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Delightfully Creepy

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 22 / 22
Date: July 16, 2001
Author: Amazon User

If you're a big fan of H. P. Lovecraft, you may feel with good reason that this game uses his writing as little more than a context for standard role-playing conventions. But, it does manage to give a few chills as you wander deeper and deeper into the action. And, bring to mind some of the shiver-producing moments experienced while reading Lovecraft.

I nearly jumped out of my chair at one point when my phone rang. The game had brought me so deep into the action and the sudden unexpected noise caught me while I was expecting something to suddenly appear in the shadowy view on my computer screen.

This game has good atmospheric components. Ambient sounds fit the environments well. And the background music is very good -- never overwhelming but never boring either.

As for danger, there are very few risks involved. However, when you do encounter a tricky situation, you'd better be prepared. And, as the game progresses, the chances for a bad end due to a poor decision are greater.

That's to be expected. Playing with dark magic and reviving the dead -- I call that serious business! You'd better be certain about what you're doing.

A couple of drawbacks as far as I'm concerned -- there seems to be a little too much "wander and find" activity at some stages of the game; and, secondly, the in-game animated videos are not always the best quality...but they do what is needed to advance the story.

This game has some of that old New England creepiness which we saw in "The Blair Witch Project". So, if you liked that, you should give this game a try.

Dreadfully obscure and difficult

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 17 / 20
Date: August 16, 2001
Author: Amazon User

After playing Dracula, I was interested in seeing what other games Dreamcatcher produced, but after playing Necronomicon, I'm thoroughly disappointed. The game is utterly obscure and complicated, and almost impossible to defeat without the help of a total walkthrough. Combining random herbs and potions to create a mixture would have been impossible had I not been going directly from the walkthrough. The game has 2 filler mazes that simply fill time that the programmers could have made to flesh out the story, which was terribly written. I barely followed it at all. The ending was very disappointing. There is a "good" and a "bad" ending (actually, the bad ending was cooler) because the good ending leaves you feeling like, "that's it?" Although the graphics are fairly well done, the cut scenes can be long and boring. The music is nothing to write home to mom about. I don't recommend this game unless you simply buy it to follow along with the walkthrough and enjoy some of the pretty graphics. Don't waste your time or money.

starts off good

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: September 24, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Well, I liked this game at the beginning, until you get half way through and then you spend more time "dying" then anything else. It got to the point where I no longer wanted to finish the game because of how and why you "died". It was just, quite frankly, too annoying to continue to play.

Necromonicon

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: October 16, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I do not recommend this game for the following reasons: Too complicated to get through without a cheat guideline. Disappointed with many of the scenes. I would have liked to be able to explore the upstairs of the first home, but was unable to do it. I became bored too soon with this game.

Linear Irritation

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: October 20, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This is, quite possibly, the worst game I've ever played. Admittedly, that's not saying a lot, since I don't play PC games that often; however, I am a fan of H.P. Lovecraft, and while the atmosphere of Necronomicon is suitably creepy, there is little of Lovecraftian lore to hold a fan's attention and less good gameplay for those unfamiliar with H.P.L. The game's three main problems are:

1) linearity--it is impossible to explore freely, to talk with people more than once, or to do things not strictly adhering to the (convoluted) storyline, you can't even explore the second story of your own home!;

2) voice acting--half of it is passable, the other half is atrocious, on the level of dubbed Hong Kong action flicks, the character you play sounds 12 years old (he isn't), and there are at least three different pronunciations uttered for Wytcherly's name, as if the actors hadn't been told how to say it--someone call for a director;

3)the puzzles--as another reviewer has noted, many of these are illogical, rendering them nearly impossible to complete without a walk-through (there are several available on-line), they generally add nothing to the atmosphere of the game, and they result in disappointing payoffs--the end of the game is a massive anti-climax.

Although the graphics are nice and some of the characters sufficiently creepy to evoke Lovecraft, the game isn't worth your time or your money.

A dark journey through your mind

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: March 26, 2002
Author: Amazon User

...Since the very beginning of the game, your character meets many different people and through dialogues the story of Necronomicon begins to develop. You explore a dilapidated house, an alchemyst's laboratory, search for books in a large library, summon a spirit. The puzzles are very intersting but extremely complicated. Nevertheless if you sum up all the information you have and take notes, (and through a bit of experimentation) the puzzles are solvable without a walkthrough. There was this moment when I had to make a potion but I haven't got any clue how to do it, and I had to choose two bottles of about 20 available and mix them. However, once you start thinking logically you will realize that the possible combinations are limited, since the variation of the pots is limited (although that is not immediately obvious). The process through which you summon the spirirt from the past provides exciting puzzles, which I rarely have recently encountered in an adventure game. I disagree with the other reviews, which criticize this game for its lack of reasoning. Logic dominates, but if you like the easy-3-hour-gameplay-plus-the-constant-assistance-of-areliable-walkthrough, then this game is not for you. The thrill this game provides is in its making you think deeper and make logical connections in order to solve the puzzles. The game is challenging and patience is a key factor in enjoying the game as a whole. Necronomicon has nice graphics and a dark atmosphere that often thrills you as you walk in dark corridors in search for a lantern (almost a hint :-)). The interface of the game is a point-and-click type, typical of the Dreamcatcher adventure games, and sometimes even provides hints telling you that you should use an item at the particular situation. Well, some people will hate me for this review, but I hope others will make use of it in a more beneficial way. I strongly recommend Necronomicon, even though I have not already finished it.

