Gaming/Film

An Educational Game That Doesn’t Suck

http://relivegame.com/

Whether you’re trained up to the gills on medical procedures (a refresher NEVER hurts) or literally only posses the knowledge that Vinnie Jones has bestowed upon you via that TV ad one time, you should checkout this little gem of a free game.

Relive is essentially a first person Sci-Fi puzzler that teaches you the bare-bones of Dr ABC along the way.  It won’t teach you triage or secondary surveys or sucking chest wounds or how to apply a tourniquet, but during the middle chapter of this entirely free game your character is required to pass a CPR test and learn to use an automatic defibrillator in order to get a certain card and get through a locked door.  The way this learning is implemented in the 3D environment is really rather good overall, certainly less weird feeling than blowing in to those monstrous looking, featureless training dummies.

I felt the responsiveness check that was demonstrated was actually rather poor and could seriously aggravate a spinal injury; also I’d have liked to have seen a better explanation of the way to properly lock the arms and give effective chest compressions, but realistically this is the sort of knowledge that EVERY single person in the world should be getting in school at a young age (I will fucking never needed to extrapolate and expand upon the meaning of a poem or solve a simultaneous equation) so getting at least some grounding through is better than nothing.

There’s no voice acting at all but the music track is literally too good for a game that costs zero pounds and the Borderlands style graphics are actually better than any Borderlands game, in this blokes’ opinion.  The puzzles are really basic and not terribly well done overall if truth be told, it’s also a bit annoying how slowly your character walks and given that the physics engine is key at certain points it’s rather overly energetic in terms of the way things react.  It’s also a very very short game and for some reason after you’ve learnt the CPR sequence you only actually use it ‘in anger’ one time, despite the fact the entire planet is under threat by a monumentally huge cloud of murderous nanites which have formed a hell of a storm around your base.

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