The Watchmaker (2001) Critic Reviews

A small conversational clue may lead to a startling revelation. Items you find may seem insignificant at first but may be crucial later. Seemingly unrelated historical information could be just what you need to get your mind focused. It's up to you to make the connections.

I did feel that certain tasks took a lot of time and the need to search everything made for some tedious work, but the comedy relief did its job and made up for the shortcomings and created a decent play experience.

A nice enough adventure. It has some depth, and you won’t breeze through it in under ten hours, but it’s also a little sloppy, and the voice acting is awful.

A beautiful game to behold, with an excellent and efficient interface and control management scheme. The story is compelling, the puzzles are logical, and the characters are interesting.

Fans of traditional adventure games will enjoy the puzzles and will likely be able to bear with the awful voice acting and the underdeveloped story.

Despite a few glaring deficiencies, The Watchmaker is a solid game. It offers firm value at its retail price and for the length of gameplay, approximately 20-30 hours, as well as for the degree of difficulty in its puzzles.

If the few minor annoyances were to be corrected - the 3D clipping, the languid music, the pixel hunting - then Watchmaker could possibly develop a devoted following especially in the wake of foreign upstarts like "The Longest Journey."

Little elements of polish and coherence are missing, anomalies abound, and you are too often left in the dark about what to do next to get the job done in a reasonable amount of time.

The deal killer for us in The Watchmaker is the acting, which we dare say qualifies as some of the worst voiceover work we have ever heard in a game, or even an elementary school play.

The game falls short of expectations, and will not appeal to anybody but the most hardcore adventure gamer.

What makes the game so irritating is that the flat gameworld textures are laughably dull.

The story is fairly solid, though sci-fi based, and the background and environments are quite beautiful in places, but the voice-acting, pace, gameplay, and interface conspire to set the entire production only slightly above amateur material.