crewmates are killed, there's a space stah'on littered with bodies and crawling with aliens, the future of mankind is at stake, yadda, yadda, yadda. The interface is functional enough, but the whole thing smacks of being three or four years old and there is little incentive to blunder your way through the textbook puzzles. It's a shame the dialogue isn't voiced because, judging from the comical quality of the intro's acting, it would have been a laugh a minute in a way that the lamentable Arcaterams.

It's hard to knock the developer, Croatian company Fragile Bits, who made the game without any funding whatsoever in their spare time and have been waiting almost a year for a developer to show interest. But the fact still remains that you have to pay - even if it is a reduced price - for the finished product, it isn't a free download from the Net as so many unfinanced mods are, and as such just isn't good enough.