Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

Originally, I was scheduled for an appointment to check out Gray Matter, but a confusion in schedule ended up with me almost missing out on the game completely.  Thankfully, the staff at dtp Entertainment were great and got me into the later stages of the Gray Matter demo, with Jane Jensen herself giving us a broad tour of the game.  After spending a few minutes with the game and with Jane, this title could be the launch of a great franchise, and that Jensen has not lost her form for creating deep, thought provoking games based on the arcane.

In our demo, I was introduced to our main characters, Samantha Everett and Dr. David Styles.  Samantha is an aspiring magician that is looking to find her way into an exclusive club of magicians called Daedalus.  However, on the road to London, she makes a wrong turn and ends up in a rain storm and in front of a dark mansion, owned by Dr. David Styles.  David seems to be suffering from some sort of dementia, looking for his assistant, and invites Samantha in from the rain thinking she is the assistant.  Sam on the other hand, feels that this is some sort of prank or joke from someone at Daedalus, to test her.  She goes along with the charade feeling that at any moment, someone will pop out to say “jokes on you”.

Instead, she finds out that Dr. David Styles may be hiding some sort of strange past, as he performs all kinds of strange experiments on people to delve into the human psyche and dreams.  Some have even accused Styles of murder, but Samantha instead believes that he is innocent, and starts to investigate the strange occurences to see who might actually be the murderer.

Some of the features that I noticed with Gray Matter is that it uses still animated panels for cut scenes, very reminiscent of Max Payne and Gabriel Knight, which add a lot of style to the story.  Another great feature that will help those of us that tend to lose sight of our goals in an adventure game, is a tracking system for each chapter of Gray Matter.  You can look in the menu, and it will show you all of the quests and items that you have received to push that quest forward.

I asked Jane Jensen about where the idea for this game came from, as it always seems that the themes in her games revolve around strange supernatural ideas, and yet, all seem based in some form of reality.  Be it Voodoo, vampirism or even werewolves, she takes these otherworldly ideas, and weaves them into factual elements creating a story that is believable.  Her response mentioned that a lot of her game development comes from what she is reading.  For instance, Gray Matter comes from a lot of reading on dreams and the human psyche, and a lot of that shows in the sequences that were shown.

I am trying to tread lightly on the meat of what we saw in the demo, as some plot points and twists were shown.  I can say that Gray Matter is coming along quite nicely, and could make a strong ressurgence for the true point and click adventure genre.  More impressive is that we did see a bit of the Xbox 360 version as well, and the controls transfer quite nicely for the game.  It uses a control wheel to select commands and items, and it is very smooth for those that might want to get achievements with their adventuring.

After all of this, it was nice to see Gray Matter in action, considering its long troubled development cycle.  I can confirm that it does exist, it is set for an October 2010 release, and fans of adventure games and Jane Jensen should have their appetites sated with Gray Matter upon its release.