Unfortunately, she can’t write scenarios or characters worth a damn. Jane Jensen is very talented at world-building and writing lore – the success of Gabriel Knight is a testament to that. It’s quite an intricate thriller that blends historical facts with topical, modern-day issues, and the core premise could easily be built into a sprawling franchise like Assassin’s Creed. Coming up with it was quite a bit more entertaining than playing Moebius, though that’s not to disparage the game’s plot. Obviously, this vampire/body snatching plot is of my own invention (and I’m accepting script options, Hollywood). I suspect this may be the key to stopping them. Sometimes, in the middle of a particularly difficult sentence, their entire body will freeze up into a t-pose for a few seconds. It’s as though the effort of mimicking human speech causes them immense physical pain. The problem isn’t so much that the lips don’t move in time with the words (although they don’t), but rather that the entire face spasms along with them. These freakish abominations can’t even talk right. They give the overall impression of a mutant nutcracker. They all have a dead-eyed, thousand-mile stare, they blink using their lower eyelids instead of the upper ones, and they can’t seem to open their teeth beyond an inch apart. Oh sure, you could dismiss them as just being terrible character models, but what gives them away is their faces. Since their veins are coursing with chlorophyll rather than the lifeblood that sustains our undead protagonist, he acts like a jerk to spite them.

The difference is that these are more plant-like, looking as though they’re made of wood with all the features painted on. This is understandable, however, because he must be starving.Įvery last human in Malachi’s world seems to have been replaced by an unconvincing doppelganger not unlike the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dare to have bad fashion sense in his presence? Prepare to go home crying. Rent a substandard room for him? You’ll hear about it. House have redeeming qualities, Malachi is just a complete dick. He seems to be going for the whole “I’m so smart I’m beyond reproach” Sherlock Holmes bit (right down to the constant drug use), but whereas Holmes and derivatives like Dr. Malachi is, at all times, a wholly unlikeable asshole, whining about everything around him and condescending to everyone he meets. Some might argue that he’s a ghost because he can phase through a number of objects in his ineptly pre-rendered surroundings, but I chalk this up to his mist form. The biggest tell is that he moves like a reanimated corpse doing a substandard mime of a real person. At one point he very expertly threatens a woman’s neck with a knife. Obviously, the name is a giveaway, but he’s thin and gaunt, reflections don’t seem to work right around him, and you could put your eye out on his shoulders. Moebius stars Malachi Rector, an antiques dealer who is clearly a vampire.

As a writer, I’m positively thrilled to be able to sum it up in a single pithy phrase. From its title to its art direction, all the way down to the building blocks of its code, Jane Jensen’s Moebius: Empire Rising by Jane Jensen is perhaps the most awkward point and click in recent memory (which is saying something considering the competition). Stiff and unnatural those descriptors come up a lot when discussing the animation in 3D point and clicks, but until now, I’ve never seen a game embody them in its every aspect.

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