Theresia - Nintendo DS

A story driven click and go puzzle game. The game play is simple enough as you work to unfold this mysterious girls story, although it is easy to miss some of the small details that help you solve the puzzles or move on to other areas. Not really a horror game, but certainly dark in nature.

This is one of the most scariest games I've ever played. Silent Hill 2 and Alone in the Dark (Aline) are the others at the top of the list. The text is disturbing and the music is super creepy. So if you have a weak stomach, then this one isn't for you. At times, it can get very frustrating because basically the whole game you're going through a bunch of mazes. There's also some backtracking involved and it can get quite confusing and you can get lost very easily. It can get boring and repititive so you may want to take a break once in a while. The story is very chilling and has two parts, one that you can play after you beat the main game. Some of the puzzles aren't that difficult but others you may have a tough time. If you see a warning message about sharp metal, then DO NOT click on that spot. You will get hurt and you CAN die. So be sure to save. If you're ready to explore the world of darkness and terror, then Theresia awaits.

It might be hard for me to describe my utter loathing of this game. I'm a big point and click adventure fan, and am a HUGE fan of the horror genre. I also love Aksys. So I thought this game seemed perfect for me, and couldn't understand why I'd never heard of it before. I played it for about a week straight, finishing the first part and starting the second, before I quit. It was a few years ago, so my memory of the details is hazy, but some things stand out without any problem. About ten minutes into the first part, Dear Theresia, I began to get the feeling that this game and I were going to have problems. First off, you're playing in the first person point of view of ????--you don't remember who you are, and you never actually see your character. Okay, that's fine, but after the first (OF MANY) overwrought description of the "agony shooting through" your body that read as though written by a thirteen year old emo teenager trying to write a super-dark fanfic, I realized that not only did I not know anything about my character, I could not care less about her. Even the mystery elements of the story weren't enough to keep me interested. The rest of the characters you encounter via texts and surfacing memories are equally unlikeable, and continue to enforce my opinion that the main character was just not someone I could possibly identify with, let alone care what happened to her. The gameplay is RIDICULOUS. You have to continually click on every different area to find out what to do next, including very specific areas in things like paintings. Nothing is highlighted or even differentiated in any way to show parts that might be important. BUT WAIT! There's a surprise--EVERYTHING KILLS YOU. Literally. You can simply touch a book and then you're reading another dramatic description of your sharp cries as crimson blood begins dripping from your frail fingertips to the floor as you curl up in empty, miserable agony. Not only that, but when the character reacts the exact same dramatic way to a needle pricking her as getting burned or touched by acid then you really start to feel more annoyed than anything else. Sometimes, you'll touch something once, it will hurt you, but somehow you're supposed to realize that you need to touch it TWICE to advance despite having no hints to this whatsoever. And other times touching something twice means you'll die. As for solving puzzles, forget logic. The things you'll need to gather and the order you need to use them in are ridiculous. It isn't even the type of "why didn't she use the rope instead of needing to find a chain" type logic that adventure games can run into, it's more that you have to gather pieces you couldn't even imagine needing in order to complete the quests. Clicking through areas where almost anything hurts you to try to find things that you have absolutely no idea what they could be does not a fun or dramatic game make, it makes a very annoying one. The music and art aren't terrible, (indeed, the tomb-like atmosphere was pretty interesting), but everything else about this is. If you're looking for a point and click adventure, try the phenomenal Zero Escape series (also by Aksys), or even the short romp that is Trace Memory, both for Nintendo DS.

