Murder mystery and curses in ancient france? BOOOOOOORING!
I’m going to be blunt here and just come out with it. Adventure gaming is dead. Although most of us don’t want to admit it, it’s the truth, and except for a couple of companies trying to revive it, it’s not in a hurry to come back. I mean lets face it, Grim Fandango and Beyond Good & Evil have already been made, so it’s pretty much downhill from there! Lighthouse games are one of the companies who are clinging onto the genre, reaching the niche audience of gamers like myself who think there may still be some hope. Most of the games they release are pretty passable games, which hark back to the old days, but Nostradamus: The Last Prophecy has all but crushed my hopes of an adventure game revival.
The game follows the story of Nostradamus’ daughter Madeline (sp?) as she investigates a series of deaths, which are apparently linked to the last prophecy of her father. One slight twist to the story is that because the protagonist is a woman, and feels she will not be respected by the queen mother (who has requested the investigation), Madeline disguises herself as her brother. This puts a slightly odd twist on the gameplay, as you will get slightly different answers when dressed as the different characters.
Unfortunately, there was not enough good for me to be able to look past the bad
Now on to my main gripe, the gameplay. When researching this game, I read that the gameplay is identical to that of Myst. Having never played Myst, I can’t comment on this, but the game is basically a first person, static camera pixel hunt. By this, I mean that your character stays still (as does your cursor) and the room spins around as you move the mouse. This can be extremely disorientating, and after the first 20 minutes of game time, I had to leave it for the night, as I felt physically ill from watching the screen spin as I tried to locate parts of a costume. As you would expect of an adventure game, items collected go into an inventory, and in this game they can be modified using different tools in your toolkit.
Some other odd elements, such as various situations where you must cook or prepare potions are present, but heavily overused in the game, and generally boring. I must have spent at least a quarter of the game spooning various strange ingredients into a cooking pot, so that I could move on to the more interesting parts (although I use the word interesting very loosely). Another gripe I have is that the logic puzzles are alien and often unsolvable to anyone who doesn’t have much knowledge of astronomy. For example, one puzzle requires you to put the signs of the zodiac in the order you see them on a picture, but because I don’t know the names of any of the zodiac signs, I ended up resorting to a walkthrough guide. The puzzles in Nostradamus range from hard to impossible, and over all I just didn’t find them that compelling.
Graphics are below average at best, verging on terrible at times (e.g. when looking in a mirror, your head is either looking up, straight or down, and it jerks from one to another) and the conversations are often disjointed. You can tell that the voice actors took some lines completely out of context, because the tone of voice completely doesn’t fit the conversation.
To sum up, Nostradamus is a game with a fairly average story, repulsive gameplay, some impossible to solve puzzles, poor graphics and some fairly bad voice acting. In the game’s defence, I didn’t find any obvious glitches, which have been ominous in the other lighthouse games I’ve played, and if you can look past the gameplay, it’s got some fairly good murder mystery elements to be found. Unfortunately, there was not enough good for me to be able to look past the bad, and I found the game generally boring and frustrating. I would advise you to avoid this one unless you desperately need to play an adventure game and can’t find anything else, in which case, try the demo first. There are much better adventure games to be had.
The Bad: Everything else is.
