You start off by poking around Vladimir’s ransacked office. Calling the police proves to be useless so it’s up to you to try and figure out what’s going on. Like many adventure games, the gameplay involves mostly your mouse and a lot of point and clicking. There is in game help if you find yourself stuck, and the magnifying glass points out all the important areas on screen. The mouse cursor will change if you hover over a point of interest, but sometimes smaller items can be easily missed, so the magnifying glass is a great feature. Your diary comes in handy too, as important events are summarized here. The story may not be all that creative, but it’s definitely intriguing once you find out more about Tunguska and how Nina’s father was involved in an expedition many years ago.

The puzzles are difficult, at least for me. I do enjoy adventure games and I remember spending hours and hours trying to figure things out without a walkthrough. I know that the satisfaction level goes down if you cheat with a walkthrough, but I find it frustrating being stuck in a section of the game and not being able to proceed. Maybe I spent too many long hours on previous games that I’ve now resorted to strategy guides and walkthroughs as soon as I feel like I’m stuck. Although with adventure games, with enough trial and error and point and clicking, eventually you’ll get it right, considering the points of interests are highlighted for you. The solutions are not always obvious or logical. It’s not that I like really easy games, but a good mix of obvious answers as well as obscure ones would be nice. I find that many of the puzzles are very random and hard to piece together. If you try to meld your inventory items together, eventually you’ll come up with something which generally makes no sense.

The voice acting and dialogue is awkward and very uninspiring. It’s not that there is a lack of expression, but it just really doesn’t sound like Nina is very disturbed when she finds out her father is missing or when someone is pointing a gun at her. Nina is meant to be a smart, sassy heroine who is also nice to look at, but she comes across a girl who has no idea how bad her situation is. She certainly doesn’t sound like she’s from Russia, but I’ll take valley girl over bad accents any day. As much as I like the fact that people are trying to create female leads, but when comments throughout the game harp on her looks and how she “doesn’t look like she can fix a flat tire”, it really feels like they should have just stuck with a male lead and skip the sexist remarks. The game was originally in German so some of the original context may have been lost due to the translation.

This game isn’t bad if you’re looking at an adventure game with an interesting story. If you’re interested in conspiracies, UFOs or the Tunguska event itself, Secret Files: Tunguska is definitely worth looking into. Despite the not so great acting and dialogue and the hard to solve puzzles, it’s still a nice looking game with a good interface that attempts to revive the genre. I miss the days of adventure games, so when one does comes out, even with its flaws, I still end up having a good time.