I first came across this game while browsing through our local game store's DS section, not really planning on making a purchase. But, once I saw it I figured it sounded pretty interesting and I might as well give it a shot. I really enjoy both survival horror games and puzzle games, so combining the two seemed like it'd turn out to be awesome. What could possibly go wrong, right? Games, much like books, cannot be judged by their covers. My first mistake was believing otherwise. Before I go into plot details, let's talk a bit about the game mechanics. Theresia is, first and foremost, a point and click adventure. If you're in to that, awesome. If you aren't, there isn't anything particularly groundbreaking in this title to change your mind. Graphically, it's reminiscent of an N64 game, but it's a DS game so I can't really hold that against it. There are a few "cut-scenes," but those encompass very minor actions and tend to feel more like repetitive time wasters than anything else (i.e. rolling a grenade or something being on fire). Any sort of story animation is little more than still images and some accompanying text. All of the main action takes place in the first person, with your character being able to move in four basic directions. I do like the fact that you can use the d-pad to move, rather than tapping the touch screen arrows every step, as well as being able to side-step using the shoulder buttons. Your character also has near infinite inventory space, but certain items have individual limits to how many of each you can carry and some items randomly break or disappear after you use them. You can pick up various weapons throughout the game, but there is no actual combat. Found a knife? Well, you'll probably need that to cut a rope or some cloth later. Though, even without having to actually fight anything, you can still take damage. There are various traps set up that are designed specifically to do little more than irritate you or make things take even longer than necessary. Sometimes, there will even be areas where you're forced to take damage, regardless of your feelings on the matter. You can find elixirs, though, that refill a portion of your health gauge. There are several maps to navigate, which is cool. Aside from the fact that they all look relatively identical to everything else in their respective levels, and are more meandering around trying to find something useful than world building exploration. Each level has a very basic goal to accomplish to get to the next one, with puzzles you need to solve to move on. The puzzles themselves are bizarre, more often than not. Well, insomuch as you begin to wonder if your character is also mentally handicapped in some way that the amnesia she has doesn't quite cover. To elaborate on that, most of the puzzles aren't that difficult to figure out--just time consuming. The one thing to keep in mind is that several puzzles almost require you to shut your brain off to solve them. They'll seem incredibly straightforward and simple, but end up wanting you to do things in the most bass-ackwards way possible. At one point relatively early on, there is a knife you can pick up. It's sticking out of a corpse, but for some reason it's blade-side up. There is absolutely no way to flip the corpse over and pull it out from the handle. Instead, you have to back track, solve another couple of puzzles, and grab a pair of pliers that you'll then use to rip the knife out of the corpse. Basically, come up with the logical thing to do, immediately eject it from your brain, and then try to think of the most complicated way to solve it that you can. Keep that in mind and you'll get on just fine. You'll also get a neat little necklace that serves as a hint giving item--it just so happens to be functionally useless. You can use it an unlimited number of times, but that doesn't mean it will tell you anything that will actually help. There were a few times I got stuck while playing, with only a vague idea of what the game wanted me to be doing (that happens quite often, but dumb luck will usually get you through); upon consulting my magic talisman of stating the obvious, I was left with nothing to do but continue meandering around and double-checking an entire level until I stumbled across something new (and sometimes something I found before that the character only now found useful). It seems like the bulk of the times it actually tells you anything helpful are right at the beginning of the game. The rest of the time, you'll probably hear something you already know (i.e. "I need to open this door.") Now, moving on to the actual substance of the game. There are two parts, beginning with "Dear Emile." The second part, "Dear Martel," cannot be played until you've completed the first half. In Dear Emile, you play as Leanne (who doesn't actually get named until the tail-end of the story); while in Dear Martel, you play as some dude that's apparently not cool enough for a name. For purposes of plot, I'll mostly be talking about Dear Emile, as Dear Martel is pretty much just giving you the backstory hinted at in the first half of the game. The basic premise is this: Leanne wakes up with no idea who or where she is. She's apparently trapped in a room she can't remember and needs to find a way out. Once she does, she's, again, trapped. This time in an underground, labyrinthine sub-basement that seems pretty darn old. There are a few traps, a dead guy, some rooms she can explore, and the beginning of the long, puzzle-filled trek to freedom. At first, she's pretty freaked out and repulsed by the corpses and blood trails she happens upon. That ends rather quickly, though, and over time she seems torn between being grossed out and deeply fascinated by the blood and gore (she's a weird lady, for sure). So that all seems rather simple: she's trapped and needs to get out. That stays her goal up until there is actually a pretty reasonable expectation that she can leave whenever she wants, but decides to try to completely figure out what's going on before she'll bail out. Anyway, like I said, she's got amnesia. Occasionally, she'll find journal entries from various characters that will trigger flashbacks that don't make much sense (to her or to you, both are applicable). These sporadic flashes of events are the overarching plot (which are, at times, nonsensical at best, and completely ludicrous at others). Unfortunately for you, the more she remembers about the past, the more she becomes seemingly irrational. It's somewhat understandable, though, as she's the only living person in the entire compound and the events leading up to that are kind of messed up. I'd probably want to figure out what the hell was going on, too, if I was in her position. But the thing is, she's sort of nuts. While at first she seems like a poor little girl lost, as her memory returns she becomes rather creepy and obsessive. In one shining instance near the end of the game, she learns a big important bit of information, and turns right around and decides it's something completely different just because she wants to. I've got this pet idea that the elixirs she consumes are actually just hard liquor, and that seems to make her sometimes mind-numbing stupidity seem a little more tolerable. I can give her a pass if she's totally hammered. So the plot you play through is this: Leanne has amnesia, she slowly gets her memories back, and she needs to get out of compound she's trapped in--eventually, no rush or anything. The backstory you happen upon is a bit more complicated, sort of. There was a virus that killed a lot of people, some scientists created a cure by stroke of pure dumb luck (it's a bit more complex than that, but suffice to say if a few key factors they had absolutely no control over had not fallen into place, there wouldn't have been a cure at all), and in the end it didn't actually matter because some soldiers killed pretty much all of the survivors anyway. Just not Leanne. Honestly, I can't tell if the plot problems are sloppy writing or poor localization. In later parts of the game, there are a lot of grammatical issues and statements that seem completely out of place. So either way, there was obviously some proof-reading errors, but there aren't many times that it will completely throw your ability to understand the basic message you should be getting. It'll really only bother you if you're nit-picky like I am. But grammar aside, it takes a while for things to come together, even after the amnesia isn't much of an inhibitor for Leanne. That, and it's obvious that the writer had no idea how physics or biology works (i.e. a wool blanket will never be able to actually contain a proximity mine blast and come away mostly unscathed, nor can it survive a blazing inferno no matter how sturdy that wooden box was; also, babies aren't that durable--just wait for that one). Atmosphere wise, there's not much to work with. There are a lot of barren rooms and long hallways. Some areas are darker than others, and some that are more rundown and bloody than those around it. That can really only carry a "creepy" feel so far, though. It's more often than not a lot more similar to wandering around an office building after the employees have left. The soundtrack also doesn't so much feel creepy as it does repetitive and screechy. If those were played to better effect, then I'm sure I'd feel more of the survival horror feel. As it is, it's very flat. There's no real sense of impending danger. The traps aren't surprising or scary, being that you know occasionally a knife is going to fly out of nowhere and stab you or you'll get tetanus on some jagged metal Leanne just acknowledged was there. Even the random dead bodies and blood get pretty lame after a while, once Leanne stops spazzing about them every time they pop up. Overall, I kind of hate this game. Rage was my one motivating factor in completing it. In retrospect, it sort of feels like a real-life scenario out of The Ring--I'll continue living so long as I pass the torment off to others. I won't tell you not to play it, just that there is absolutely nothing about the game that I find worthwhile. YMMV and all that. If you like it for some reason, that's awesome for you. If you don't, I feel your pain and send you my sincerest condolences. But I'll give it two stars, because, at the very least, it isn't the *worst* game I've ever played. It's close, though.

