There you are on the floor of the bathroom inside a seedy bar. You have a nasty headache, and there is a glaring red needle mark in your arm. It isn’t too hard to figure out what happened. Hot, single detective, out on the town in 1940s Chicago he obviously had way too much fun the night before. That is the initial idea, until you start thinking about it. Not only is last night fuzzy, everything is fuzzy. You don’t even know who you are! Not only that, but where did the other three bullets go from the chamber of your gun and who is the dead guy in the office upstairs? Those three bullets in him sure look familiar, but you, Detective Theodore “Ace” Harding, have no idea what is going.
Such is the nature of the game Déjà vu: A Nightmare Comes True by ICOM. This is the very first adventure game from the makers of Uninvited and Shadow gate, two of the most influential early games in the genre. It was released in the middle eighties by Mindscape, and also spawned a sequel featuring more amnesia for our poor hero in Déjà vu II: Lost in Las Vegas.
Ace is going to go out on the town in this classic point and click adventure game, hoping to stay alive long enough to exonerate his name of any wrong doing on the part of the dead guy. It seems like there is peril around every corner, however, as everyone on the tough
streets seems to want him dead. He really needs to do some hardcore detective work in a short amount of time to stay ahead of the thugs and the cops who are trying to arrest him for murder.
Déjà vu has some very interesting sequences for a graphic adventure. To say that it is challenging is a bit of an understatement, so learn to save often and under different file names to prevent arrest or death at the hands of the mob. Learning to user the interface will be the biggest piece of cake in this game, as it is a classic point and click with eight very familiar commands for the gamer to user when interacting with his environment. There is an easily accessed inventory on the screen.
In short, this is a standard detective themed adventure game, good enough to spark a sequel. It has merit as a challenge, but bewares of inevitable pixel hunting with these great graphics. Give it a try, and download the sequel while you are at it. See if you have what it takes to get Ace’s memory back and outwit the Chicago gangsters of the 1940s. It’s highly recommend downloading.
