The first problem is that navigation in Culpa Innata is a very tedious exercise. Every time you transition to a new screen the camera angle changes, leaving you consistently confused about where you are going. You'll constantly find yourself accidentally backtracking or missing hallways and passages. At the very start of the game I wasted a lot of time looking around Wallis' office building for the character that I needed to speak to to advance the plot. I eventually found him at the end of a hallway that I must have missed a dozen times, and even now I couldn't provide you with directions as to how to find him. These navigational issues are compounded by terrible design decisions that will drive you crazy with frustration. For example, after leaving the office building and coming to town I found a subway station. After listening to Wallis extol the virtues of public transportation I was able to enter and decided to see where the train would take me. Getting to the train was a chore as I had to click my way through screen after screen of waiting areas until I finally found the ramp down to the platform. After reaching it and wandering around a bit I found a sign that said that this platform was closed and that I needed to go to the other one. After backtracking I found the sequence of screens that took me towards the other platform. When I reached the platform I was informed that I could not go down the ramp because I had no money. I then had to click my way back through umpteen screens just to get back out of the subway. Did the developers seriously think that players would enjoy such mindless wasting of their precious gameplaying time? Instead of Wallis' soliloquy on public transportation, why didn't she simply state that she had no money to ride the subway? And why the heck are there umpteen screens between the entrance and the platform? All I can think of is that this sort of thing was done simply to pad the game and make it take longer to solve. Would you rather play a short game that kept you engaged the entire time or a longer game padded with dead time? I think that I know your answer to that question, but just in case some of you opted for the longer game I'll have to tell you about the character conversations in the game.

Culpa Innata is filled with interviews and conversations, the majority of which are inane and seem completely unrelated to the case. Wallis is a terrible investigative interviewer and when you're presented with options as to what to ask next there's no way to tell if the ridiculous question choices available to you will lead to something of value or a long string of useless babble. Wallis also seems obsessed with prying into the sexual habits of her interviewees even though they never have any bearing on the case. It's just plain weird. Making matters worse is the fact that you can only interview people once per day and you'll be forced to return to the same interviewees over and over again - and there's no way to skip lines in a conversation.

The graphics in Culpa Innata are a mixed bag in the same way as a bag of licorice jellybeans with one wild cherry jellybean is a mixed bag. The wild cherry in this case is the animation of the characters' faces. I can't remember seeing more expressive faces in an adventure game before. It's not just the mouth areas that are animated; you'll see characters express their feelings through their eyes and even there eyebrows as well. Everything else in the game is pure licorice. The game supports only two resolutions, and the "high" option is only 1024x768. The environments are pixilated and blocky and the game has the look of something that would have passed as merely average ten years ago. The character animations with the exception of the faces are awful. Watching people run in the game is simply painful; they make the least athletically inclined kid in gym class look like Carl Lewis.

There's simply not enough game in this game. Puzzles are too few and far between and you spend most of your time trying to get from one place to another and in one conversation after another, which is a shame because the puzzle design is generally pretty good. However, I couldn't help but get the feeling that I was reading a poorly written graphic novel more than I was playing a game.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 50%. Culpa Innata is best left to the most masochistic of adventure game fans.

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