I had recently played another Aksys game (9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors) and enjoyed it. Theresia seemed to be similar in gameplay, but in a darker gothic style with survival horror elements. Being a huge fan of the horror genre, I decided to buy it. In terms of gameplay, Theresia is tedious. This is particularly true for the Dear Emile portion. I unfortunately spent most of the game glued to a faq due to the sheer amount of backtracking required along with the obscure solutions to some puzzles. Especially true since some of the puzzles require very precise application of the touchscreen. This made actually playing the game very frustrating. After awhile I ended up solely playing for the tidbits of journal strewn about and the memory scenes that came with them. Graphics were a mixed bag. I enjoyed the still frames and the cutscenes, however the rendering of the hallways was very grainy, to the point where it was hard to determine you were at a bend. Not too much music to speak of but what was there, was solid. The story was really well executed, despite the fact that I had to toss in a healthy amount of suspension of disbelief with some of the details. Dear Emile was more satisfying, tough that was mostly due to length of that chapter giving the opportunity for better development. Dear Martel felt somewhat rushed, and I would have enjoyed more fleshing out of the details, but it was still satisfying. Both stories leave you with a number of unanswered questions. I understand that this is an adaptation of a mobile phone game series in Japan, hopefully more of those get released here to clarify the story a bit more. Anyway, final take: Did I like this? Yes. But I didn't really like PLAYING it. I would have preferred it as a movie or novel. However, I did get it when it was 10 bucks so it totally justifies the money. Also, when you beat the game it gives you synopsis of both stories with some added details, so you can revisit the story anytime you want without trudging through those abysmal dungeons.

