THE ARRIVAL

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION

YOU'VE BEEN ABDUCTED!!! You're in a cold, steel room. A window provides you a view of outer space. Your assignment is to escape without alien detection, so play a game of "cat and mouse" and work your way through the maze of the alien space station, moon base (mining colony) and three out stations.

As you explore intricate environments and challenging puzzles, you will encounter multiple routes with hundreds of variable story lines. Your mission is to decode the alien safeguards, take control of the alein space station, and find a way back to earth TO WARN THEM!!! Are those you encounter friend or foe?

GAME FEATURES

• First person, 360-degree horizontal/60-degree vertical perspectives
• Hundred of high-resolution 3-D environments
• Thousands of detailed sprite animations of aliens, robots and humanoids
• Highly complex full screen puzzles based on alien technologies
• Nonlinear gameplay with multithreading story line with multiple endings

~ from the back of the box

 
Any of you remember the 1996 sci-fi movie The Arrival? Directed by David Twohy of Pitch Black fame, it stars a mis-cast Charlie Sheen as an improbable nerd astronomer who turns into a dumb-ass action hero after uncovering an alien conspiracy. At the time it drew on the popularity of The X-Files improbably earning the reputation of an "intelligent blockbuster". There are some genuinely good moments in there, but the script and cast are terrible in such a way that I had an enjoyably good time for what it was. What I didn't know is that a year later a tie-in PC point-and-click adventure unassumingly hit store shelves. 

Coming on 3 FMV-filled CDs, the Myst-inspired adventure differs drastically from the film that inspired it. The movie is entirely set of Earth with an increasingly paranoid Sheen infiltrating scientific facilities and underground lairs uncovering a plot to terraform the planet's atmosphere to be more palatable to aliens. The game is set exclusively on a high-tech alien space station from which your character has to escape.

Right-click to access your inventory, look at or interact with the environment or click OFF to quit (left).

The Options menu is how to save and load the game (right).

After a quick probing, we begin the game proper in a holding cell, the entrance blocked by a force field. A small video device has been carelessly left for you to view the last words of the previous occupant, one Peter Jenkins, and somewhere in this room is the passcode to escape. Apparently, aliens think that a code lock on the inside of a jail cell is the best way to hold a prisoner. Across the hall is another abductee, though his fate is bleaker than yours. He is disheveled, bloodied and limping, but is still able to tell you that the aliens are evacuating the station for some unknown reason (I reckon the animation budget) and there's a vent at the other end of the hall that you should head to.

These opening moments are actually rather gripping. It establishes the imposing environment you find yourself in and a conspiratorial mystery to go with it. From here, you will explore the mostly abandoned locales solving the odd single-screen logic puzzles along the way. Some of these fit in with the sci-fi leanings, but most are incongruent affairs that wouldn't be out of place in a 7th Guest sequel had it been given a different theme. You do have an inventory, and it is used to solve some puzzles, but none of them are particularly complex, consisting primarily of key cars, energy cells and video clips.

Your inventory (left) is rather basic, but you can look at some items a little closer 

to get a little more information on them (right).

You access the inventory by right-clicking. A selection of circular bubbles will pop up and the one displaying the backpack icon will take yo there. You can get a closer look at many of them (though not all) to give a better idea of what they are, but this feature is somewhat superfluous. You won't need to study that key with any great depth as they're colour-coded anyway. You also cannot manipulate any of them either which could've deepened some of the puzzles. To use an item, click on it to change your cursor into it and, once returned to the main game screen, click on what you want to use it with. Fairly self-explanatory for even the most green of adventure gamers.

From the bubble menu, you can also select one of two ways to interact with the world. These are essentially Look and Use, but both are necessary a lot of the times. Both you and your character may not know what you're looking at given all the alien technology about, so a look with the eyeball may give greater context. It will also make it easier to navigate the massive building when looking at a door will tell you where to go. The main issue with this is that the voice over they chose sounds overly robotic and grating to a point that I almost never wanted to use it. The rest of the voice work, while not spectacular, is par the course for the era (barring one dopey potato of an alien creature that obviously didn't use the movie's design team), but when it's bad, it's really bad.

Most of the single-screen puzzles are stuff you've seen before presented differently. Press "?" to get hints (left).

Be aware of your surroundings as some moves will lead to a death screen. I hope you saved! (right).

While some designs do hark back to the movie, I have a sneaking suspicion that the original concept had no relation to the movie at all. Not only is the setting and story different, but what is there feels like an afterthought haphazardly hammered into the design documents. One of the most memorable scenes in the movie has Charlie Sheen strip off and enter a disguise machine to make him look like a different human. That happens here too, but instead of a Mexican caricature, our protagonist morphs into an actual alien. Why is this here? What possible need would an intergalactic alien species have of this? Do they wake up one day itching to look like a co-worker named Bob? Surely, it's only use would be to aid escapees in their escape. And, in a rather revealing cutscene where we find out we're actually playing a Ken doll, we do exactly that.

Plot holes aside, The Arrival is an okay game. The puzzles are tease the brain nicely and the environments are often spectacular to look at even if they have a black border surrounding them. Each node can be rotated in a full 360 degrees with fully animated transitions between them to give you a true sense of place. This is where most of the data on the three CDs is made up of, so the three-hour play time is a bit of a disappointment, but I don't regret playing through it. I actually enjoyed myself. Not is a "so-bad-it's-good" kind of way like the movie, but in an actual "I-think-I-like-this" sort of way. Not my highest recommendation, but recommended nonetheless.

To download the game, follow the link below. This custom installer exclusive to The Collection Chamber uses the DOSBox-X build of DOSBox 0.74 running Windows '95. This is a multi-CD game. Press Ctrl-F4 when prompted to cycle through the discs. Manual and Walkthrough included. Read the ChamberNotes.txt for more detailed information. Tested on Windows 10.

IMPORTANT - Remember to shut down the emulated version of Windows before exiting DOSBox. This could potentially result in errors, lost saves and corrupt data. The program will automatically shut down when you exit the game.

File Size: 1.67 Gb.  Install Size: 1.93 Gb.  Need help? Consult the Collection Chamber FAQ

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The Arrival: CD-ROM Adventure is © Enteraktion Inc & LIVE Film and Media Works
Review, Cover Design and Installer created by me

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