Have your Eye Spy Book of Cliches open, pen in hand – you’re going to get a lot of ticks today. It all begins with your next door neighbour getting roughly arrested by a violent group of cops, his wife and son thrown out of the way. You see this through your front door’s peephole, and decide that you must help the family. Once the police are safely out the way, naturally. But you, you poor thing, have just lost your own wife and child in a terrorist plane attack a couple of weeks back. Ahhh, do you see? Ahhhhhh. Tick, tick, tick.

So, for no reason whatsoever, the personality-deficient protagonist decides to skive work (an advertising company developing commercials for new government censorship initiatives – there’s about four ticks there alone) and investigate these suspicious goings on. And you wouldn’t believe it! There’s an alien conspiracy afoot! TICK!

Making this all much worse are the ridiculous mistakes in the game’s design. There are no cursor indications of explorable directions to head in, meaning that every edge of the large locations must be fruitlessly run toward, just in case /this/ one leads to new scene. Add to that the conversation trees, apparently treated with Agent Orange, and ghastly translation from German to English, and any redeeming features are lost in the murk.