I believe that Adam's Venture: Episode 1: The Search for the Lost Garden will be the first game I have played that took longer to write the review than to actually play the game. I’ve played a lot of adventure games throughout the years, and this one has me scratching my head a bit.

Adam’s Venture is an adventure game involving the discovery of Eden and your adventure of doing so by deciphering a puzzle. Uh ... what are you looking at me for? That is the story. That’s it. There’s nothing more. The gameplay in Adam’s Venture is just about as basic as you can get: There is no inventory, and you have very limited interaction with your surroundings.

The game is played in a real-time 3-D world; you can jump, run, crouch, crawl and hang on ledges to get around. The controls to accomplish movement are absolutely horrid. There seems to be a bizarre mixture of using space and control to drop or move up, depending on your situation, and you really aren’t in the game long enough to get used to them. Why couldn’t they just use up and down? It isn’t like you were using them in any of those situations anyway.

I’ve already established there was no real story to Adam’s Venture, but what about the puzzles? They gotta be hot, right? The most difficult thing you’ll find in this game is trying to put three different pieces of a sentence in the right order. Actually, that is the entire challenge of each little stage you come across. Lucky for us, consistency is something that Adam’s Venture delivers. The story sucks, the gameplay is simplistic, the puzzles are ridiculously easy and the characters ... well ... they are just annoying. My guess is that there are a whole slew of small adventures planned for Adam and Eve, but I can’t see how those biblical names are going to apply to different adventures.

So what is it that really had me scratching my head about Adam’s Venture? The game took me just a bit over an hour to complete with no help, but the graphics and lighting in the levels are downright pretty. The developers spent all that time on the graphics and to just scribble a quick script. It was such a disappointment. One point you won’t be used to in an adventure game is that there are no save games, just checkpoints; the gameplay is so simple that you can’t get anywhere and miss anything you need to advance.

Adam’s Venture isn’t a bad game. It isn’t full of bugs or unplayable, but at the same time, it isn’t a very good game. The short length with the shallow story and characters and lack of difficulty provide no sense of accomplishment as you progress. And what is the point of a game if not that? The very short playtime ends up being a bit of a saving grace for Adam’s Venture. There is such a lack of interaction in the world you play in, the gameplay of ducking, crawling, running and hanging gets old fast, and the puzzles are repetitive. I wouldn’t recommend Adam’s Venture to anyone. It just doesn’t feel like a whole game, and I can in no way justify paying for it.