"This sure feels like a Jane Jensen game" thinks person who is unaware that they are playing a Jane Jensen game. She has a certain something to her writing, her games firmly rooted in location and time, anchored by characters and folklore, touched by the supernatural. It's a good thing, impressive that the author's touch carries through as cleanly as it does.

But this isn't the old Jane Jensen. This isn't a point'n'click where you scrape every object off the background, walk around, stare into the void, rub a brick on a window to see if it does anything. And don't get me wrong: I love those. I love carrying a small steamer trunk of items that I picked up solely because the game let me, which means at some point I'll need to use them to steal a car or create a fake ID. But those games are gone.

In their place we have the new breed: more discrete, episodic or borderline so, eager to guide. It makes for a smoother experience, for sure, and allows a more dynamic narrative in a smaller space. A compromise, an olive branch for a new breed of gamers who have far more access to far cheaper games.


And it works, for the most part, and better here than in most other games that have tried the same. Multiple progress bars gently nudge you in multiple directions at once, providing focus and indirect hints as needed. Highlightable interactions ease pixel hunting, internal monologues prompt direction and maintain momentum.

Which is nice, because the story itself moves quite slowly, and getting bogged down mechanically would transform the game into a plodding slog. Instead there's just enough, between puzzles and sleight of hand, narrative hooks and the occasional bit of genuinely deft, unspoken storytelling to keep the pace up.

But it does stumble a bit at the end. There's an obvious hook for the sequel, a sense that a bit of the plot is missing as the finale rolls out and the twin themes become unbalanced. Still, credit for handling the damage carried by the main characters indirectly and for the quite clever framing of everything in the magician/assistant box.

After being introduced to the work of Jane Jensen trough the Gabriel Knight series, I was very happy to discover that she was still making point-and-click adventures after the genre disappeared from the mainstream.

Similar to those games, Gray Matter features an engaging story with supernatural elements, real-life locations, dual protagonists and chapter progression, meaning that a story chapter ends when all necessary puzzles, talks and observations were made to progress the plot. While the puzzles themselves are well made and have a nice difficulty curve towards the end, this structure may be a bit annoying if you’re kept back by just one detail to continue. Thankfully the map can show you which location you should revisit. When playing as Sam, you also have to solve some puzzles with a magic trick, which fits her character well and is a nice mechanic alongside the usual point-and-click gameplay.

The story is intriguing and well written, and both protagonists, Sam and Dr. Styles, have their own motivations to solve the mystery, as well as different perspectives on it. I can’t say anything about the English voice actors, but fwiw the German ones did their job very well.

The 3D art style - design, models, lighting - is very pretty, the 2D cutscenes do not achieve that same level but aren’t bad either. The soundtrack by Robert Holmes is great as always. It enriches the story’s themes and the locations‘ designs and creates a melancholic, magical or suspenseful atmosphere when necessary.

Gray Matter has all the qualities a great point-and-click adventure and Jane Jensen game should have.

As a slow player and without using a guide, it took me ca. 20h to complete, which also makes it one of the longer games in the genre.

Point and click adventures are still abundant, but good ones are hard to come by, and even rarer are ones that make it mainstream. Gray Matter is a game that has a story a bit more sophisticated than your typical adventure game. You play as both Samantha Everett and David Styles who are probably the most interesting characters of the game. Sam is an orphan who is traveling the world, but her bike breaks down in London and she winds up at Dread Hill which is the home of Dr. Styles. Dr. Styles is researching ways to bring his wife’s spirit back after a fatal car accident and he’ll do anything to get this research done. The rest of the characters are people you recruit for the research, but their personalities aren’t as likable as the main characters.

The story really gets involved and has a twist ending that will surprise you so playing the game is worth it. The gameplay consists of your typical clicking on things to find the clues and move on. However, Gray Matter is severely flawed in that you have missions to complete and each mission has a number of points associated with finding things. If you miss a few points you have to scour the huge world in the game to find what you missed. This can lead to hours of hunting and click on everything until you find it. Certain events won’t trigger until missions are done which I really hate. It is also little to no direction on where to go and what to do in the game. There are different areas in the game you can jump to, but there are so many things to click on that the game is nearly impossible to beat without a guide. Later in the game, you run into a labyrinthine maze type area and this will take forever without some kind of guide.


There are a few interesting things Gray Matter does for the adventure genre and these are magic tricks. You get a book of magic and you have to use it to get certain things done in the game. Things bring up a new window that has you following instructions on how to map out the trick. Its interesting and changes the pace a bit. Of course, there is a mini-game tossed in here and there, but most of the time you will be running around clicking on everything almost blindly and this really hurts the flow and pacing of the game.

The visuals in the game are decent, but the drawn cutscenes that are just a few frames really aren’t that great. The art is smudgy, and the character design is inconsistent throughout the whole game. The in-game models will be completely different from the hand-drawn scenes, but then some scenes will have the characters looking different. I found this very weird and annoying. Overall the art is very nice especially towards the end of the game in the Daedalus Club.


The voice acting is decent at best, but Sam’s actress is pretty bad and sounds cheesy. Most of the game is all British actors so there isn’t much variety. My favorite character of them all is Dr. Styles who is struggling within himself to go out and socialize, but he feels like a monster due to the scar on his face. The game is really an acquired taste among both adventure gamers and hardcore gamers alike.


If you can stomach the goalless wandering of the game by either using a guide or just aimlessly clicking everywhere you will be rewarded with a rich and dark story. The game also has a decent length that will run you about 8-10 hours and that’s if you just use a guide and run through the game. I really wish the game would guide you more because it almost breaks the entire game.