The developers have gone with something of an abridged script to help ensure that the game doesn't get bogged down to the length that a novel would, but the tone and timbre of the words and rhythm are just not there. Naturally, a video game needs to present the narrative differently - there are characters to move around, and interactivity to consider. It's not quite poetic, but it was very carefully crafted. The Phantom of the Opera is notable for a certain structural beauty, with words flowing off the page with a musical rhythm and tone. That's perfectly normal for any adaptation or reworking of a work, but The Phantom of the Opera was never really about grisly horror scenes, and the way that Buquet goes in this game is a significant break from what, I believe Gaston Leroux would have envisioned as he was writing. Firstly, the video game industry has never been good at understanding that sometimes less is more, but quality authors certainly do, so by adding scenes for "clarity", the developer is undermining the creative vision of the author to an extent. While it's good in the sense that it gives the developers creative freedom to go beyond the book, there are also issues with it. So, rather than just seeing Joseph Buquet show up dead, as he appears in the book (and I'm really sorry if that's a spoiler to you, but we're talking about a 100-year-old book here, so just deal with it), we can instead see the circumstances and terror with which his death played out. The added benefit of the interactive medium is that the developers can take a swing at filling in the blanks of the book. Effectively this means that the game offers a fairly straightforward, almost visual novel-like approach to the story, and it does stick quite nicely to the book's key moments. Structurally, The Phantom of the Opera is a point-and-click adventure game, but without the elaborate puzzles. The Phantom of the Opera is the first from this developer that I've played and, while I don't think it's great, I would like to see MazM continue, because we badly need more developers that can look at literature like this, rather than yet more damn Tom Clancy or Youth Fantasy authors. Hyde (though unfortunately neither of those is available on Switch). The team has previously tackled Wizard of Oz and Dr. MazM is a developer that is committed to taking classic literature and turning it into video games. Unfortunately, the musical, though very watchable and far more tolerable than many of Webber's other projects, has since come to dominate people's understanding of the story, and that's disappointing, because the narrative is better than what the musical offers. Before it became most famous for an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, it was a masterfully written bit of gothic literature, right up there with the likes of Dracula, Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein, and The Monk.
The Phantom of the Opera is one of my favourite books.
0 kommentar(er)
