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And I was looking forward to this. To be specific...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 15 / 16
Date: November 01, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Well, the main reason I'm writing this is because there seemed to be a large lack of pride of the programmers, and it is reflected in the game.
----- Pride. In the flimsy booklet, and in the install procedure, you see that they will, and I quote, "gladly replace any disc free of charge, whether accidentally damaged or due to manufacturer defect." But, the very next sentence states that you have to send $8 for S&H [that's over 25% of the purchase price] and $2 for each extra disc [and again, that's even if it is damaged by the manufacturer, as stated. I mail CDs all the time for work... it costs about 75 cents... do they package it in lead? `Free' has taken on a new meaning, as has their `warranty'.
Moving to the game itself:
----- Characters. The voice actors were awful [probably my biggest negative, and hard to explain in type]... painful to listen to them... almost wanted to cut sound off and read subtitles. Listening to the woman 'heroine', I was just crying for Imoen, Charsi, or April Ryan. Wish they had spent the extra dollars and went with real actors. the guy hero... well... where's garret [or even Mr. Freeman or Max Payne] when you need him? [granted the actors may be very nice people, but they don't have game quality voices]. Actually, Jim Raynor would have been fantastic for this role.
----- Game settings... you have two settings: music volume, effects volume [oh, and subtitles on/off]. That's it. and the sound effects? Marginal. No video settings to tell the game "my system should have a stewardess on it, so throw as many triangles at the screen as you want." No video check, either. Nope... lowest common denominator, I suppose [which left it too blocky for my taste].
----- Interface. You can barely hear the walking sounds (so you don't know whether you're walking, or whether you're on a motorcycle, which seems like the case with the speed you move from room to room. But, that doesn't matter much, because you really don't have much control over where you can walk to... when you click to walk, you go automatically to where they want you to go, so you might as well just clip to there. There's not much looking around... stuff is either right in front of your face, or you don't get to look at it... but most scenery that you'd like to check out isn't available [plenty of doors on huts, etc, that are simply pretty scenery, even though you're right next to them and you're supposed to be investigating what's going on]. I'm left wondering, such as in the big lebowski, what's the point? What's the point of having all that scenery and what not, when there's a stiffly few things you can look at, and despite there being lots of `stuff' around, you can't investigate it. It's as if there's puzzle A, and you need to solve puzzle A, and other than that, that's it. Once you do that, you move on. Why even have a game interface or story? The walking was somewhat similar to Riven [and the year it came out... no progress, which is what I was hoping for].
Sure -- the backgrounds are somewhat nice, but stick to dl'ing some pretty wallpaper and you'll have the same.... artwork on your desktop you can't do anything with.

Do NOT Buy!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 9
Date: July 28, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This is an absolutely horrible game. The first thing you notice, though fairly trivial, is that the graphics are bad. There's no changing the resolution or the color depth, so it runs at what appears to be 640x480 or something with a very low color depth. Everything's grainy with banding due to lack of color.

The next biggest problem is that the navigation is terrible. You move forward by clicking when you randomly pass the cursor over the right spot and the cursor turn to the right shape. But, to turn, you either have to use the cursor keys (which do an instantaneous turn instead of a pan, so it's hard to hold an image in your head of where you are), or you click and PUSH the mouse in the direction you want to turn instead of clicking and dragging the window in that direction (and the pan is so fast you can't see the scenery go by). There's no cursor change in those cases. Then, if you can look up or down, the only indication you have is a change to an icon down below the scene in your inventory. Plus, the cursor shape indicating a possible path is very easy to confuse as to where it's really pointing. In some cases, clicking forward will turn you 45 degrees before proceeding to take you somewhere nowhere near where it looked like it would take you. In other cases, you think it's pointing somewhere you've been, but it's not (so you miss a path). You end up watching the cursor and thinking about the mechanics of movement instead of looking at the scenery and tying to figure out what's going on. Also irritating is that once you click to go forward, it will stop at multiple, non-significant spots (even on straight, non-divertable paths). So, you spend time sweeping the cursor over everything in every direction wondering what's so important that the game stopped you here.

But, the biggest problem is the puzzles themselves. The charitable description would be that they're impossibly hard. A more accurate description is that there's neither rhyme nor reason to them. In some cases, there's no indication that a device IS a puzzle and not just a static display. If you don't have a necessary inventory item, you can't do anything and there's no indication that you could EVER do anything in it. If you have some random inventory item that it expects, it just changes the cursor in the right place (if you happen to cross the spot) and you drop it on. In others, the puzzle is so vague that you're not even sure what you're supposed to be doing with it or why. Then you have to work your way through multiple, non-easily-written notation systems or phonetics. In my case, I uninstalled the game when it became obvious that it wanted me to reproduce some long string of barely heard, non-phonetically-writeable, background-noise-filled, alien speech on a set of devices strewn in four or six places about a very large room.

Impossible. Not fun in the least. Do NOT, under any circumstances, buy this game.

Not even close to Riven or Myst III

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: March 09, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I'm not a "hard core" gamer and am pretty picky about what I want to spend my time on. I wanted a game like Riven or Myst III, both of which I enjoyed a great deal. I've played this game for only a few minutes and will be returning it immediately.

First of all, just because I haven't purchased a DVD-ROM yet doesn't mean I should be punished with jumps, crappy graphics, and (from what I hear) less of a game. I have a nice system, far above the PII300 that they recommend. Myst III looks fabulous on my machine. ...

Even worse though is the navigation. It's completely non-intuitive. You have to force the mouse to turn you in the correct direction -- and often end up spinning too much, you can't look up and down, you move in strange increments. Worse are the obvious game-plot-forced movement. In the very first location there are tons of cool things I want to look at and try, but can't get to them. This isn't exploring a mysterious new world... it's being told what to do by the system! I don't like being told what to do.

