Nothing is more frustrating than a game that won't get out of its own way. Buried deep within Still Life is a great game, with an engrossing story, well-thought out characters, and chilling atmosphere, but it's so covered in tedious and laborious gameplay that even the most dedicated players are likely to give up long before they reach the end. I suppose I should be impressed that Still Life somehow manages to embody both the best and the worst aspects of its genre without nullifying its own existence, but instead I'm just left disgruntled, unsatisfied, and longing for what might've been.

Still Life starts with a disquieting cinema of a man in a top hat and cloak dragging a dead body through a deserted building, stopping only to use his victim's blood to scrawl something on the wall. The action picks up right where the cinema leaves off, as worn-out FBI agent Victoria McPherson arrives on the scene of this latest homicide, victim number five in a grim chain of killings. The investigation to date has produced very little, stressing Victoria out to the point that she decides to take a break and visit her father for Christmas. As she rummages around in the attic, she discovers her grandfather's journal, and learns that at one time, he too was on the trail of a serial killer. The two cases run parallel to each other throughout the game, with the player alternately taking on the role of Victoria or Gus as they wend their way through dark alleys and darker motives. Some of the characters they encounter are generic stereotypes, such as Vic's blustery boss or the hooker with a heart of gold that hires Gus, but for the most part the story succeeds, giving out just enough information to tantalize us, but withholding enough to make us want to dig deeper.

Still Life is set up as an adventure game, in the classic point-and-click style, and it pulls off those controls perfectly well, even improving on tried-and-true methods in some places. As a cursor runs over hot spots embedded into the scenery, it changes to let players know that an object can be picked up, investigated more closely, or be used with something currently in inventory. NPCs that can be spoken to sport a talk bubble, but conversation has thankfully been streamlined into two simple paths: case related, and personal. Pull the left trigger, and the conversation furthers the investigation; pull the right trigger, and Victoria or Gus will ask more casual, friendly questions. A graphic pops up once enough information has been imparted to advance the game, whether or not there are still conversational options left. At that point, the player can choose to either see the talk through to completion, or simply say goodbye and get on with things. The voice acting is truly abysmal in some places, but I was grateful to not have to follow each and every branch in a dialogue tree in order to advance the plot. Traveling from location to location in the game has similarly been simplified; the player merely highlights a point on an in-game map, pushes the button, and voila, they're on the scene. As the cursor rolls over each map point, a snapshot of that location appears, which can be a helpful reminder as more and more become available.

So, technically, the controls work just fine, and the story is grisly and exciting enough to intrigue even the most jaded gamer, so what's the problem? Here's an example, pulled straight from the game: Victoria interrogates a suspect as his apartment, swiping an empty beer bottle as he's in the other room. She rushes the bottle back to the lab so that Claire, the lab technician, can dust it for prints. Claire, unfortunately, is swamped with the autopsy of the fifth victim, and asks Vic to run upstairs and do the dusting for her. This requires the following:

Leave morgue (where Claire was working.) Enter hallway. Push through door to other hall. Push elevator button. Wait for elevator. Enter elevator, select floor. Watch elevator animation. Exit elevator. Walk to offices. Walk to Claire's desk. Put down bottle. Open fingerprint dust. Pick up brush. Use brush with fingerprint powder. Brush bottle. Drop brush. Pick up fingerprint paper. Use on bottle. Take paper. Leave desk. Leave office. Walk to elevator. Push elevator button. Wait for elevator. Enter elevator, select floor. Watch elevator animation. Leave elevator. Walk to door, push in code. Walk through door. Walk down hallway to morgue door. Enter morgue. Talk to Claire, drop off prints.

So, we have about 20 seconds of gameplay surrounded by about three minutes of boring, pointless filler. It's maddening. Just as the game starts getting interesting, it bogs itself down with endless walking, waiting, and loading.

An adventure game rises and falls on the strength of its puzzles, and here Still Life is again, very frustrating. Some of the puzzles the usual fare, such as safes with absurdly complicated locks, or controls that are non-functional until switches are thrown in the right order, but others are simply baffling. I don't mean that they're so difficult or obscure that they can't be figured out, I mean I just don't understand what they're doing there. At one point, Vic's boss barks at her to get in his office, and oh, yeah, bring him a cup of coffee while she's at it. This involves picking up his cup from an interrogation room, taking it to the coffee maker, and pushing a button. That's it. Is that meant to be a puzzle? It's so simple, there's nothing really to solve, but if it's not meant to be a puzzle, what's the point of doing it? In another part of the game, Victoria's dad asks her to make him his favorite cookies. For starters, the recipe is in code, begging the question of whether or not Vic's mom was entirely right in the head. I mean, not even the most paranoid, tin-foil-hat-wearing conspiracy freak is so paranoid that they feel the need to protect their cookie recipes by putting them in a code that the Enigma machine would choke on. Once the code is broken, the player must suffer through the laborious process of selecting the ingredients in the proper order, then pushing the button on the mixer. Just what I want in the middle of a serial killer investigation: a baking sim.

The problem isn't so much that these little pockets of interactivity are dumb, unrewarding, and pointless, it's that they stop the action of the game dead in its tracks. I don't want to cut away from Gus's interview with the lone survivor of the serial killer so that Victoria can make cookies, I just don't. Perhaps the developers were trying to make the experience of Still Life feel a bit more real by injecting these snatches of real life, or maybe they were simply trying to extend the overall playtime. Regardless of their intent, all they succeeded in doing was frustrating me, boring me, and making me weigh the pros and cons of reading an online walkthrough simply to find out how the plot winds up.

Players who are actually dedicated enough to brave the endless walking cinemas and loading screens would be wise to pick up the PC version of Still Life, as opposed to the Xbox version, unless they happen to have extremely good vision coverage in their health plans. There are piles of reports, journals, and notes to wade through in Still Life, some of them providing valuable leads or clues, others simply fleshing out the back story of important characters. I nearly went blind trying to read the tiny typeface from my spot on the couch; it's pretty obvious they were only ever meant to be read from the comfortable arm's length distance of a computer monitor. It doesn't make the game unplayable on Xbox, but it gets old really fast.

Graphically, Still Life lives up to its name. Characters meander through gorgeously rendered static vistas, moving with either a herky jerky jog or a slow and ponderous tread. It's all pretty easy on the eyes, but in this day and age, is it really such a great accomplishment to create attractive still pictures? It also seems like a lot of the environments were added simply to showcase the artistic abilities of the graphics team, since they don't contain any people or items of interest and do nothing more than increase the time it takes to get from one side of town to the other. Overall, though, the dark and dirty scenery creates an effective feeling of foreboding and creepiness, which blends well with the grisly storyline to create a tense and unsettling atmosphere.

I wish Still Life would make up its mind. The story and presentation make me desperate to see the investigations through to the end, but the plodding gameplay mechanics make me want to throw the disc in the nearest river (which is about 100 yards or so outside my kitchen window, so this is no idle threat). With hit and miss puzzles, tiny typefaces, and more loading screens than I could count on an entire chorus line's worth of toes, Still Life just gets in its own way, seemingly deliberately keeping players from getting too involved or too excited. Maybe they'll make a movie version and I'll finally be able to find out who the guy in the top hat is.