KGB
Review
KGB. The plot is so good I won't even go into it too much, I'll just say that it involves conspiracies and other such things towards the end of Soviet communism. An uncertain future. You play as an ex-Spetsnaz just transfered into Department P of the KGB, an agency designed to root out KGB corruption. Some guy has just been killed, and since he was ex-KGB you've been sent to see if there's anything to it.
The game is played as a first person adventure. The interface is very similar to the interface of Dune, but thankfully it is much better designed. The puzzles are quite varied. From simple inventory puzzles to more complex cryptographic problems. The main puzzle though, is mostly knowing where you're supposed to be at what time, and trying not to walk into any of the instant-game over rooms. In some cases it's easy to figure out, but in others, like Chapter 3 in particular, it's mostly trial and error until you get the right one.
This trial and error method of gaming would be much worse without the backtracking feature. That is, you can backtrack to slightly before you made the mistake. Sadly, this feature just, doesn't work. The only time it helps is if you walk into a room that kills you. Sometimes you can start on a game-killing path without any way to reverting other than loading a saved game. Making full use of the save-slots then, is a good idea.
While the music is decent and fitting, the graphics are really quite atmospheric. Everything has been drawn to look about the correct level of squalid. The bars are seedy, the offices are spartan, full of beige, and lacking any individuality. People's faces in particular are drawn well, and it almost perfectly conveys the type of person that they are.
The dialogue, though. I don't quite get it. That is either really how they talk in Russia (unlikely), another case of the French messing up English (likely, but not so much in this case), or they're trying to give us a very awful stereotype of Russian speech. This is my guess. It's not just bad English like in Dune, but a completely over-the-top propoganda-style speech that just everyone seems to have. Talk to the owner of a hotel and out of the blue he comes out with "Death to <random new post-communist initiative spelled out using bizarre terms>!".
Which brings me neatly to another point. Despite what some people may say, probably partly due to the way everyone talks, there aren't really many memorable characters. In fact, the thugs, prostitutes, and Americans tend to stand out purely because they don't talk like idiots, but that's not really a good reason, and they aren't particularly memorable anyway.
In conclusion, KGB has enough shortcomings, but not nearly enough to not be a good game. It's very atmospheric, gritty, and with a well thought out — if hard to follow — plot, and challenging gameplay.
Note: I've included Conspiracy, a CD re-release from a year later. It's the same game, but with very poor quality video clips (see screenshot 6) and a hint-system that only seems to work when you already know what to do. It's not really worth the extra filesize, but I'm including it here because no other abandonware site seems to have it.
Knyght
Downloads
- KGB (PC) (2.5 MB)
- KGB (Amiga) (2.5 MB)
- Conspiracy (PC CD) (189.9 MB)
- Walkthrough (13.2 KB)