CD-ROM REVIEW : Scary Gadget Trips the Light Fantastic

Start with a dash of Franz Kafka and George Lucas, splice in a bit of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch, blend in some mind-bending graphics and a minimalist score that would make an industrial musician like Philip Glass grin, and there’s Gadget.

Subtitled “invention, travel & adventure,” Gadget is a trip in more ways than one. As a creepy mystery game--take a train ride, find the bad scientist, collect the gadgets, keep your head--Gadget relies on the “Twin Peaks”/”Myst” formula: While the narrative is linear, it becomes clear quite early on that not everything is what it seems to be.

But as an interactive experience (it was Macworld’s multimedia game of the year in 1994), Gadget is a luscious example of the art so far. The detailed rendering of the game’s environments--stunning, surreal train stations, eerie techno-world landscapes, sensationally smooth computer animation sequences--are haunting and hypnotic. You may not like all you see, because Gadget has an uninhibited dark side. The game introduces a seriously scary set of characters.

All in fun, though, Gadget’s dynamics--which actually start out in static fashion--flow from the mind of director Haruhiko Shono, who allows players to instinctively wander through his three-dimensional realm, clicking the mouse pointer here and there, listening to clues in the form of phone calls, radio broadcasts and chance meetings with strangers.

At the beginning, we are placed in Room 306 of the West End Hotel. A radio broadcast warns of impending doom: A comet is on a collision course with Earth. A group of scientists, we later learn, is busy building a capsule spaceship.

But that’s hundreds of mouse clicks down the line. In the hotel lobby, we meet the enigmatic Slowslop, who hands over a photograph of one of the scientists we have to locate and the first of five gadgets, a pair of binoculars. Then it’s off to the train--a sleek, phantasmagoric train--and deeper into the puzzle.

D irector Shono keeps the tale inviting, exchanges with other characters are flashed in subtitles, and the virtually weird landscape never gets unreasonably weird, no thanks to the humming, atonal music supplied by composer Koji Ueno. When all the sensations threaten to overwhelm your equilibrium--after two or three hours, say--Gadget can be saved easily to the hard disk, so players can return at the exact point of departure.

No word yet if Synergy is preparing a sequel, although it would seem to be a natural. Any votes for Gadget Goes Hawaiian?*

* Gadget, Synergy Corp., CD-ROM for Macintosh and Windows/MS-DOS, about $50.