LifeSigns is a point and click adventure game with a focus on performing surgeries and other hospital related tasks. You play as Dokuta Tendo, a second year intern, as you establish your grounds as a surgical doctor. The overall story and presentation of the game is nice and can lead to some well thought out stories. However, the weird pacing presents some high difficulty sections and overall awkward game play.
The visual presence of LifeSigns is quite nice. Everything is hand drawn to showcase a manga-like feel to game. Along with this, the game presents itself in an easy to use user interface and basic map layout. Along with a fun look to the characters, the game becomes quite inviting and fun to watch as you read your way through the adventure and medical stories.
The majority of the game play involves you going through conversations with your fellow colleagues and patients. This ends up becoming a double edged sword as around 70% of the game is reading. You really have to enjoy story driven games in order to find enjoyment from LifeSigns. The bad part of this is that the game can become quite boring as you have to spend hours at a time reading dialogue and then selecting the next place to go to read more dialogue at. However, for the majority of the time, the conversations going on are either interesting, intense, or quite funny. The game also goes out of the way to put conversations in there that relate to nothing and are only there to give the player a laugh.
The sound and music in LifeSigns isn’t anything exceptional, but it does the job. During the intense conversations or surgeries you’re faced with high speed music while the depressing and low-key moments are presented with soft melodies. Though, during any conversation you will have to present the person with the correct documents or objects in order to continue through and when you present something correctly, you hear a “ding” sound. I quite liked this because it told me when I was proceeding correcting in the story and when I didn’t, I got a muffled buzzing noise. This was great in order to verify I was on track and doing things right.
The rest of the game will be centered around examining and performing operations on your sick and injured patients. During the examination you are to use either the Listen, Feel or Visual Inspection commands to find out what is wrong with the person. This sounds good on paper but ends up becoming quite the hassle and can take far longer than it should. The problem with these parts is that you have no hints on where to look on the patient. There will be times when they have a physical bruise and you can know to visually inspect that region, but when it comes to internal issues, you’re stuck with the guessing game. These sections can end up with you just randomly tapping your patient’s body until you finally find the right spot. There should have been much more guidelines to this.
During the surgical operation parts you must perform a specific surgery in a set amount of time. Not only are you working against the clock during this, but you have to make sure to perform all your tasks well enough to not kill the patient. To ensure you are aware of your patients remaining life, you are shown a meter and are notified of their heart rate. If these hit zero, or you’ve run out of time, you will fail.
Throughout these surgical sections, you will need to perform a sequence of tasks in order to save your patients’ life. These can range from stitching someone all the way to removing a blood clot in the brain. The majority of these operations can come off as a bit stressful but considering each task usually only requires a slow swipe of your stylus across the screen, it evens itself out. With this, each procedure becomes quite fun and you’ll notice yourself just rushing through that countdown. What started out as a 30 minute operation will quite short when you finally realize your done. These surgical procedures are the best part of LifeSigns as they can be incredibly stressful but very fun.
What sets LifeSigns back the most though is the pacing between each of these operation parts. The beginning alone will have you reading through almost 2 hours of dialogue before you finally reach your next surgery. And though the conversations are fun and informative, they really start to become overwhelming when you have to truck your way through several hours of them.
The worst part of this is that the surgeries can be quite hard and stressful. Some of the tools you use during the operations require specific actions and after a while of text, you end up forgetting how to perform. There were times when I almost lost because instead of using my tools correctly, I had to guess and check my way through the procedure. It would have been much better if the operations came more frequently, or I was I told more often how to go about them.
The aspect that sets LifeSigns apart from other hospital based adventure games is the inclusion of persuading mini game sections. In these you will have to try and convince another character to do something/tell you about something by showing them pieces of information or objects you are holding on to. This is probably one of the more engaging parts to the game since it involves you having to think which documents and articles you should show this person to try and get them on your side. If you show them the correct objects, you will be granted with bonuses. These can range from more dialogue sections to bonus time during surgical parts. Getting these wrong however can give you a disadvantage.
Overall LifeSigns comes up a bit short in entertainment. It presents itself nicely and is set up well enough to warrant a play through. However, it is still hard to recommend it considering all the other hospital based point and click adventure games out there. The awkward pacing caused me to feel either incredibly bored or overwhelmed when it came to the surgeries. If you really enjoy text heavy games, you will definitely find some enjoyment here. It has great story telling and makes sure to explore each of the presented characters. LifeSigns ends up feeling like it is being weighed down with all the extra elements instead of sticking to what it should have: surgeries and medical operations.
Overall: 6/10
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