Gray Matter

After eight years of making, Gray Matter brought much delight to the fans of Gabriel Knight series. The game was published back in 2010, and only recently made its way towards Steam. It’s a point-and-click adventure full of illusion, magic and mysteries of a lost soul trying to make its way into the lights. Gray Matter isn’t a sequel to Gabriel Knights; instead it’s a standalone journey combing the stories of a scientist and a young stage magician. Even with the lack of depths in its puzzles, this bookish adventure of Gray Matter makes quite an impression with its story.

During a typical English storm, an aspiring stage magician Sam Everett makes a wrong turn on her way towards London. She takes refuse at the Dread Hill House pretending to be the new assistant of an Oxford University professor Dr. Styles. Indecently, immediately after that very night, she finds no choice but to carry on her assistance duties to aid Dr. Styles with his eccentric experiment. Soon she discovers the plots that led Dr. Style to conduct such experiments, and not only she, but the whole group of people she has involved in the experiment aren’t safe from danger. Later on she realizes that it’s not Dr. Style that she should be afraid of, rather someone else who might be using him to pull off a substantial magic trick to make his or her entry to the Daedalus Club, a secret society of the magician. Coincidently however, Sam considers herself as a candidate to join that club too. And now she’s up against someone who is causing great deal of pain to people she’s starting to care.

Game of the Gray Matter doesn’t bring anything off the book on table. Like a typical point-and-click, players control Sam’s movements with mouse clicks. The cursor changes when she can interact with others or objects from the environments. There is an in inventory to keep all the collectables, and they can be combined whenever necessary before implementing. In Gray Matter, Sam isn’t the only character players will control, but Dr. Styles too. During each chapter players will control either of them and progress the story. Sam mostly does all the work in the fields collecting information and conducting several activities, where as Style’s only work is to progress the experiment for communicating with his dead wife. Sam gets most of her tasks as assignments from Style and when all are finished, the chapter ends with Style to carry on from there. It can be puzzling to figure the progress of the story, while the only way to distinguish the progress of the story from the given map. When all location marks turn white, it means there are no more activities to do. Though there’s a progress bar at the save panel that shows how much the chapter has progressed, but it’s really not much of a help. So the lack of indications of both the game’s progress and activity log can easily become a frustrating factor.

Besides the actual story, Sam has side missions to accomplish her personal goals for making an entry to the Daedalus Club. These missions don’t provide much with stories but puzzles to solve after finding a series of hidden objects. Due to the nature of Gray Matter’s gameplay, at some stage, these side missions become more appealing than the actual story, simply because they are harder to solve and are largely mysterious. Whereas the actual story even with greater mystery; loses the excitement due to its lack of directions. Could be the reason because the game eventually becomes nothing but pixel hunting and implementing magic at a given scenario. Speaking of magic, Sam needs to perform tricks in every scenario to accomplish tasks, such as stealing something, or to convince someone to perform an act. Thanks to the magic book she carries that explains every step of these magic that need to be carried out.

Presentation wise the game doesn’t do anything astonishing. Movement animations are clumsy and its sluggishness does help improve things either. Though the cutscenes are well portrayed and the background music blends well with the environments. Character designs, however, are somewhat praise worthy. Both the protagonist Sam and Style fit well with the story, even though Sam’s gothic appearance comes unusual when pretending to be an Oxford student. When the presentation fails to impress, voice-acting does a decent job to balance the combination.

In the end, Gray Matter does enough to keep the players going to uncover the mysteries behind its stories. It may not be greatly appealing to the eyes, but the story is captivating enough to entertain the players. With a small price to pay for such dark mystifying adventure, fans of this genre shouldn’t hesitate to go for it.

Sarwar Ron, NoobFeed
Twitter | +SarwarRon