Red Johnson's Chronicles - One Against All

RJC follows the story of Red a young red-headed Private Investigator as he kind of cleans up the city of Metropolis. The game opens with a film noir inspired scene used as a vehicle to steer you through the plot of the first game (I'm none the wiser to be fair). The story finds you in Metropolis, an alternate Soviet city in the grip of the enigmatic kingpin ‘Uncle Teddy’. While dodging Uncle Teddy’s $150’000 bounty on your head (dollars possibly being what makes Metropolis an alternative Soviet city?) Red finds out his brother has been kidnapped by almost necking his severed finger in a frosty cold one at Duncan’s Place and so begins ‘One Against All’….



Game play is split between action cut scenes, puzzle environments and interrogation sequences. The action cut scenes (QTE) were frustrating for me; they popped up unexpectedly and were sometimes so quick I hadn’t even spotted the button press required. This meant doing the QTE again, with a different sequence of button presses! But these are few and far between so my failure was short lived. The puzzles to find and solve are plentiful and are varied and rendered in nice detail. Some are pure genius while others had me wanting to turn the game off, not through frustration, but because I would be aimlessly looking for the sweet spot to move things forward. However, hints can be brought from your friend Saul, an underachiever from the Huggy Bear School of Pimping, with cash earned from solving puzzles. The quicker you solve the problem at hand the higher your rank and the more cash you’ll earn. The dialogue/interrogation sequences are filled with varied characters, some interesting and others who are just damn bizarre. Take Red Johnson’s brothers Black and Brown, that’s right folks the Red, Black and Brown Johnson family….mix that in with Red’s comments whilst searching a female characters locker ‘If I were a serious pervball I’d take a whiff of Abbie’s panties. But I ain’t no perv!! Well…maybe one for the road.’ and you get the idea. If the dialogue wasn’t full of cheap innuendo it was often protracted with a pretty bad lip sync issues. I often found myself skipping through the dialogue for something a little more engaging but this turned out to be the wrong thing to do as the end game concludes with an irritating ‘final report’ exercise filling out answers and clues you have uncovered (or totally missed because you skipped the dialogue) whilst chatting to the residents of Metropolis and solving puzzles.



Now I loved point and click games in the past, proudly stepping up to each of the Myst titles eager to flex some grey matter. That was some years ago and I haven’t played anything similar in a long time so I was looking forward to see what was on offer here. Graphic adventure games of yesteryear worked because they were filled with creative puzzle designs and engaging stories. RDC is a little lacking in both, now don’t get me wrong I wasn’t overly disappointed I was just left wanting a lot more. Overall, RDC is a nice looking game with an ok story, marred by a bad script. The puzzles as a whole are engaging but are nothing ground breaking. Achievements come with the full 400. The majority of these will be accomplished whilst playing through the game. A second run through will be required to hit the ‘record time’ ‘finish with an A rating’ achievements. You could probably do this on your first run with a guide, but where is the fun in that you dirty cheevo whore. Is it worth 800M$P? You'll get around 10/12 hours game play for your ‘soviet dollars’ and a hefty 2.68GB download. If you like this kind of game you probably already own it, if you’re on the fence I’d wait for DOTW and if you don’t then I would just move along there is nothing here for you.