I can't comment on the value, difficulty, or logic of the puzzles. I got so annoyed just walking around that I'm not even going to bother.

Beware the Bugs!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: December 31, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Although this title has quite a few reviews, I wanted to add the information that some people, myself included, have found the game to be extremely buggy. I have the CD version, and it has some serious bugs. The worst is that when you switch from one character to the other, the current game is not loaded. If you save often, you can always load the correct one, except when you get to a puzzle where both characters have to work cooperatively. In that case, it is impossible to get past this puzzle because no game will exist with the cooperative actions in it (if you see what I mean). After struggling with this game for 3 days, I threw it in the trash. I've never done that before. The bugs, combined with some of the most irritating puzzles I've ever encountered (can't save in a multiple part puzzle, for example) made this game a total waste of $...

Unbelieveably bad

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: June 01, 2002
Author: Amazon User

CDROM version. This game is horrible. The graphics [arn't very good], the gameplay is slow, it keeps crashing, and the game riddles are insanely difficult because there is no logical flow to them. I wanted a game that was like MYST and got a big piece of do-do. Stay away at all costs.

Buy the DVD version!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: September 11, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Do NOT buy the CD-ROM Version of this game! I made the mistake of buying the game on CD-ROM. The game was so butchered and chopped up just to get it to run in the CD-ROM drive that the game was impossible to play. I just got the DVD version. Its GREAT. The graphics flow. There are tiny animated sequences that are not in the CD-ROM version. There are many more clues and indicators that tell you that you are doing the right thing that are not available in the CD-ROM version. I have only played the DVD game for about an hour last night, but I am convinced!

So far I would give the DVD version a 4 star rating.

Don't bother! Just throw your money away instead!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 7
Date: April 13, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I purchased thsi game in the discount section of a local retailer thinking I would have a good alternative to the usual first person shooter clones that are flooding the market.

After starting up the game and watching the two main characters do their thing It became quickly apparent that no matter what I tried to do the curser indicated that no action was possible for me.

I guesss the game consists of installing it, watching the intro, and then uninstalling it. Not as I expected at all.

Moreover the game is unsupported. My copy is in the trash now!

I Wish I had the money I spent on it instead!

In my opinion a genuine Rip Off!

Bad...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: August 19, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Okay, first off, I've played MYST since I was five, so don't think I don't know about this stuff. *ahem* Anyway...it's horrible.

First off, the storyline is so...bland...boring...bizarre...(need I go on?)... It lacks the depth that I expected.

Second of all, the puzzles are almost impossible to solve. My dad and I eventually stopped playing it, even after we looked at the walkthrough on the internet, because nothing was coming together right and we were basically just walking back and forth thinking we missed something. Well, there's really nothing to miss...it's just poorly done, that's all...

Third of all, despite what you may think, the graphics aren't that great. Sure, the music is OK, but...I've seen better...

So, the verdict? I would suggest skipping right on out of this web page and ordering yourself a copy of Real MYST.

An unbelievable nightmare . . .

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: March 13, 2007
Author: Amazon User

When I first installed this and got it working (finally!) my jaw dropped to my feet. I had been under the impression from the screen shots online and on the box that this game actually looked as good as, say - Myst?
Hah.
When I finally realized I had done nothing wrong in the install and troubleshooting, I was so disgusted I actually felt bile rise in my mouth. In short, this game looks TERRIBLE.
Now, I'm out about 60 bucks for two games that are outright unplayable. This and Reah. They inhale big time. Why? Because they are nothing more than interactive mpegg-y video sequences. You don't actually explore anything, unless you like watching bad streaming video at low resolutions as you 'walk' to the next location. You can't look at anything, and the video garbage is so messy that this is in no way an interactive experience, unless they were just going for eyestrain. When you stand in one area, there are huge color blocks and hash that obscure and ruin what might have been nice visuals.
Why couldn't they have gone for still screens like in Riven or Myst? Those were immersing enough and sure as hell looked a lot better. This hack company tried to go to 3d and it's so god awful I can't describe it accurately. It's like downloading a bad video off of some kid's computer. I can't believe this was brought to this country. Remember that train sequence in the first Myst, the one that drove everyone nuts and was ugly to boot. Imagine blowing up that low res stuff to fill the whole screen and trying to play it. Well this game is just like that, there are no worlds to explore, just click the arrow and watch a cruddy video of how you walk through the area.
People compare it to Myst 3 with 360 views of all locations. Huh? Maybe they got a different game. What I got was so unlike Myst 3 that I'm just stunned. In fact, I have never run into this kid of gaming engine before, And I have played all kinds of games, from Mario to Kings Quest. This kind of engine is pure rot.
What it looks like is this grainy video that you press and arrow to 'walk' forward. Then the low quality video takes you halfway across town or whatever to another puzzle that you can hardly see because it's so low res.
Wow, I am out of money and patience and warn you to stay away from this clunker like the plague.

Disappointing

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 12
Date: November 04, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I don't mind the graphics or interface of this game, but I do find the puzzles both trivial and frustrating. I don't much care for games that require me to keep detailed notes of obscure symbols, sounds, etc., some of which may be useful later. (I recognize that there are people that do enjoy this, and consider this a mark of a good game -- I'm simply not one of them. Since I don't usually play a game all at once, but over the course of two or three weeks, I find this process tedious.) I finally went to a walkthrough and, frankly, I never would have figured out the solution to the first puzzle. I'm not an idiot, and have played many of these kinds of games before, but this one is, in my opinion, not worth the trouble.

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