Experience 112 aka Experiment 112 aka THE E.X.P.E.R.I.M.E.N.T feat Q-tip and Jay-Z
 

Lexis Numérique, developer of In Memoriam, returns to the experimental adventure scene with a lovely new title that hopefully all PC gamers will eventually notice. The game recently won the Grand Prix for Best Computer Game and Best Scenario at the Festival du Jeu Video 2007.

http://i199.photobucket.com/albums/a..._art_CT05b.jpg

You wake up in a run-down ship, inside a control room filled with monitors and equipment. You have no idea how you got there or what the place is altogether. On one of the monitors you see a woman wake up on an operating table. This woman is Lea Nichols (who also has no clue where she is or what's going on) and the two of you need to work together to escape the facility and find out what exactly took place there.

So far pretty familiar. A woman in distress and an abandoned facility to explore. It could be almost any survival horror game, actually.

The trick in the setting and the gameplay, however, is that Lea can't see you and (at least initially) you have no way of directly communicating with her. You can hear her if there are active microphones present, but otherwise you are stuck in the control room, forced to watch over her and help her any way you can, by operating survaillance equipment, security, door locks and even ventillation. Lea will eventually know you're there, but she has no idea who you are.

http://i199.photobucket.com/albums/a..._screen2-2.jpg

http://i199.photobucket.com/albums/a...screen30-2.jpg

The second trick comes from the fact that Lea is completely controlled by AI. She will have a will of her own and act accordingly. Throughout the game (as far as I understood), depending on how you play and help her, she will develop a certain level of trust or distrust for you. Help her out and she will feel safe knowing you watch over her and do your best to help. Bring her to danger and she will start to get hesitant of doors you open for her, clues you try to give her. She may completely ignore your help if you break her trust badly. Hopefully this has been implemented with care and subtlety, as opposed to simple crude status bars.

You need to use the equipment at hand to best guide Lea around and warn her of any dangers that might be there (gas-filled, contained areas, hostile beings). At certain points you may be able to improvise crude, basic communication with Lea using equipment and machinery (moving a camera around to indicate a nod or shaking your head, for instance).

I'm guessing the structure is otherwise familiar adventure gaming. Lea needs to pass obstacles and puzzles and she should be able able to suss them out as best as she can. At times you operate door locks and such to help her forward, with certain puzzles requiring a more hands-on help from you (guiding a remote controlled robot carrying a key card, for instance).

The story is promised to be pretty gripping, with scientific experiments and conspiracies. Hopefully they keep it relatively tight and don't go overboard with supernatural stuff.


Either way, the execution and spin on the typical adventure game mechanics are intriguing enough for me, but I love the setting and visual style as well.


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The game was released in France on October 11th by Micro Application. Dreamcatcher is supposedly releasing the game in the US under the name Experiment 112. Their initial release date (according to amazon.com) slipped over to next year though, but since their own website has no mention of the game, I'm having a hard time confirming when they plan to release it.

Promisingly, the english language website Experience 112 gets updated every now and then, so hopefully that means a European english release is in the pipeline.


Pics:
http://i199.photobucket.com/albums/a...screen15-1.jpg http://i199.photobucket.com/albums/a...screen16-1.jpg http://i199.photobucket.com/albums/a...screen19-1.jpg http://i199.photobucket.com/albums/a..._screen4-1.jpg
http://i199.photobucket.com/albums/a..._screen9-1.jpg http://i199.photobucket.com/albums/a..._screen2-1.jpg http://i199.photobucket.com/albums/a...screen30-1.jpg http://i199.photobucket.com/albums/a...2_art_10-1.jpg
http://i199.photobucket.com/albums/a...art_CT06-1.jpg http://i199.photobucket.com/albums/a...art_2P05-1.jpg


Playable demo (in english):
http://download2.microapp.com/experi...12_Demo_en.exe

Adventure Gamers preview:
http://www.adventuregamers.com/article/id,654/_

UK trailer:
http://www.microapp.com/contenus_pro...railer2_uk.zip

Original french trailers and old teaser:
http://www.gametrailers.com/game/4958.html_

Official website with more screens and stuff:
http://www.experience112.com/_

wow I heard about this game but really it didn't seem that interesting, but now that I read your description, I'll definitely check it out. the concept look a out like Lifeline on ps2 where you play an operator and you help her by speaking with her with a microphone. I did really like that and this game seem pretty good and minus the poor voice recognition annoyance of lifeline XD.

