From a creative standpoint, The Experiment could be considered a monumental effort in telling a story. Sadly, this game doesn’t follow through on all other fronts which in the end makes the finished product suffer immensely.

The premise is simple yet inventive. As a faceless operator, you are put in control of the security system of an abandoned military vessel that has run aground and mysteriously been emptied. There is only one woman left, and it is your task to help her escape from this ghost ship. You do not control her directly though, as your only means of helping her lies with the security interface itself. You can control the cameras, lights, objects, and doors throughout the ship in an effort to make the woman move along through the damaged rooms. This interface can start to become overwhelming if you are not careful though. You are able to have only three security cameras open at a time, which is your only means of viewing the character, and then use the map to light up nearby objects to draw her towards them. You use these tactics to solve the puzzles and gain access codes to the rest of the security database in the ship. The rest of the windows that you can bring up involve everything from the crew’s personal files and security information, to the upgrades that are installed on the cameras and the in-game help screens. Thankfully, the game action is never too fast-paced and generally gives you ample time to complete any searching you may have to go through before completing an objective.

This is also a slight fault of the game. While maneuvering the woman around is hard enough in itself, the fact that she moves so painfully slow through the areas is a factor that will start to weigh on your sanity. The mini map and cameras do little to complement each other in a lot of cases. Since the camera angles don’t offer any sort of complete view of any room, it becomes hard to decipher whether there is any additional portion to the room you are in. Since you have to physically move the map around to locate objects and lights, it becomes hard to tell if the room actually ends where it looks like it on the map, or if you have simply failed to move the map all the way to one side or the other. When completing tasks is so dependent on a good map, it is simply frustrating to remember to do this kind of stuff all the time. This is a minor complaint, as the big complaints fall squarely on the main character and that damn voice of hers.