The Gene Machine is a third person adventure game that was released in the middle nineties after significant development by Divide By Zero. It is an excellent two-dimensional adventure that raised the bar for point and click interfaces.
Piers Featherstonehaugh is the protagonist…what a mouthful. It is pronounced Fanshaw in the game. Piers is an English gentleman who has just returned from rugged frontier America to his home in Victorian England. His butler, Mossop, had accompanied him and neither character was terribly impressed with the rough and uncivilized ways of the Americans.
The Gene Machine is a third person adventure game that was released in the middle nineties after significant development by Divide By Zero. It is an excellent two-dimensional adventure that raised the bar for point and click interfaces.
Piers Featherstonehaugh is the protagonist…what a mouthful. It is pronounced Fanshaw in the game. Piers is an English gentleman who has just returned from rugged frontier America to his home in Victorian England. His butler, Mossop, had accompanied him and neither character was terribly impressed with the rough and uncivilized ways of the Americans. They are more than happy to sit down to a relaxing and social tea and forget such uncouth adventures. But Doctor Dinsey has created yet another miserable being in his Gene Machine…a catlike
man thing termed 73, since it is the seventy-third experiment. 73 implies that the duo are too soft for such adventures, and the couple get their collective danders up immediately. Piers’ pride propels him to Dinsey Island, where these horrific numerical monsters are being created in an effort to allow Dr. Dinsey to take over the world, Dr. Moreau style.
Piers moves all about London, gathering clues and resources that will allow him to find this secret island and the notorious doctor who dwells there. Many people need to be interviewed and many clues will be found. The Gene Machine features a massive inventory and some very witty puzzles, plus a lot of running around on a rather large map. Unlike other games, once an item is used, it will disappear on its own if it is no longer needed. This takes a lot of the guesswork out of the puzzles, but initially causes panic, with the gamer thinking he inadvertently dropped something invaluable.
The Gene Machine presents this adventure in a very humorous manner. Much of the humor centers around the socioeconomic class difference between Piers and Mossop. The voice acting is also very well done and the graphic display is colorful, intriguing and pleasing to the eye. It also has a subtitle option for those who don’t care about great voices and just want to breeze through everything as quickly as possible to advance the story line. The interface is standard and very easy to manage and features commands and sub-commands, such as: pick up, look at, smell etc. Overall, the Gene Machine is simply an entertaining game that goes down in history as one of the best point and click adventures of the decade.
