Adam Hall

Publisher: Microsoft | Developer: Tecmo | ETA: Out Now | Price: £39.99 Inc VAT.

Introduction
Being scared is definitely one of the top entries in my list of things I don’t like much, it makes you all sweaty, you fidget more than a pile-ridden naked man sitting on sandpaper, and all your senses raise to the point where an ant farting from a mile away puts you in a state of petrifaction that doesn’t dissipate for several hours. It’s ever so stressful.
With that in mind, when Project ZERO arrived on my doorstep sporting review quotes such as ‘This is by far the scariest game I have every played”, you can imagine the horror spread evenly over my face. It didn’t take long for me to experience what that lovely man/woman from IGN was talking about, within minutes I was the one negotiating my way around a creepy house at the speed of a barefooted man across broken glass, I was the one in the midst of all this, and if you buy the game, you will be too!

If you’re a bit of a non-conformist and oppose all clichés, I’d suggest you don’t play this game because it’s full of them. As far as story goes for PZ, it’s a bit melodramatic and generic, but it’s an excellent tension builder for the rest of the game.
Nine days ago (from when you start playing the game), a guy called Mafuya thought he’d venture off into a heavily secluded and stereotypically chilling mansion located deep in the heart of the forest. This was, of course, what you might call a ‘silly idea’ because the little guy went and got himself lost (/dead/trapped/held hostage, we don’t know).
After not hearing from him for a while, his sister Miku Hinasaki (you) goes on a little adventure (to the same demented mansion) in search of him. Now I don’t know what’s wrong with this family, they clearly all have a death wish if they feel the need to follow a fellow family member into such a bloodcurdling house that, once upon a time, was apparently owned by a very powerful land owner who had complete control over the area.
Nevertheless, that’s how the whole game starts, simple, but affective.

Graphics
Upon initial impressions of PZ, you’ll no doubt gaze for an unhealthy length of time at the wondrous graphics that the game sports. Despite this, the more and more you look at the game aesthetically, the more you’ll 1) Get bored, and 2) Realise that the game isn’t actually that impressive in comparison to games like Halo or Splinter Cell. The only thing you get with PZ is the real-time shadows and we’ve seen those before. The textures of objects in game do look quite impressive, very detailed and appropriately made, but once you get closer than a metre or two, heavy pixelation smacks you in the face like a gloved brick and you feel like you’re playing something on the PlayStation one when it was first released.
Although PZ doesn’t push the Xbox to it’s limits of graphical excellence, the entire look of the game works very well. The moans and groans emanating from dark corridors will still scare you half to death and the eerie, but excellent shadow system will put you in a real atmospheric and movie-like situation.

Sound
This is an area where PZ shines, combined with darkness; the sound is positively terrifying! Technically, though, the music in PZ isn’t actually music at all. From what I could gather, it’s all just a combination of creepy ghoul groaning noises coupled with the backing of a violin note played so much, you’d think the violinist had a 10 foot bow. This may seem repetitive and monotonous, but when you’re in their photo shooting the most stylish of ghosts for ‘Undead Weekly’, you forget about sound as an individual aspect and it becomes one with the game, and inadvertently, you!
I’d really like to write more about the sound in PZ but to be honest with you, that’s about as far as it goes. The game doesn’t front spiffy In-game Dolby Digital surround sound or anything like that, the above is all you get! Nevertheless, the sound in PZ is most excellent and is the best I’ve seen in any scare ‘em up to hit the shelves. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll even soil yourself, and all of that wouldn’t be possible without the tremendous audio capacity of PZ.

Controls
There are problems with the Xbox controller, I know it, you know it, and PZ has a tendency of exploiting these in the most annoying and stressful way possible.
I personally believe that the Xbox controller is most suited to first person shooters, and seeing as PZ is NOT an FPS, the following problems entail:
This may be a flaw that comes almost obligatory with pretty much every adventure game of this style, but I don’t think the Xbox controller is helping it much, if at all. Slightly to blame is the lack of ability to move the camera, but confusion arises when it comes to deciding what direction to move the thumb stick to, to go wherever you want to go in game. Not only does this happen when you’re looking around a room or something, but it’s at it’s peak of annoyance when the game does the genre-cliché of changing the camera to another fixed point to allow visibility of your location. If you’re trying to go somewhere and in one camera angle you’re pressing all you need to press to progress, nine times out of ten, when the camera relocates, you’ll have to adjust the thumb stick to a different position to continue your development in the your chosen path.
This may seem a tad petty, but it’s an extremely annoying problem that I’ve found to come about in nearly all games of this type. If someone is intent on getting somewhere, they want to do it with the minimal amount of effort and bugs like these hinder such comfort!
It doesn’t end there, because of the whole rugged and bulky nature of the Xbox controller, you’ll find panicking (something that happens frequently at the beginning of the game) will neutralise your battling (photography) ability and you’ll succumb to stabbing random buttons hoping whatever’s making you panic will go away. This is no way to play a game and often results in you losing critical amounts of health. If they call that difficulty, they need to rethink they’re philosophy.