As Inhert mentioned, this does REALLY sound a lot like Lifeline, right down to the setting. But I did like Lifeline, and this game looks and sounds pretty nice, so I'm looking forward to checking it out once an English version is released. I wonder how the puzzles and such work with it...it seems like communication should be a major part of the game, but from the sound of it, it's completely secondary to controlling things in the environment. I'd like to see how the AI handles in the game, would be pretty impressive if it managed to do at least some "thinking" on its own without everything being scripted.

The UK trailer mentioned next month for a date, so I guess its released might be right around the corner in Europe.

"Check the drawer on the right"

"You want me to leave the room? OK"

You mentioned Ico only 20 times.

I'm worried about the AI. Seems like the game will completely rest on that.

Just a heads up for the 3 of us that cared about this game: the playable demo (in English) was released a little bit ago showing off the start of the game. Worth a try anyway, the English demo is available on Gamershell and Computergames.ro

Man, I hadn't checked the site for updates for a while, downloading now. The demo is also downloadable from the official site.

After y'all try out the demo, let me know how it is

So what's the puzzle to combat ratio here? Are there more or less puzzels then that of a Silent Hill?

Also how good is the combat system when you need to use it?

Anyway, game looks interesting. Downloading demo now.

Yeah, downloading the demo as well. The premise sounds interesting enough. I'll give my thoughts on it later.

Apparently this demo does not run on Vista... lame.

Has anyone gotten the demo working? I downloaded it from both the official site and gamershell, but when I try to run the setup program it gives me an illegal operation error and shuts down.

Just tried it and doesn't start for me either :(
I hope they fix it and release a working installer soon. Meanwhile, I'll try if the french demo works.

And Slayer, it's not survival horror, it's a PC adventure. Since you don't control Lea directly, there's no combat system. I'm pretty sure there's some horror elements to the storyline though.


Well damn, the french demo installs and works, but I'm getting no sound :( And because of the french notes, I can't tell if it's some driver I don't have up to date or what. Looks very moody though.

Thanks guys you saved me, i was 100mb through and cancelled it, i dont want 600mb to crash on me with 'illegal operation'.
Was looking forward to it, lets see if 'working' demo will hit net.

I'd like to say I was the exception and the the demo started up fine... but it didn't. As soon as I tried, it had the generic "Setup.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close" error message.

=\

If this was a beta demo of a game that's currently in production, that would be one thing. But the game was already been commercially release, and they can't even put out one working demo? The premise sounds neat, but I'm not having a whole lot of hopes for the final product. When you pay money for a game, you'd kinda like it to not crash on you, y'know?

Welcome to PC gaming~


Judging by Amazon and a few other sites (still no sign of the game on the publisher's own site, though), Dreamcatcher is releasing the game in the US on February 8th, under the name The Experiment. Who knows when the release date slips again.

Same for me (XP) - downloaded from Gamershell, Setup crashes.

This game looks sweet, but its not working for XP and vista... lame.

What the fuck did I type there? I can't believe nobody called me on that. I sound like an arcade game from 1989. Just how sleepy was I this morning?

Dunno why, but as soon as I thought 112, I thought "Flash Punch"

112 is the european emergency number - like 911 in the US. That´s what I thought of first.

Damn this game looks really neat but yeah, demo pooped out on install.

I just installed the French demo instead, which is probably a stupid idea since I won't understand shit, but I really wanna see what it's like. So far it's pretty cool but I'm totally lost as to what I'm supposed to do. I just like listening to Lea talk. I more or less figured out how to work the cameras, how to get multiple windows, how to make one of three windows the largest, smallest, etc. At one point I hit a camera view nearer to the floor and nearly looked up her skirt. I've just been turning on lights and objects everywhere, not knowing how the hell to get her to do anything other than stand around and cough.

I did feel a sense of satisfaction at turning the lights on for her and her being happy though, heh. I assume I am supposed to survey the area for her at this point. My comp is starting to slow down though so it's making it very hard to play this without everything taking forever to register.

EDIT: Grr, I guess she won't do anything if I have everything already turned on. So I'll have to leave them off and then do it one by one. My comp is a bitch though, so I can't continue :(

One interesting thing that did happen after I got Lea to activate a new camera option for me was

112 = same for Asia too I think...

This is bummer, so can you install on vista or not?

It no work on Vista either. I tried and it just came up with an error like everyone else.

Daaaamn, I'm so pissed I couldn't get any sound in the french demo. Sounds really intriguing so far.

I'm fairly certain my audio drivers are simply not up to date or something, but I can't really tell.