I enjoy playing Point N Click Adventure games and I like Westerns so a title which combines the two should be right up my street. Every time a game of this type is released fans of the genre get all excited and hope it will spark a proper revival but more often than not the game fails to live up to expectations and fades into obscurity.

The game starts with a short cut-scene, a cowboy and cowgirl are riding horses together across the desert, and they discover a wounded man face down in the dirt. This is where you take over, playing as the female character you must find a way to heal the wounded man, and the process, as is tradition with the genre, is a drawn out affair.

There are some plants nearby, red and green, and as anyone familiar with Resident Evil will testify: red plant + green plant = super healing properties. This should be a simple case of walking over to the plants and ripping some leaves off but that would be far too easy so you must first fetch a knife which you’ll find attached to your horse.

Using the knife with the plants will give you leaves (and a strange popping sound which would better suit a bottle being opened) and then you have to figure out how to use these to heal the wounded man. First you must make the man comfortable by talking to him, which is bizarre because he is clearly unconscious, and then you must roll him over, and of course this is not as simple as it sounds.

You must take the blanket from your horse and use that with the man in order to roll him over and place it under his head. As you pick up the man’s glasses you will trigger another ridiculous sound effect which is completely out of place.

You mess around a bit more, wounded man tells you that there’s gold in a coffin, and he then tells you the name on the gravestone, at that moment the cowboy returns, and three strangers approach. When asked if the wounded man, who is now deceased, said anything, the cowgirl replies “just the name on the grave” because that’s exactly what someone would do, admit that the wounded stranger gave you the whereabouts of hidden gold to three dodgy looking individuals. This is obviously where the trouble starts and the game properly begins and everything continues in the same manner with a silly story, silly dialogue, silly sound effects, and worst of all silly puzzles.

There is one thing about this game which I find more baffling than anything else and that is the amount of memory it requires to run. The graphics aren’t bad but they certainly won’t win any awards, there’s nothing here that should require a large amount of memory, but a quick check of the Taskbar indicates that this game is eating up 283,848k and that is absolute madness.

I love the fact that some developers out there still feel strongly about the genre and try their best to spark a welcome revival. The problem is that many of those same developers feel the need to update graphics to the point where the games barely resemble the past masters in the genre. Evidence of this can be found in the later Monkey Island titles when compared with the original two. The focus seemed to shift towards lovely visuals over solid gameplay, story, and dialogue, and I don’t know of a single person who would suggest that the more recent attempt was superior to the first two. A misguided attempt at style over substance is where Fenimore Filmore ultimately fails and it’s a shame because the otherwise interesting setting could have made for a classic point n click adventure game.

5/10

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