Adventure games are slow and methodical. They test the gamer's patience and logic, and the good ones make it worthwhile, not just by making the journey worth traveling, but by making the destination as outstanding as the road to it. Scratches starts well, ramps up nicely—and then in its third and final act, just as the truth is almost tangible, the puzzles become less organic, and most players won't be intrigued enough to persist. This assumes, of course, that they have overcome some belabored pixel hunting made worse by murky graphics that may set the mood but don't do your environment-scouring abilities any favors. At Amped IGO, we even endured over a dozen crashes to desktop on two separate computers in our fervor to reach a conclusion we were sure must be stunning—only to encounter a game-killing bug that stopped us in our tracks and rendered it impossible to complete the game. Just like the rest of Scratches, we were left wondering at how so much potential could have gone to so much waste.

But if we must start at the beginning, we should tell you about author Michael Arthate, the main character of Scratches. Thanks to his friend and real estate agent Jerry, he's spending the weekend at an authentic Victorian manor in Northumberland, hoping for the inspiration he needs to finish his latest mystery. However, what he stumbles upon is much more sinister. Is the murder that took place in this gothic mansion as simple as what the newspapers reported? What happened to James Blackwood and his wife? And how did James' obsession with an eerie African mask fit into his eventual fate? Like any decent adventure, Scratches raises a lot of questions, and the driving force for the player is to find the answers.

The game is a typical PC adventure hearkening back to Myst: while you can freely look about from any place you may travel, the travel itself is limited to individual nodes. To go from one spot to the next, you simply click on the node to get there. The bad news is that unlike the third and fourth games of the Myst series, you don't have a quick travel option. The good news is that since you're confined to the house and its gardens, it doesn't take too much effort and time to get to where you need to go, all things considered. The interface is purely mouse driven: you move and interact with the left mouse button, and you enter your inventory with the right. From here, as you may expect, it's all about exploring every nook and cranny, picking up anything that you can, and fitting it together with whatever seems to make sense based on clues you glean during your exploration.

The game itself is split into three days that are further segregated by the grandfather clock downstairs. Scratches starts slowly, with puzzles as simple as setting down and opening your suitcase, and requiring you to explore a little, go call Jerry, explore a little more, call your secretary, explore a little more, call Jerry again, and so forth. The most interesting moments come while reading the notes left by the previous inhabitants, which describe a mythology far more interesting than the one you are playing out on your computer screen. As you continue your explorations into a greenhouse, the family crypt, the garage, and a chapel, most of the excitement you have to check out the new areas fizzles, simply because there aren't as many surprises as you would think. There was, however, a notable exception to this during Day # 2, and it was easily the best, chilliest moment of Scratches.

From there, things go terribly awry. Not only do the puzzles in Day # 3 stray from the mostly logical ones that came before it, but constant desktop crashes made the entire process maddening. Installing the game on another machine and copying over the saved data did not save us, so it became necessary to save often, since we may never know when the next crash might come. The pixel hunting also gets worse at this point too, requiring you to find the tiniest glimmers, look straight up at the ceiling, and in one odd puzzle, do an action again after it fails the first time. If the adventure genre demands more trial and error than any other, forcing the player to repeat an action that didn't work two seconds before is maddening. If games like Indigo Prophecy represent the future of adventures, games like Scratches personify the past. Paying tribute to your inspiration is fine, but Scratches is too mired in the yesteryear to be good, let alone great.

So once you get the hunting and the puzzles out of the way, what is left for most great adventures is a story worth telling, but the sad truth is that unless we replay from a very early saved game, we will never know the full story. One of the final puzzles requires the player to put two items into a grinder. Apparently, we must have done something out of order somewhere along the line, since the grinder won't let us fit the necessary item into it. Yet we are able to return to the source of that item and get it again. And again. And again. Until five of them were in our inventory and we realized we'd broken the code. Alas, we can only guess at the true answer to the mystery, but even if you forget the conclusion, the journey wasn't so special as it was. Scratches, like many gothic mysteries, is about atmosphere and tension, and dated graphics and a cliched haunted house setting aren't what they used to be.

In fact, Scratches misses what made similar games like Myst IV: Revelation so special: a dazzling world worth checking out. The house has some nice artistic touches, like nicely detailed doors and a grungy attic, but it's a few years too late to be eye-catching. Nothing is organic: everything is perfectly still, just like the Myst slideshows we knew and loved, but rather than feeling creepy, it just ends up being stifled. The thunderstorm of Day # 2 is a great exception, with lightning flashes lighting up the rooms, but most of the time, everything is too drab to be scary. On the other hand, Scratches sounds terrific. Tinkling pianos and freaky sound effects give the needed boost to the game's production values. In this case, the minimalist approach was perfect, and it tries very hard to keep the player on edge all by itself, even after the rest of Scratches has fallen flat.

To be fair, it's possible that a spectacular conclusion could suppress the frustrations, but it would have to be a doozy indeed to lift Scratches from a mediocre adventure to a good one. It's got some nice touches, but in the end, it's too buggy, too cliched, and too uninteresting to come to the head of its class. Nucleosys delivered a title with plenty of promise, but can't live up to it. Only the most seasoned adventurers are likely to enjoy their time with Scratches.