When handed Next Life, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. I figured I could count on a similar experience to The Adventure Company’s last Agatha Christie game, Evil Under the Sun – slow characters, a lot of talking, and a few awkward choices. Turns out, I was right.

The game outdoes some of my expectations, however, so let’s address the good stuff immediately. The story itself is engaging, and I actually find myself truly wanting to find out what happens next, as if I am reading a good book.

Puzzles, while tough, are intuitive: if you’re looking for a tool, chances are you can find it in a tool shed. While the game will rarely ever explicitly tell you where to find something, using common sense actually helps you solve puzzles! There’s very little of the ‘Silent Hill’ factor going on with puzzle solving. For the uninitiated, this means that you won’t be doing things such as combining a needle, a coat hanger, and a piece of string to get a pair of keys out from under a grate. No, instead your common-sense-using character finds a hacksaw (or maybe a crowbar or screwdriver) and goes about prying the grate off. You know, like a rational person would.

I couldn’t be happier with the environments. You, the very confused Adam Raichl, spend the majority of the game on the island, at least at first. In most point and click games, this would mean wandering through the same exact screens dozens, or possibly hundreds of times, searching them over and over again for different objects, clues, or people. In Next Life, the camera angles change whenever the story advances; some areas open, some close, sometimes it’s raining, cloudy, or sunny. An unbelievably helpful feature included in the game allows the player to press the E key, which immediately reveals all available entrances and exits on a screen. This key does not reveal hidden exits, but goes a long way in speeding up gameplay. Many times, when Adam falls asleep (due to the mysterious bell that tolls 3 times every afternoon), he wakes up someplace completely different. A surreal construction site, a road, and a morgue make for several different interesting locations that challenge the player with creative puzzles, mostly solved by picking up objects and interacting with the environment, or the objects themselves.

On to the negative!