Nice story but too dark!!!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: April 08, 2002
Author: Amazon User

When I mean 'dark' I mean 'dark'! What made this game frustrating was that some scenes were too dark to find anything! Getting around the lab was really tough cuz you got find these switches to light up the room.(yes, I put my brightness all the way up!)

As for the puzzles, some are easy (just keep clicking the symbols if you don't understand the clues) some are hard (just read those books you find) and some are just time consuming (you can get through those mazes eventually!!!).

I think the most "illogical" part comes after you leave the lab. You have to find the right urn and have the charcoal with you.

As for the lip sync, I don't really care about it. It is afterall just a video game with limitations. I don't think the average player is going to notice that.

I think this game could have been better if it had more puzzles and less of picking up stuff. Nice story though.

really awful

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 5
Date: June 05, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I picked this game up because it was cheap and happened to be one of the few adventure games I didn't already own. It was a waste money. This most awful computer game I've ever played. The storyline is boring and confusing and the graphics and voice acting are terrible. It's an excruciatingly slow game to get through, not because it's hard, but because it takes forever to get from point A to point B and then you have to listen to some awful dialogue for a while. The puzzle I had the most problem with in the game was the one where you had to light torches in a dark tunnel. You can't go on to the next stretch of tunnel until you light the torch in that area, and it's impossible to see anything. I was reduced to searching the screen with my cursor until I could find a spot where the game would allow me to use my matches. It wasn't hard to figure out what I had to do, but actually doing it was another matter. Save youself the frusteration and boredom and buy some other game. Whatever else you might get, it'll probably be better than this game. If it's worse, you have my sympathy.

Average

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 10 / 10
Date: July 16, 2002
Author: Amazon User

_Necronomicon_ is a stunningly average game. Like most games, it has its good points and its bad points. Unlike many, however, it has nothing that really sets it apart in either direction. The good parts are simply pretty good, not thrilling. The bad parts aren't unforgiveably bad; they're merely annoying. As it is based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft and I feel the same way about those, in this respect it turned out about as I expected.

You play William Stanton, a scholarly fellow who lives in the Rhode Island town of Providence. The time is the late 1920s (although the character costumes make it look more like the late 1800s). As the game opens, you answer the door to your old school friend, Edgar. He tells you he's in danger and entrusts you with a mysterious artifact. Soon after, a man appears who introduces himself as Edgar's doctor. Edgar, he informs you, is suffering paranoid delusions. His family is worried about him. Can you find Edgar and figure out what's going on? Trying to accomplish this superficially simple task leads you into an unexpected realm of necromancy and black magic.

The graphics are great, as is the voice acting. I felt that in both look and character _Necronomicon_ really taped into the New England feel, where things are both endearingly quirky and a little eerie, especially to outsiders. The game relies heavily on the sense that there's something mysterious going on here that everyone knows about but no one is talking about. Every non-player character is at least mildly eccentric and some are downright creepy. This gives you a sense that you don't know whom to trust. Unfortunately this doesn't really go anywhere, aside from creating atmosphere. I kept expecting to find hidden agendae, or to uncover things that weren't as they seemed on the surface, but this was not the case. As a result, the whole game lacked depth that could have made it more interesting.

The puzzles are mainly inventory-based mechanical. They are neither particularly challenging nor particularly easy. Any challenge comes from some external situation rather than the puzzle itself. For example, a room might be so dark that it's hard to see what's going on, or a solution might depend on combining one or two of a large number of items, where no indication is given which are correct or even what the result should be. This gives the game an annoying degree of randomness and makes it seem that every solution is a matter of chance, rather than brainpower. You're just a likely to stumble on the answer by chance or luck as you are to "figure it out." Often failure to get it right means death, so there were long periods of dying over and over again while trying different things out. I found this trying.

_Neconomicon_ suffers from extraneous detail: things you can look at that have no purpose or things you can interact with that don't really have a function. I constantly found myself wondering, "Is this a puzzle or isn't it?" A lot of this stuff seemed to have been put in there just to extend gameplay, but it left me feeling gypped. In general, it seemed that there was too high a proportion of irrelavant material and the material that was relevant just didn't thrill enough or make up for the make-work. There was too little of the satisfaction that comes from solving a really complex, logical puzzle from carefully collected clues.

_Necronomicon_ is also one of the most linear games I have ever played. There's almost no sense of interacting with the game or doing things in an order that makes personal sense. Once you start, you're locked into a pre-determined path. It may be a fairly interesting path, but it just doesn't involve the player like a more non-linear game.

There are two different endings to the game -- a "Successful" ending and a "failure" ending. Which you get is contingent upon your success in figuring out the last puzzle. Unfortunately, once you start the last puzzle you can no longer escape and start over even if you figure out you're on the wrong track. This resulted in having to view the "bad" ending sequence about 20 times, and you can't escape from that either. That was the singularly most annoying thing about the game, in my opinion. By the time I had seen the "bad" ending 5 times I was ready to give up and go look for the answer just so I didn't have to see it again. After all that, the "good" ending was distinctly anti-climactic.

On the whole, I neither liked this game nor hated it. It was just something to do on several summer afternoons when it was too hot to do anything else. In that respect, it was worth it. If you decide to play _Necronomicon_, don't expect too much and you should get along fine.

Evil

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: August 22, 2002
Author: Amazon User

..., I played and enjoyed this game. The story is cool and the graphics and sound are excellent. If you like the occult, satan and stuff like that, and you are an adventure gamer, I recomend this game.

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