I'm a little late to the table on this one, as Theresia was released last October and I only just got it for Christmas. I'd originally heard about this game back in June, when I was bored and Googling "Shadowgate" - an old favorite NES game of mine. When I read that Aksys was localizing a game that was "a horror-adventure game like Shadowgate," my inner fangirl (and a lot of my outer fangirl) began squeeing with delight. Now that I own the thing and have beaten both halves in 2.5 days of frantic gameplay, I have to answer the question: Is Theresia a worthy successor to the Kemco-Seika point-and-click trilogy of yore? That would be an emphatic yes. A red-blooded (and occasionally purple-skinned) point-and-clicker with a seriously creepy and nightmarish atmosphere, Theresia delivers in spades. There are two halves to the story; Dear Emile and Dear Martel, the latter of which can only be accessed after completing Dear Emile. Each story revolves around a protagonist who awakens with no memory of who they are, where they are or how they got there (echoes of the first Deja Vu game). You're surrounded by booby traps that will drain your health - yes, there is a health bar AND ways to replenish it. This allows for a little more exploration of your surroundings than in Shadowgate, where nearly everything would kill you instantly. And you're going to need to explore. A LOT. Nearly the whole game is spent wandering around hallways in a first-person 3D perspective. The graphics here are not really DS-worthy. In fact, they look kind of Super Nintendo-y, very pixelated and grainy. Normally, mazes of this kind would make me weep with despair (see also: the maze in Uninvited), but Theresia loves you so much it provides you with two things that will make you want to kiss it: a map of the entire area, AND a way to look at said map to see every room you've explored and what you did in that room. In addition to these fantastic tools, you also have at your disposal an item (it's different for each character) that, when used on yourself, provides you with a hint as to what you should do next. I got quite a ways through Dear Emile on my own with these advantages, and I am no puzzle-solver. The gameplay mechanics are incredibly user-friendly, with the game itself leading you gently and telling you how to use objects, what everything does and sometimes even where to go. It's very easy for someone to pick up and play without looking at the instruction booklet. The puzzles can be savagely difficult if you don't have much of an analytical mind, and there is a severe lack of completed walkthroughs on the internet to help you through. Fortunately, it's really hard to die, and you can explore your surroundings in-depth, despite the fact that nearly everything is booby-trapped. Thankfully, there is an examine feature - the Eye - that will almost always indicate where the traps are, by indicating hidden needles or pieces of metal, or just giving you a George Lucas bad-feeling-about-this. Your main goal in each story is to recover your memory and figure out why you are where you are, and what's with the purple corpses everywhere? You do this bit by bit as you explore, collecting journal entries and triggering memories as you struggle to make it out. I can't emphasize enough how creepy this game is - it's officially the first game I've played to give me a genuine wiggins. It's not a shock-jump kind of game such as, say, Resident Evil, where you never know what zombified creature is going to leap on you next. It's originally Japanese, and as in their horror movies, more emphasis is placed on creating a growing feeling of dread than BOO! scares, although there are one or two of those. The graphics in the rooms are much more lovingly detailed than the wandering-in-the-hallways sections, looking for all the world like oil paintings. The corpses you run into all over the place are invariably disgusting and gross, which is fantastic, especially on a small-screen system. The memory flashbacks are beautiful, using specific colors - mostly red - over gray and sepia tones to effect a sense of nostalgia. If you've seen the movie "Suspiria" by Dario Argento, the importance of color in this game is a bit like that. You're surrounded by a lot of grays and browns, so when red and purple come up, you know it's important. So what's the real selling point of Theresia? The intertwined stories. I really, really, really can't give even the slightest hint away as to the plot because it is so worth discovering for yourself. I will say that both Dear Emile and Dear Martel are incredibly twisted: Dear Emile because of psychological reasons, and Dear Martel for biological ones. I'd say Dear Emile's was the more warped of the two and Dear Martel had more of a sense of regret to it. The endings are still making me go "wait...what the HELL was that?" Dear Emile's story is almost an aftereffect of what goes on in Dear Martel, and it's very exciting to play for the first time just to see how they intertwine. Replayability may suffer a bit just because you know what happens and why, but it's like re-reading a good book to catch things you may have missed the first time around in order to gain a deeper understanding. Bottom line, this is a wonderful horror-adventure game for people who enjoy subtle terror, point-and-click adventures, and yes...DEFINITELY fans of Shadowgate.

This game has a really spooky atmosphere. It can be a bit confusing at times, but I really enjoy playing it. It's completely in English, which I took the risk of because I wasn't sure. Overall, I love playing this game and it has been one of my favorites ever since it came in the mail.

Theresia has alot of problems; the puzzles are kinda weird (in that the sloutions are just ridiculously skewed in terms of logic) and there are some noticeable (but infrequent) syntax/ grammar errors. However, the game has an incredibly creepy atmosphere and the story is like a great gothic horror novel. Also worth noting, the music is top notch. If you love horror (like I do) and don;t mind putting up with some issues, Theresia is the game for you.