Imagine a world free of illness and disease, crime and poverty. Imagine a world where there hasn't been a murder in a decade and a half. Imagine a society where selfishness rules and the most greedy people of all are in charge. There is also no privacy because you are wired to a network that can view everything you do. That world is what Culpa Innata is all about.

A Story Among Stories

Culpa Innata is what may just be the most innovative adventure game to come out in 2007. The story revolves around the year 2047, where most of the world has merged into the World Union. The World Union consists of the USA, Japan, Europe, etc. The entire history has been drawn out in the story in such an elaborate way that it makes it seem very real.

The game's intro is that of a strange room with a militaristic-looking man teaching a group of youngsters about the sun and how it is going to explode earlier than they expected, and just how they plan on solving the problem. It is then followed by a ceremony of new immigration graduates of people from the rogue states being inducted as citizens to the world union. This is where the main character you are going to control throughout the game is introduced. The story then unfolds to tell you the entire point of the game: there has been a murder, the first one in years; and it is your job to investigate it.

Gameplay

The game is a third-person adventure game with various puzzles and interrogations that allow you to proceed with the story to solve the case. The controls are quite simple: click to walk or perform an action, double-click to run and right-click to open your PA. The PA shows you the inventory and all the information you have so far, as well as a save function and the game map.

As you proceed through the game, various puzzles arrive and I must say, they are some of the better puzzles I've seen in adventure games. They are quite complex and they all intertwine together. There is even one particular puzzle that you might find to be impossible, but it is not. I actually needed a little help on that one, but (as bad as this might make me look) my mother beat it in about 2 tries. This goes to show that the game is challenging for some people, but for hard-core puzzle gamers it is just another small hurdle on the way to uncovering the big picture behind this storyline.

One downfall to the gameplay would be the dialog. You find yourself talking to the same people about the same things over and over again so that you can try a different option in the end. And then you find out you have to go talk to somebody else for 30 minutes to discover something that will allow you to talk to the first person you were talking to for 30 more minutes. The problem is the game doesn't allow you to take up that much time with a single person in one day because it is against your job description. Therefore you have to talk to people, and then go all the way home and sleep, and then go right back to the person you were talking to and in this makes the game a little tedious.

Sound

The music was pretty well done. Most adventure games just have music there for the background so that it's not completely silent. Culpa Innata's music is more in the foreground. It's one of those games that you'll be in the middle of a puzzle and say to yourself "the music here is pretty awesome". Another good thing about the sound is that every conversation is voiced. This is helpful since there is a lot of conversation in Culpa Innata. The voice-acting is fairly decent but at some points sounds unreal. In perspective, however, the whole game is pretty well-done.

Graphics

The in-game graphics are probably the least important aspect in the adventure genre, but Culpa Innata pulled through on this one. It may not have graphics on the level of Unreal Tournament or Crysis, but for an adventure game the graphics are quite nice. There is only 1 or 2 problems that I found with the graphics. The first one is that the people do not look right when they're talking. There's something wrong that I just couldn't point out. The other thing is that there is a huge glitch that you can run through certain walls and then the graphics get all kinds of funky but it's rare and for the most part it's perfectly fine. However, this was fixed in a released patch.

PlasmaFactor

Here's the kicker: Culpa Innata is a nonlinear game. This really made the game. There are puzzles you can completely avoid by going through a different path altogether. You can do things in any order you want, any way you want. If you have to find a piece of information, you can either go talk to people about it, search the person's apartment in question or do a variety of different things in order to obtain the information. In this aspect, the game is innovative and provided a lot of entertainment.

Conclusion

Overall I'd have to say that this game is a good play for those that enjoy adventure games. The problem is that this title is more suited for casual gamers. Like I said, my mother is good at this game, and she's a 45 year old woman in the culinary arts profession. This game isn't for everyone, but for those that enjoy this style of gaming, it is amazing.

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Gameplay: 8 Graphics: 7 Sound: 8 Value 7 PlasmaFactor: 9 Overall: 7.8

By: Jeffery Collins