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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.

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.

truly full of lovecraftian horror -- but not as intended

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: June 02, 2004
Author: Amazon User

You will experience true horror -- at the quality of the acting, programming, and writing. You will encounter many singular and strange -- software bugs. And you will be confronted with the ultimate conundrum of all: how did this game get past QA?

I generally like anything gloomy and dark, no matter how bad it is. Yet even I like to have one candle dimly flickering -- so as not to be the thing that goes "bump" in the night against every corner and chair. (I'm not a bat -- I have eyes) Yet many places in this game the screen is pure black -- you have to literally click on a black screen by trial and error! As much as I like the color black, i'd rather not sit there clicking on it...

The voice-acting is so bad that all you hear are mumbles and whispers -- there is NO way to turn the voice up reletive to the background sound, and there are NO subtitles! And there is no way to escape from a cut-scene or conversation once you started it -- no matter how long and annoying it is.

Puzzles come in two varieties: those that require a knowledge of the occult and obsesive re-readings of the given books and materials as well as some guess work (which happens to be my idea of fun) -- and hard-core pixel hunting (which doesn't!)! I don't mind a few pixel-hunting quests -- but looking through screen-fulls of identical jars just to find the right one is a bit ridiculous! Even Tetris is a better computer game than "look though 100 identical things to find the right one"!

In conclusion, you must be a masochist to enjoy this game! Go re-read a Lovecraft book. If you don't like reading, get Black Mirror -- which, with all it's flaws, is still a much better dark-occult game than Necronomicon.

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.

Unpleasant beyond belief

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: September 06, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Being an H.P.Lovecraft fan I bought this game with high hopes and initially was happy with the excellent pictures. My brief euphoria, however turned to frustration and then anger when I had to turn the brightness up to the max on my monitor and still couldn't see anything during the dungeon part of the game. I could just imagine the game's designers sitting around saying "Let's make it even darker! That would be really fun!" Even with a walkthrough I had a terrible time manuevering around and eventually the boredom took over, and I got rid of this turkey. Save your money or read some H. P. Lovecraft books instead. I will never buy another Dreamcatcher game again.

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.

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.

good game,very creepy and pretty hard

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: September 09, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I enjoyed necronomicon.At times it was hard to hear the dialogue because the people either mumbled or talked to fast or soft.The graphics were good and the puzzles were not easy.The only thing i had to have help with was the correct urn.I just guessed any urn would due.I thought it was funny that in the town other than the fisherman nobody ever answered a door when i knocked.It is creepy like the 2 dracula games i played.Necronomicon is certainly harder than dracula -resurrection and a little bit harder than dracula-the last sanctuary.I thought the documents were complicated.If there is a negative to the game it is the overcomplicated documents.overall a good game.

Nice graphics

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: July 02, 2004
Author: Amazon User

The world of the game offers you the 360 rotation of most modern "shooters." It has a very loosely related H.P. Lovecraft theme but no connection to any story I know. There are some tough "hunt and peck" pixel quests which can become tedious (especially the one in total darkness.) I did enjoy it, but the box says that this is the "first adventure game to be directly indpired by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft." This was annoying because there have been much better Lovecraft ports such as the excellent adventure games Shadow of the Comet by Chaosium/Infogames in 1994, and my favorite text based Hound of Shadow 1990 from Eldritch Games, and the Alone in the Dark series from the early 90's.

I didn't personally encounter any serious (lockup) bugs but it did drop out to windows sometimes. The cut scenes and movements played without any choppiness at all but sometimes the voices would stutter. The graphic detail of the towns and building was excellent, especially the fishing village. Riding the little antique motorcycle was fun. As one reviewer noted, the main character sounded unnecessarily like a 12 year old-- good description. However, the people were mispronouncing the guy's name differently for a reason: they were indicating or pretending they didn't know him, of course. This was not a flaw by the game designers.

In sum, the graphics were pretty, but gameplay could have been better. Worth a look in the bargain bin.

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