I'm going to try and make this as professional as possible, but I can't be entirely perfect. You have been warned.
Title: The Blackwell Legacy
Released: 2006
Blackwell Legacy has been under my radar for a bit now for its nostalgic appearance to the point-and-click adventure games I grew up with on the computer in the 90s. So, when I managed to get hold of a copy to play for myself, I was probably going in a bit biased as to what to expect. The introduction itself took a bit longer than I expected, but it was after I got to actually control and solve things on my own, in a familiar setting, that everything started falling in place.
Story: Welcome to the Blackwell family. Shortly after the game is booted up and a new game is started, we are introduced loosely to Rosangela Blackwell. The first stretch of the game, a minor bump on the road of its story, introduces us to this character and what she has recently gone through, that being of her Aunt Lauren passing away and being cremated. But there are underlying threads that slip through the cracks as you continue to learn more about this young woman and her late aunt, and it revolves around one word: Joey.
Paying no heed to this at the time, we see Rosa take up pen and paper as a part of her freelance gig with the Village Eye, a little niche of a newspaper that she writes book reviews for. "Bob", some strange character thrust down upon us, tells Rosa to take up her paper and investigate the suicide of a girl at NYU. There's not much we can uncover, but this does lead us to wrapping the night up with the introduction of the name from earlier. Joey Mallone, the so-called "Blackwell Legacy", appears before Rosangela and causes her to have quite the momentary mental breakdown.
"You're a medium," is force-fed to Rosa as she is dragged by the ghost to perform the duties of her late Aunt. She must help ghosts pass on from this world to the next. What better place to start than an area previously introduced in the form of the park, and it is through cycling around the map that Rosa and Joey uncover a much larger story than one girl's suicide. The story does drag a bit at first, and some of the points do make it hard to understand what you're supposed to do, but that's the beauty of these games, where you get rewarded for trying absolutely everything in your repertoire.
The light interaction with specific characters did kind of take away from the sleuthing, but as a whole, the story was decent for its length. Thankfully, there are four more games to go through, so I will be able to get a better sense of the whole thing soon enough.
Graphics: True to what I said before, the 90s was a time for point-and-click video games. Monkey Island and other LucasArts games were making their name known at the time, and there was also the efforts of Sierra with King's Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, and probably others that I can't think of or name right now. So, to see this game adapt the same pixelation for their characters definitely does make it match right up with those big-name titles. In a sense, it does help to match it next to the others by having something in common with the difference in time.
Music: The music, on the other hand, really didn't make much of an impression on me. It could've been because of the fact that it had voice-acting that I just tuned out the music in place of listening/reading to what the characters had to say to my questions, but when you have to go to the same place several times just to make sure you have done everything you can just to move on, it blends and blurs into a inconsequential blur. That isn't to say that what I can reflect on was a negative experience; just not memorable to listen to it on repeat.
Overall: While the Blackwell Legacy does well to put its foot in the door, it definitely has me wanting more. Perhaps it was because the overall length of it wasn't quite what I was expecting. About halfway through, I could already sense that I was nearing the end of the game by the revelation brought out by some of the characters. I wanted to get to anchor my feelings and thoughts about these characters a bit more, but it just didn't give me a lot to work with after the initial introductions and brief back-and-forth throwarounds between Joey and Rosa. But I will say that the game does an excellent job in STARTING something, so I'll have to see if it can finish it as the other games are dealt with in the series. Next up: Blackwell Unbound.
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