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. At Festival du Jeu Vídeo 2007, the game won the awards of Best PC Game, Best Scenario and the GRAND PRIX 2007 (Best French game of 2007), beating games such as 'GRAW 2' and 'Test Drive Unlimited' along the way. Experiment 112 also recieved a 9/10 from Eurogamer.fr and was claimed as best french game of the year by the reviewer.

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.

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, 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.

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.

Pics:

Links:

Official website (The english demo is currently broken, so don't bother download it yet)

9/10 Review by Eurogamer.fr

Buy/Pre-order it at Amazon (will be released 5th of February)

Now that sounds pretty neat... I just hope they put enough time into her AI, cause that's really where the whole game could fall apart.
Of course, a 9 out of 10 from Eurogamer is pretty good, although I think that would have to be converted from metric...

this game sounds soooo freakin good and refreshing.....i want it

hmmm, that sounds interesting.

One of the few things that sucks about being a Mac user is that you can't play the odd interesting-looking PC game - like, say, this one. Hopefully we'll get a Wii port!

it's done by low end developers, which only now they're making the english version, so I doubt they'll release it for Wii.

The release date has been set: February 5th.

If anyone is interested, you can buy it here. I can't wait