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Reah

  • Plenty of interesting and challenging puzzles

    The high quality puzzles are the true value of gameplay for many adventure game players. Reah has plenty of puzzles - the mix of inventory based, mechanical, and logical ones, ranging from very simple to quite complicated puzzles suiting everyone from people new to the genre to die hard adventure gamers.

  • Reah is puzzle oriented adventure

    The players want to solve puzzles not just watch story - that's what movies are for. That's why Reah's developers tried to create a game which primarily concentrates on the process of solving puzzles, not searching for them or watching the story. The player won't have to desperately "scan" the screen looking for hotspots or items or just for clues. He won't have to use any carried item on any other in hopeless attempts to make any progress in the game. The player will just know that he's facing the puzzle and his task is to solve it. Of course there's a story in the game, a world created only with puzzles would look a bit... odd.

  • Great freedom of exploration

    Although the game is entirely based on prerendered graphics, the player experience a very immersive environment, thanks to our V-Cruise™ Engine. The navigation is ultra-smooth, fast and seamless and gives a feeling of "being there". The player can move between hundreds of locations and he has the ability to perform full 360 degree turns in every location with addition of occasional up and down looks and zooms. The engine does not use the popular technology of projecting a flat image onto the inside surface of a cylinder like many other similar products do - it simply shows the picture recorded by moving or rotating the camera. Thanks to this the player clearly sees that he is inside the three dimensional world instead of just watching the flat projection. The effect of 3D is further enhanced with slight eccentric rotation. The navigation is entirely controlled by mouse movement and one mouse button giving the player intuitive and smooth control similar to real-time rendered games combined with the highest quality of prerendered graphics.

  • Highly realistic, beautiful graphics

    The team of five artists created a beautiful and varied world - there're cities, fountains, arches, a jungle with a lake, a desert village, and a futuristic tech center. Although the game takes place in an alternative world which helped the artists to show their imagination but most of the objects in the game resemble real ones forcing the artists to pay special attention to every detail. They created about 9000 different objects, large and small, consisting of over 10 million polygons illuminated with over 500 light sources.

  • Dynamic, animated world.

    The world in the game is not static - the engine allows the addition of many animations in various locations.

  • Full screen video sequences

    The game features a small cast of real actors who prevent the player from feeling lonely and help the story to develop. The actors were carefully shot on digital video and then composited against rendered backgrounds. The video sequences are displayed full screen at 25 frames per second.

  • High resolution, high color display

    The game works in high resolution - 640x480 pixels, full screen, in high color mode - 65 thousand colors. The actual game window is also big - 608x348 pixels and all graphics and video are stored and displayed exactly in this resolution, there's no scaling and other similar "tricks" involved in order to cheat the player.

    The DVD-ROM version significantly increases the quality of graphics thanks to doubled data transfer rate (reduced compression ratio).
    DVD-ROM vs CD-ROM DVD-ROM vs CD-ROM DVD-ROM vs CD-ROM DVD-ROM vs CD-ROM

    DVD-ROM vs CD-ROM version comparisons (each picture is about 100 kB in size)

  • 16-bit, high quality sound effects and music

    All sound effects in the game are of the highest quality, all in 16-bits of resolution with 22 kHz sample rate. A virtual world created with amazing graphics and supported by superb sound effects is even more convincing and realistic. The game controls the location of the player's character and all sound sources in the virtual world allowing for precise positioning of them in stereo and updating these positions in real-time thanks to QMixer sound engine licensed from QSound Labs, Inc.

    The DVD-ROM version uses the newer version of the sound engine - QMDX - which supports hardware accelerated 3D sound card allowing for full three dimensional positioning of sound sources.

  • Atmospheric, mesmerizing soundtrack

    The music was composed by leading artists from the Polish techno scene. The result is a mix of trance, psychedelic, ambient, trip-hop and drum'n'bass styles.

    The DVD-ROM version uses MPEG Audio Layer 3 (MP3) technology licensed from Fraunhofer Institut which allows for an improved soundtrack of full CD quality and increased length. Next to that, an extra track, especially composed for that version, is added.

    The standard CD-ROM version for the North American market features all sound enhancements of the DVD-ROM version.

  • Simple, intuitive interface

    All movements are handled with the mouse and one of its buttons. The interface is simple - the inventory items are automatically highlighted and ready to use when an appropriate hotspot is discovered - there's no need to guess what item should be used at a particular point. All other options are available via an auto-hiding top menu bar. There are also keyboard shortcuts giving access to the most important functions.
    Interface example Interface example Interface example

    Interface examples

  • Double sided DVD-10 disc or 6 CD-ROM discs full of game data

    The game consists of over 87,000 frames of 3D rendered animation plus 40,000 frames of video sequences giving over 127,000 frame in total - this is definitely not an interactive slideshow. These are real numbers not the values "created" by marketing people. There are over 400 sound effects and similar number of spoken phrases - audio data occupies over 280 MB. Actually the developer had problems fitting the game on 6 discs.

    It was impossible to fit the data on "standard" DVD-5 single sided disc after decreasing compression rate in order to take advantage of better DVD-ROM performance.

© copyright 1999,2000 L.K. Avalon, last changed: May 19, 2000