The Traveler Game Review
The Traveler is an advergame / ARG promoting “The Traveler” by John Twelve Hawks.
Your role is to learn more about various characters from the book by using a variety of surveillance tools available in the game.
What I liked: The game is huge! There’s a lot more here than any other advergame I’ve seen recently, and it all plays right to the core audience of book readers. The content seems to be very well put together, and does everything it can to engage the player.
There’s also bits of the game that make this even closer to an ARG, with related websites based on some of the characters in the game and book.
What I didn’t like: The game is huge! It is too big for me to really get into at work, and it doesn’t have any obvious means to save my progress.
The content itself could also be presented in a better manner. The green text on a black gradient background may look like a spy-movie, but it is far removed from reality, and very easy to read.
It also isn’t always obvious what to do. When I first played the game, it took me several clicks though before I realized that I needed to click on the audio surveillance link first.
Overall: This is going to be a very successful promotion for the book. The gameplay matches perfectly to the content and what they are trying to sell, and it does so without trying to blatantly force the branding.
There is enough content to keep players engaged for a while, and I can easily see this game entering the discussions at book clubs and between friends.
The only thing that holds this game back is the apparent inability for me to play for ~5 minutes at a time.
(via AdRants and MarketingVOX)
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 28th, 2005 at 2:12 pm and is filed under Advergame reviews, Advergames. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
