I`ve always had a soft spot for adventure games that do more than rattle your brains with difficult, meaningless quests, but I find it more and more difficult for a game to impress me to the point where I actually remember it for more than a couple of days. Overclocked: A History of Violence successfully falls into this category, with an excellent story, dark atmosphere and fantastic music. Trust me, it`s definitely worth your time.

Expecting hardly anything more than graphics from a quest game on 2 dvd`s I've installed it without too much hope. Since this spring seems to be an adventure season, I initially overlooked "Overclocked" for other, better known, titles - making a big mistake. Unfortunately, it`s going to be very difficult writing a review without spoiling the excellent story for you, but I`ll try to go into detail as little as possible.

As you can tell from the title, "Overclocked: A History of Violence", the story revolves around the motive that causes violence in 5 teenagers, and is a pretty violent game itself. Disturbing images and scenes will become more and more common as you go further into the game so I wouldn`t recommend this game to young impressionable children, but to a more mature audience.

You play the role of ex army psychiatrist David McNamara, called from his home in L.A. to New York, to help with an ongoing investigation. Apparently, five teenagers have been found wandering the streets of New York, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and amnesia. They all exhibit an increased tendency towards violence and have been committed to the local mental hospital. It`s going to be your job to treat them and see if you can discover exactly what happened to them.

At first, trying to chat with any of the teenagers will be almost impossible; one of them is still very violent and his cell is no place you want to stay in and chat. Step by step, you will help them remember their past, and while you delve deeper and deeper into their minds, you must make sense of their recollections.

The story evolves on two fronts, the hospital being one of them, and the other being David`s personal problems. He is having problems sleeping, the other guests of the hotel have been complaining of screams coming from his room at nights and of course there is that traumatizing letter received shortly after arriving, announcing an imminent divorce.

As any good psychiatrist, David will try to solve his problems in a peaceful and rational way and.... actually no, he will just go and get drunk almost every evening. While playing you will get to know David very well, and his problems will even get to you. Add to that the dark atmosphere of the game, and the fact that it never stops raining from the moment you get there, and you will have one dark, depressing game. The backgrounds seriously contribute to this, as all the locations visited in the game, especially the military base and the hospital, have a certain old and dark feeling surrounding them.

Weird as it may sound, the game actually made me feel better. I felt a great deal of relief when exiting the game, as I was leaving all of David`s problems behind and realizing that life could be a lot worse (ignore the fact that I`m comparing myself to a character from a PC game...). David`s character "evolves" during the course of the game from a rational, renowned psychiatrist to a more violent and severely disturbed character. At no point in the game did I see David take a turn for the better, not even in the end, so the final cinematic left me a little puzzled.