Adventure Player: Choose your own adventure

This FromSoftware UMD is an unusual thing. More of a facilitator than a game, Adventure Player‘s designed to be an open platform for genre fans and dedicated creators to revel in their shared love of adventure games. Three pre-made experiences are stored on the UMD, Kaikiken, Echo Night #1, and Hako no Naka, created to give new users a brief taste of the software’s potential. All three showcase their own take on a desaturated, spooky theme, with the first offering a small selection of short and mostly linear sound novel experiences (to simplify: a screen’s worth of text laid over a series of images with atmospheric sound effects) to work through, Echo Night is a (2D) adventure where I’m allowed to manually inspect objects, talk to people and move around the maps within using a point and click-like interface, and Hako no Naka relies on good old-fashioned command menus—think lists of verbs—to get things done. They’re all good fun, and as a fan of the series having more Echo Night to…