Let’s talk about Adam’s Venture.This is an episodic...

Let’s talk about Adam’s Venture.

This is an episodic adventure game that, by its own description, focuses on family-friendly puzzles, and non violent action. Okay, I says to myself, I can handle that. I know plenty of games that don’t rely on action to sell themselves. Also, I can handle some puzzles. Usually. I’m more of an action puzzle adventure gamer, but I can figure these things out. Also, I can tell from the get-go that it’s a Christian game, and again, I’m like, okay, I can handle that. I grew up with Christian video games, I know what I’m in for.

I didn’t know what I was in for.

The biggest problem with Adam’s Venture, outside of the rampant puzzles for everything, is the lack of any reason for anyone who isn’t Christian to play this game. And at first, I was really forgiving of that aspect. But when it came down to it, the game had bad writing, awful pacing, terrible story, and Biblical overtones really set it apart as a game where there was clearly good intent, but it falls flat on its own face.

Let’s talk about the good: the graphics, for a $4.99 per episode game, are decent enough. The environments were nice, the animations were okay, and it was pretty enough to look at that it distracted me for a while. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting it to look that good, but for a bargain game, this is gorgeous compared to some. The game controls well enough, the interface is easy to get used to, and the music is perfectly decent. All well enough for making the gameplay experience enough for me to keep going despite everything else. And that’s the bad: everything else.

Over the course of the three episodes, the game’s story goes all over the place. It begins with the climax (“The Search For The Lost Garden” should really be titled “The Search THROUGH The Lost Garden”) as Adam Venture and company arrive at the Garden of Eden, searching for a way inside, but are denied by a strange smoke monster, and then the cavern collapses. That’s Episode I. Episode II picks up immediately after, where we discover that the corporation Adam was funded by is really actually evil and is mining beneath the Temple Mount for Solomon’s Treasure, which Adam and Evelyn (last name Appleby) search for first, only to have a cliffhanger ending where it looks like Adam is trapped beneath the collapsing Temple (sensing a trend?). Finally, Episode III opens up before Episode I’s opening, showing us how Adam and Evelyn got to where they were in Episode I, and introduces Adam’s father, who we have yet to meet, yet somehow manages to reach Solomon’s Temple just in time for Adam to wake up and save the day. It’s a strange narrative decision that completely undermines any kind of tension or suspense, and refuses to give the player any reason to care about Adam, or Evelyn, or Adam’s father. Adam’s father doesn’t even show up until the end, so we had no idea he was a part of the story whatsoever, and is really only there to provide a mentor figure who is taken hostage by the evil bad guys. And the evil bad guys are really evil: they apparently had no idea what they were doing at Eden, as the story tells us that their intent was to blow up the Temple Mount to get Jews and Muslims and Christians to go to war with each other and sell everyone weapons. Eden, it seems, exists only to exist in the first episode, and is promptly forgotten about.

But while the story goes nowhere and leaves sense at the door, the puzzles are where the game truly lets the player down. At first, the math puzzles are easy to overcome, but the logic puzzles go from making sense to making no sense, to not even understanding what sense is. I spent more than a couple of puzzles randomly pressing buttons until something happened, and I didn’t even know how I’d solved half of the objectives. But then the Bible puzzles come up. By including puzzles involving specific Bible verses that have to do with specific instances that could not have been written in the Bible at that time, it bounces out any suspension of disbelief, and the true nature of the game is shown: this is a Christian adventure game for Christians. And that’s fine, I suppose, but it felt incredibly disappointing to me. Eden shouldn’t have signs written in English describing Hope, Faith, and Love, nor should it have revolving posts with verses about Jesus Christ. If the Garden had been locked up by the Almighty, I sincerely doubt he would have required an understanding of the Messiah to do so, especially considering that English wasn’t a language to be written at that time, nor was Jesus a glimmer in Mary’s eye. What further infuriated me was the notion that Solomon’s Tomb was accessible via puzzles that referenced Bible verses ABOUT Solomon. This implies that Solomon was vain enough to write about himself and use his own verses to unlock portions of his own temple/tomb in order to access the treasure that he had amassed over his lifetime, including his time worshipping false gods. Either that, or someone went into Solomon’s Temple long after the fact, and set up these puzzles using said Bible verses and then relocked everything so someone could find the treasures centuries later. I understand that this is “a video game,” but there is such a thing as setting the scene, and making the player feel like this is a real thing. Games such as Uncharted and Tomb Raider come up with puzzles that feel like they really could unlock these ancient places, and feel natural. Adam’s Venture forgoes feeling real in order to place Bible verses and history into the game, where unfortunately it really does not make sense. What’s further aggravating is that I grew up in a Christian household as a video gamer, and so time and time again I beheld Christian games that did little more than fanservice the Bible, and made little sense as actual games. Games are meant to be fun, and can be educational as well when done correctly. Simply tossing in puzzles that require Bible knowledge don’t, in fact, make a game any more valid for a Christian gamer; they simply make them more obviously Christian in objective.

Part of me wants to write a story in which a Bible scholar uses his knowledge of both history and the Bible to track down an artifact, without insulting either the Christian or the mass media audiences. It can be done. The problem is that most Christian game designers — whether it is Adam’s Venture or otherwise — seem to think that the purpose of these games is to educate and elucidate around the Bible itself, and so sacrifice any believability in their game to work the mechanics around Bible teaching, instead of working the teaching in. This is the biggest obstacle for Adam’s Venture, in that ultimately it excludes itself from the rest of adventure gaming and squarely sets itself into a limited category that limits the expectations of players. As someone who has read and understands the Bible, the fact that these puzzles did little more than highlight verses just stood out as lazy game design. Make them feel natural or a part of the world, or don’t make them. Your audience will see this and realize what you’re doing. This isn’t Math Blaster. This is an adventure game for adventure gamers.

I actually really wanted to like this game, and went in with the expectations of something that wore its religious lean on its sleeve (literally: Adam has a WWJD patch on his shoulder in the year 1928). However, as the game progressed, I found myself more and more disappointed in that the producers did not seem to want to make a game so much as they wanted to make a series of brainteasers and Bible verse tests. The adventure part of the adventure was lacking, the story held no weight, and overall, the game was a thorough disappointment. At the very end of the third episode, Adam says, “This isn’t the end, this is just the preface.” Adam, you’d have to understand where to place the preface before understanding where the ending is, and furthermore, you’d have to understand how to tell a story. As it stands, this truly isn’t worth the purchase at all.