Gränsland [Sw] Snille / Paregos mediadesign 1999

The main character of Gränsland is on the verge of adulthood: she leaves her native nest and moves to an apartment in an ordinary house. But it is not as simple as it seems at first glance, and the atmosphere there is by no means neighborly: the tenants are constantly saying something, and the mysterious doors in their apartments, which no one seems to see, give off a dim light. Before how to start the description, you need to immediately warn the potential player: when passing, there may be big problems with understanding the plot. In addition to the fact that the narrative is very allegorical and filled with symbology, everything else also happens in Swedish, with no subtitles provided. Action unfolds in the apartments of one entrance of a three-story building. The game is divided into 3 days, which are, in essence, chapters: there is no change of day here. Our neighbors are Judit, Jonas and Edgar. Jonas lives on the first floor. He has the most modern apartment of the whole trinity: he even has a computer. The young man has a typical problem: his father wants him to study in England as an economist, and Jonas himself raves about astronomy. Judit is his neighbor. She is a stylish old lady, but there is something strange in her love for bright clothes ... Edgar is a professor living on the second floor. His apartment is lined with old furniture, and cabinets are bursting with dusty books. The game world is filled with magical realism - a combination of everyday life and a competent interspersing of elements of the supernatural and even magical. This literary genre in games is catastrophically rare. Also there is a detective story and a teenage romance. The mysticism in the game is subtle and unobtrusive, it is emphasized by music and sound effects, which are always appropriate in relation to what is happening on the screen. More than once there will be associations with the series “Twin Peaks” by David Lynch. It even has its own Laura Palmer - Saga, from a philosophical point of view - the main character of the work. This is a missing girl who is the main topic of conversation with the characters. A distinctive feature of the game story is the layering. Indeed, the main plot with the search for the Saga is only the tip of the iceberg, needed mainly not for the events of the events themselves, although they are very exciting, but in order to pose the player complex philosophical questions that he will reflect on while he travels slowly from one floor home to another. Gameplay is a panoramic quest: we go with the arrows on the screen, we select objects with the mouse. When you click in the upper right corner, the inventory opens, and if you click on the bottom left, you can save, boot, exit the game or adjust the volume. There are few quest riddles to combine items here, and they are simple. But you have to run around: having seen something new in the location or having read some document, you need to go around all the neighbors and see if new dialogues have opened with them. They start automatically when you head to someone’s apartment. Our new friends chat a lot and the characters seem truly alive. A rare example of acting in FMV, when Stanislavsky would shout: "I believe!" as opposed to the clowning that happens so often in American quests. You even get the feeling that our movements around the house and conversations have an effect on the heroes and they react to the actions of the player. A similar effect was in Façade, but objectively this is not so: we have no influence on the characters in the gameplay, and there is no variation here. But what part of the house the neighbors find themselves in and how the actors play, looks so natural that it seems as if we actually settled next to them for several days in the same house. The texts are well written: dialogues, Saga diary, thoughts of the main character, which are constantly displayed on the screen. The game is overshadowed by only one fact: it clearly had a modest budget and very small in scale. But maybe the chamberness of such a story is only good.
Screenshots
Swedish 2CD ISO Demo 437+210MB (uploaded by Old-Games.ru)


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