Sometimes when I play a game, I sit there trying to figure out what the hell the developers were thinking. Dead Reefs is one of those games. Being an adventure game, the controls should be pretty basic, but they'll end up haunting you longer than the pirates in the game if you aren't careful.

Dead Reefs is a murder/mystery adventure game based in 1727 on a small island off the English coast. You play as Amadey Finvinerro, an investigator sent by the King to uncover the circumstances of the death of Patrick Wyndham. You will need to travel across the island, talking to its residents and investigating different areas and hoping to discover motive, clues and more about Patrick's death. You'll soon discover that there is more than meets the eye on this old smugglers island, and you'll have to track down Patrick's ancestors, who remain haunting the area while an ever-growing body count racks up.

The game interface is a little different than you normally encounter. On the right hand side is an action menu: Press up to talk, down for inventory access, left to examine an item and right to interact with an area. The left side will pop up your inventory control, or conversation topics when you activate that mode. Conversation is extremely basic, and it can end up not being very fluid. As you talk to someone, you need to broach a topic, and that conversation is just a scripted and static sequence. When that sequence finishes, you can pick another one, be it on another topic or something else you just learned from the previous conversation blurb. The way you can pick topics in addition to the complete lack of structure in any conversation often just sounded wrong. The voice acting, while very flat and uncreative, isn't bad but does little to make up for the other issues.

For a game that is advertised as non-linear, I'd have to say that is complete false advertising. You rarely will be allowed to wander the island. Attempts to explore almost always end up in being told you shouldn't go here or there yet. Some puzzles that you can complete just won't be triggered, so Amadey will not take the final piece. Because the story is just that linear, you can very obviously figure out things become unlocked as you complete the previous section.

Early on, Amadey will pick up an island map he can access for quick travel, and when stuck, you can always refer to his notebook. Your character will automatically note important events, clues and other things he witnesses, as well as keep any possibly important documents that you can access at any time. Unfortunately, this area gets a bit buggy: Notes will repeat; some notes appear before you even experience something; and I've had documents that I was currently searching for pop up as available, making me question what I was even doing. The map is probably the most useful function, simply because attempting to move your character in the 3D world is nauseating, at times.

This is the part that may haunt you. You control Amadey in a full 3D experience, with ... well, almost first-person-shooter-style controls, except you can't back up. This is incredibly annoying. The thing is, if you can't back up when you just barely missed an area to interact with, then you need to turn around, run back, turn around again and hope not to miss it this time. Why? Because many items can only be accessed from one side. Movement is done through the WASD keys but is rather clumsy and inaccurate. Your function keys are the arrow keys, no less ... yes, it makes no sense, and it is more horrible than even I can make it sound. Your mouse does not work at all. What were they thinking?

Now I have a strong stomach — roller coasters, hills, planes and even a ride on open-ocean vessels haven't bothered me. But damn it, that almost ended with Dead Reefs. Amadey runs with a very odd limp-like movement, and the camera will chase him wobbling around. I can't tell you how many times I had to stop moving just so I wouldn't feel more ill. There were times I'd run some of the longer straight distances with my eyes closed!

The story for Dead Reefs is one that starts out pretty well. I was interested from the beginning, but things taper off a little more than halfway through the game. I think it has to do more with the plummeting quality as the game moves forward than with the story. Nothing kills a good sense of immersion like having your main character spout the same useless phrases regarding just about every item in the latter half of the game.

While the initial gameplay involves a mixture of inventory puzzles and action puzzles, I really didn't encounter much difficulty with them. For the most part, an item was explained. As you move forward through the game, it almost feels as though the developers simply ran out of time, and soon just about everything results in your character telling you (even though an action is clearly available and required) that he doesn't need to use this, whatever it is — because sometimes you can't tell. This gets frustrating. It is very difficult to figure out a puzzle when you don't know what you are even dealing with. It turns a game with very good puzzles, of an ideal difficulty, into a game with a bunch of puzzles with which you aren't really even sure what you're supposed to be doing.

The graphics are solid and feel right, throwing you inside a fully 3D world, but often lack details to make some areas appear authentic. Many objects also will be quite crudely drawn, with an excessive number of corners, while others do not suffer from that; however, the movies in the game do not suffer from this and are done well. The sound effects are fitting, but the lack of volume control for light footsteps and other smaller noises (compared to a louder running effect) doesn't seem to exist. I also found the ambient effects to be neat at first but then increased to annoying later on, when I realized that you could hear one person snore anywhere in a house at all times of the day. The music attempts be a source of tension and could work very well, using a plucked-strings sound, if it wasn't just so entirely random. Nothing creates tension like ... reading a book or some other ill-timed action and hitting the random point in the soundtrack that is creepy.

Inside Dead Reefs lies a very good adventure game, but the decision to wrap it in horrible controls and movements, and to not finish the end of the game properly, completely destroys what it could have been. To have your character constantly tell you that he doesn't need to use something when he absolutely has to is just a poor job from the developers and makes for more wasted time than fun. The biggest clincher would probably be at the end of the game, when they seemingly attempted to change the final puzzle but not complete the changes, making the game only completable via a walkthrough. Adventure fans might want to play Dead Reefs, but I can't imagine too many others will — not unless they decide to finish what they started and complete this game properly.