Gemini Rue

Genre: Point-and-Click Adventure Game
Developer/Publisher: Joshua Neurnberger/Wadjet Eye Games
Release Date: February 24, 2011
Platform: PC (also on Mobile)
Time Played: 7.5 Hours

For a change of pace, I thought I’d start incorporating a bit of video games here from time to time. The focus will still be on books, but gaming is another hobby I’m passionate about, and it might be interesting (maybe just for me) to mix it up here a bit.

If you’re a fan of point-and-click adventure games, you’re likely familiar with Wadjet Eye Games, a game studio founded by Dave Gilbert that has been publishing a steady stream of quality adventure games for just over a decade now. The genre has really had a resurgence in the last few years, and in my mind, Wadjet Eye Games has been at the forefront of that. I’ve only played about half of the games they’ve published, but I plan to go through the entire catalogue eventually. If you’re new to their games, I’d recommend starting with The Blackwell Legacy, the first in a series of supernatural detective stories.

Joshua Neurnberger really nailed the atmosphere in Gemini Rue. You’ll get the Blade Runner and Cowboy Bebop tingles as you walk through the dark and perpetually rainy city, stopping to look up information on a glowing streetside terminal screen. Half of this story takes place on the streets of a war-ravished planet ruled by a crime syndicate and poisoned by drug trafficking. The other half takes place in a hidden facility which seems to be wiping people’s memories and training them in various disciplines. For a section in the middle of the game, you can play both stories simultaneously (Broken Age style, although this is the earlier game). I’m not usually a fan of stories with two separate plotlines like this, whether in games or in books, so that did put me off a bit. I may be alone in that complaint, though, and once I got over that I started to really enjoy the writing. The story and universe are interesting throughout, and the two plotlines end up coming together in a really satisfying way.

The atmosphere is strengthened by a fantastic original soundtrack by Nathan Allen Pinard, who I was excited to find out also did the soundtrack for Technobabylon, a 2015 game published by Wadjet Eye Games that I haven’t gotten to yet. It’s a series of dark orchestral pieces that just drip with cinematic tension. The sound design itself is great too, particularly the thundering rain while out on the street and how it changes to a pattering on the rooftops while indoors or a smacking drip on a balcony floor outside, but also just the general ambient machinery sounds of being in a generator room or in the cockpit of a spaceship. It’s all just so well done. On top of that, Wadjet Eye games are fully voice-acted, and it tends to be of quite high quality. This one is no exception, although there were a couple of dodgy lines in a few scenes.

These games tend to have retro pixel-art graphics, which is style-choice that some may not like, but they do it really well here. In Gemini Rue, some backgrounds almost look like pixellated paintings. The dark blue and purple hues of the city really hit that noir science-fiction feel. It’s an updated version of the graphics with which I grew up, so there’s always a bit of nostalgia involved there too.

The mechanics are also an updated, streamlined, version of early adventure games. This escapes some of the common pitfalls that would often taint the genre, such as frustrating pixel hunting, puzzles involving completely irrational item combinations, and incomprehensible stories. There is a little pixel hunting, but it’s really only for achievement secrets. Any plot items are fairly obvious on the screen or have clues that will lead you to them if you’re paying attention. I did spend some time wandering aimlessly in the middle of the story, trying to figure out the next move, but mostly I was able to keep moving forward, which is what you want in a story-driven game. It’s not the challenging puzzles of the old games in the genre, but when the focus is on the narrative, you don’t want to be stuck for hours or Googling answers. That was never really fun anyway, back in the day. It was poor design that we lived with, due to really having no alternative.

My main complaint would be the combat element in this game, shooting at enemies from cover. While I will always applaud them for trying to incorporate new ideas into the genre, this was not a fun aspect of the game. It thankfully doesn’t come up very often, but after that first or second shootout, it really started to bore me.