Operation Wintersun is a boring game.

I knew I was in trouble when it took me a half hour to get past the tutorial-style intro. I finally had to turn to the manual to find out that I needed to — no lie — dig in the trash, find a potato, scatter the potato onto a special part of the ground so that a crow would fly off a branch to eat it. I then needed to tear down that branch and “combine” it with a loose bar sticking out from a nearby window.

I was then supposed to use the stick/bar to open another window that was too high. This was all done so that I can overhear two British spies talking, but as soon as I got the window open, one of the spies came outside to talk to me and the level was over.

…

Then the gameplay started to get slow.

The rest of “Undercover” is summed up best by Brett Todd, a Gamespot reporter “Anyone who can solve this spectacularly hard game without resorting to a walk-through deserves a ticker-tape parade like the kind they used to give generals and astronauts.”

The game is hard. The puzzles are completely non-intuitive. But worst of all, the gameplay and movement is so ridiculously slow that you don’t want to go spend days going through it all.

I really tried to like this game. It has a pretty interesting plot, good graphics and landscapes and a full voice cast. I even tried to forget the fact that Lighthouse Interactive, the game’s publisher, is largely European-based, so slowly developing, verbose, detailed plots are natural (just watch any British or Canadian crime drama).

The film-noir plot casts you as British physicist John Russell, drafted by intelligence to check out a Nazi plot to build a nuclear weapon.

The script is solid enough, but in the end I just couldn’t get past the fact that I was falling asleep at the mouse. And I don’t mind a slow, noir-style video game (Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit, Tex Murphy: Overseer) — the fact is that Undercover: Operation Wintersun just isn’t a good game, period.

Quick hits:

Publisher: Lighthouse Interactive
Developer: Sproing
Platform: Windows PC-CD
Genre: Adventure
Players: 1
Launch Date: August 28, 2007

Playability: 1 out of 5 stars
Learning Curve: 2 out of 5 stars
Sound: 3 out of 5 stars
Graphics: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Overall: 1.5 out of 5 stars