Secret Files: Tunguska (2006)

Secret Files: Tunguska (2006), developed by Animation Arts, published by Ravenscourt

Back in the era of the perceived death of adventure games, in the barren space of the first decade of the 21st century, the genre was in the firm grip of European developers. Such was the hunger for some pointing and clicking that even relatively terrible games like Secret Files: Tunguska found an audience and managed to grow into a series of several games.

A note about the developer/publisher: Secret Files: Tunguska is currently sold under Animation Arts and Ravenscourt. However, the original developer was Fusionsphere Systems, and the original publisher was Deep Silver. It can be assumed that the rights have changed hands.

Nina Kalenkow arrives to the musuem in Berlin the meet her father, only to find his office ransacked and him nowhere to be found. As the police offer no help, Nina takes it upon herself to look into the matter. The only helpful individual he finds from the museum is another researcher, Max, with whom she soon plunges into a decades-old conspiracy of what happened over Tunguska, Russia, in the early 20th century. 

The search for her father takes both Nina and Max all over the world, until they manage to find the cabal of the baddies from Antarcica, where the nonsensical story is finally resolved, the mysterious villains are brought to death, and some mysteries are at least partly resolved to wait for a sequel, which came out mere a couple of years later.

I'm going to tackle the good things first. The game looks pretty solid. The pre-rendered backgrounds are detailed, and the characters look good enough and are well enough animated. Technically, there's really nothing wrong with the game, as it plays well and even has a hotspot revealer, which makes the game a bit more bearable to play, as otherwise you'd be hotspot hunting more than enough. It also has to be said that the reviews of the era seem to have been very favourable to it, a notion I do not share at all.

So, why don't I like this game? It boils simply down to the puzzles. And how they are telegraphed to you, the player. Granted, some of the puzzles do make sense, real-life sense. Some of them even make adventure game sense, but there are a good few in the game that make no sense at all. 

Here's a puzzle: you need to make a random dude a fried fish dinner. You get the fish easily enough from a local fisherman, but there's only one place to cook it, a local tavern. The tavern owner is no help, but there is a fireplace there you can use. There are no utensils, however. So, in order to cook the fish, you need some sort of tray, which is obviously a road sign you can get outside and then just stick it in the fireplace with the fish. But alas, you can't get the fish from the fireplace, as the sign is obviously hot. Luckily for you, there's a flag you can steal and use as an oven mitt. Not straight away, though, as you need to get it wet, so you need to drape the flag on a speed sign, which will allow the rain to wet the flag, and you can then get the fish. Then there's just the question of seasoning it with lemon, which you obviously get by covering the speed sign again, causing a passing by truck to almost crash. This near accident throws a crate from the truck. And that crate contains a lemon.  

Simple, isn't it?

If you like these kinds of puzzles, you'll like, no, you'll love Secret Files: Tunguska. The puzzle design revels in making you function in a way no sane human would ever function.  The use of moon logic is very, very strong with this game.

I'm certain there's a very specific group of adventure gamers who love this kind of adventure game. Personally, I have very little tolerance for this specific style of adventuring anymore. I prefer logic, which makes sense.

Anyone interested in giving Secret Files: Tunguska a spin can do so by heading to either GOG or Steam. They should be on sale often enough.