Adam's Venture: Origins

There is a point that you have to wait for a game to drop in price in fear of it being shit before you buy it. My price limit is normally around £10 and that’s exactly the price I waited for before buying Adam’s Venture.

Adam’s Venture is a game that follows the story of Adam, a layabout who works for his father, as he goes on a... venture to find the Garden of Eden. He is accompanied by Evelyn (do you get it? Not quite an obscure reference) as they journey around the world following various clues to the Garden’s whereabouts while racing against the evil Clairvaux Company to the end goal.

The gameplay involves exploring and solving puzzles and whereas there isn’t very much to the exploring, the puzzles in game scored points with other critics. Not me though. So many people have said that the puzzles are imaginative and original but I found them either obscure or overdone previously. The one I remember most was where you had to put pins in wires to disarm dynamite but these were just so ridiculous in being able to work out how to solve them, that they were neither fun nor imaginative.

To put it in the simplest terms, it’s basically a poor man’s Tomb Raider without any of the cool boss fights or the ability to shoot your enemies. To make things worse, Adam isn’t even a likeable protagonist. He is a chauvinistic sexist whose constant attempts at showing off always fall flat. I’m assuming this is an attempt at humour, along with his many shitty quips that he feels he has to make every five seconds, but it doesn’t come off and this made it really hard to invest in the story.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 15 Achievements

Out of the 15 achievements, 13 of them are obtained by walking Adam through the game. That leaves a solitary two that you have to do stuff to get and I actually missed the first one because of my inability to read and research properly.

The first non-linear one you get is a secret one so easily missed if you don’t know it’s there. What you have to do is not start playing the game when prompted for 2 minutes. This amounts to you having to sit there and watch Adam sleep instead of playing – easy to get if you’re not paying attention but I don’t understand why it had to be a secret.

The other one is for spinning all the globe models in the game. Get this though... there are only three. Two of them are right at the beginning of the game and the other one is in a town further in. The name of the achievement suggests there are loads of these things though so without knowing there are only three you could spend minutes exploring the game’s environments in futility.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Adam’s Venture is nothing to write home about. It’s a very basic game that offers no replayability. The achievements are easy enough and you can race through it in less than 6 hours. These will be a very flat unimaginative 6 hours though.  I don’t normally talk about pricing but I’m not sure how they can get away with an RRP of nearly £30 for this. This is probably one of the worst value for money experiences ever.