The adventure game The Experiment has turned that pretense to its advantage: the player sits in front of a computer screen playing a character sitting in front of a computer screen.

The game begins as a young woman wakes up to discover a note telling her something awful has happened. Confused, she looks around to realize she is being watched on a security camera by you, the player. Introducing herself as Lea, she asks for help.

The Experiment is unusual in that the player is essentially stuck in a control room watching events unfold on dozens of security cameras installed on a research ship anchored near a jungle. The game is focused entirely on the mechanics of the control room. You can ask Lea to move to a new room by flicking the lights on in that room, where she will search for useful items in desks and on the bloody corpses of her comrades. You are also able to open locked doors and to control machinery like a robot needed to retrieve a security card from a room filled with poisonous gas.

The writing is often stilted, and the game's text is riddled with misspellings like "departement" and "pilote" and job descriptions like "responsible of the control room" that suggest the game's French design team, Lexis Numerique, had the entire game translated by the summer intern.

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Yet it is fascinating to browse through the researchers' papers, which are a mix of love letters, gossip, paranoid musings and fascinating scientific papers on mysterious creatures called Tyriades that communicate entirely through scent. Other papers deal with the guinea pig humans who have been exposed to a mysterious Tyriadian gas and sent out into the jungle.

The Experiment is as frustrating as it is intriguing. Manually switching cameras to watch Lea is cumbersome, but the option to have the game automatically choose the best camera does not work. It often jumps away from a good view of her to show you an empty room nearby. You can excuse many of the flaws by noting that they are true to life; The Experiment works hard to be convincing by having you watch Lea explore the ruined ship and later the Tyriades' exotic jungle home through awkwardly placed, sometimes broken security cameras.

So realistically, security software would be poorly designed to help a woman escape a research vessel. Things that would annoy me in other games, like Lea's leisurely amble from place to place, add to the game's veracity. And for all its rough edges, The Experiment creates a world so vivid and unusual that it held my attention where many slicker games have left me with a been-there-done-that feeling.