Delphine Software was not well known for its stellar approach to adventure gaming. In fact, they were responsible for a couple of games that could be chalked among some of the worst ever designed in the genre during its golden age. But with Cruise for a Corpse, bless their souls, the good people at Delphine tried something different.
The early morning of a detective Raoul Dusentier is interrupted by a message. A telegram, the story is set in 1927, is inviting him to a cruise held by a rich businessman Niklos Karboudjan. This makes a good change in the rainy Parisian climate, so Raoul cordially accepts the invitation to the CRUISE FOR A CORPSE (echo... echo... cho...ho...o).
Raoul has barely time to set down his luggage, when Hector, the butler for the good Mr Karboudjan, crashes in, stammering that his master is dead. Promptly the good detective follows the servant and does, indeed, find the millionaire from his onboard office with a knife in his back. Before he can do anything else, a sinister figure clubs both of the living men in the room unconscious and when they wake up, the body is gone.
From there, the game begins in earnest. Playing as Raoul, you have to dig into what really happened and who killed Mr Karboudjan. And where his body went as well. This is also where it is easy to notice, the Cruise for a Corpse was trying to be a bit different from other adventure games: it has a greater emphasis on talking to people.
What this means is, that you have to walk all around the ship, talking to the other passengers about everything. A bit by bit, you gather more topics, which in turn can be talked about with other passengers and by doing this, you further on the in-game clock stolen almost directly from Sierra's Colonel's Bequest. Each correct checkpoint you reach furthers the time, which in turn opens up new avenues to investigate. At times, you even have to examine other peoples cabins or solve puzzles.
But the way this system has been executed leaves a lot of room for improvement. You see, while you can talk to people about everything, this doesn't mean the time is furthered despite you are talking to the right person about the right thing. The checkpoint is marked only after you talk to the right person about the right thing during the right time. This leads to the situation, where you often have to exhaust each topic of conversation time after time again in order to get the time moving forward.
There are other checkpoints besides conversational ones. At times, there are incidents you can witness aboard the ship, but these are usually triggered only if you walk the screen from the right direction. Basically, this means you have to walk around quite a bit at times in hopes of triggering an event. You also have to peek in the cabin windows quite often at one point in order to witness shenanigans between people onboard.
Now, I don't know if triggering these events and how they work a bit clunkily is an issue with how the game has been implemented in ScummVM or if this is how it originally works. If it was always like this, then all I can say, that this was a decent but highly flawed attempt from Delphine in creating a more narrative-driven adventure. But if the way this works is an issue with ScummVM and the game actually should work better, then I'd call it a bloody great attempt in changing how adventure games are played. I mean, I guess I could try playing the game under DOSBox, but after finally completing it, I don't feel like doing that any time soon.
Graphically Cruise for a Corpse looks pretty solid. The background art is of the early 90s chunky pixel variety as you'd expect, but what really shines is the animation quality. All the movements of Raoul's are rotoscoped, so his walk cycles and other animations are far more fluent than with most other games of the era. I am not quite certain but Raoul's graphics might be vector-based. There are quite a few views of him emerging from the front part of the screen, where the scaling down does seem quite smooth and crisp. Vectors or even a rudimentary 3D mesh would seem like a more obvious tech to use here rather than having multiple animations of him just scaling up or down.
The game also uses quite a few cinematic screens and angles in conveying the story. While the in-game screens are usually what you'd expect of an old adventure game, the cutscenes are far more playful in their presentation. This does make me wonder, had Raoul been done in 3D, there probably would have been more than a few screens in the game as well shown from extreme angles in the style of Alone in the Dark.
Another great thing about the game is the use of smart cursors. Instead of having a tonne different verbs at your disposal, each clicked hotspot reveals only the ones you can use in the given time. This isn't the first iteration of the system, as far I know, Lucasfilm games used a version of it, but this might be one the furthest evolved ones in early 90s games. Lucas games had a UI that highlighted the needed verbs but did not remove other verbs, here there are no unnecessary commands at all.
As you'd expect, there is no voice acting in the game. There's actually very few sound effects at all, which is kinda odd considering the game takes place on a ship, which is a place with a rich aural tapestry. Sounds of creaking blanks, crashing water and squealing seagulls would have been something I'd expect myself at the least. The music ranges from decent to irritating, but there's not much of that either.
There are things to like in Cruise for Corpse. I like the attempts it makes towards more story-driven gameplay despite it having severe issues in how it does it and the story manages to take a bit convoluted turn as well towards the end. For my tastes, at least. Furthermore, what comes to the script, I have a feeling there might be some translation issues with the script. The dialogue is, in the English version at least, tonally a tad inconsistent. At times it feels like the game was translated by two different people, of which one was trying to turn it into a comedy whereas the other was dead set on a more serious tone.
But it has a solid foundation that could work well if someone was to consider a remake of the game. Behind all the little technical issues I had with the game, there is an intriguing murder mystery present. It would just take a bit more spit and polish to fully realise it.
Cruise for a Corpse is one of those games not sold anywhere currently. That's probably thanks to Delphine Software being defunct because of a bankruptcy in 2004.
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