Title: The Watchmaker
Genre: Adventure
Strap: Please, please, let it be a death watch he’s making.

I’ve done something horrible to my back. I can barely walk, and it actually hurts to breath – an activity to which I find I’ve developed quite an addiction. Add to that, I woke up with a cold this morning, and then a tooth broke during my breakfast, and the very last thing I want to be doing is to be sat at my PC writing about the most joyless gaming experience of my entire, well-worn, life.

There are certain degrees of ‘badness’, if you’ll forgive the grammatical jaundice. People are often mistaken in the belief that these go down as far as "So Bad It’s Funny". Believe me, there are layers deep, deep beneath, that would give The Watchmaker vertigo.

The cover art on the box is somewhat of an ominous omen. A Gif file blown up too big, all rough-edged blocky pixels, making it look like a fifteen year old’s homemade compilation CD. Who would do that? Who would not even bother to fix their box cover? That would be the people happy to have their main character, a British lawyer, speak with a American college-boy accent. The same accent the Austrian hotel owner has. And just about every other male character in the game.

There isn’t a part of the game that doesn’t feel like a home movie. It appears that the voice actors were hired from the cleaning staff at Trecision’s offices. Key intonations of words are missed, meaning you have to run sentences through in your head, working out where commas might once have been, before you can decipher what on earth it was meant to be about. And then realise that you just don’t care. The story is so soulless, the characters so appalling, the puzzles so... not there, everything, everything horribly wrong.

There is no understanding of adventure gaming at all. Your characters ask people about other characters they’ve not met yet; the answers to puzzles are investigated before the puzzle has been found; and you control two characters, but at the same time, having to juggle back and forth to keep them in the same room. I honestly have never enjoyed playing a game less than this attrocity.