Solving the Lost Puzzle - Part 1
by Scott Lewis
For those of you just tuning in, I spent last week bemoaning the loss of the pure puzzle game. This week, we mark the beginning of a more positive approach. We're going to see what's out there. The Holy Grail is a pure puzzle game on the lines of the 7th guest, one in which advancement is conditional on solving discrete puzzles rather than the manipulation of inventory or interaction with other characters. See the previous article for more on these topics and a differentiation between puzzles and games.
We begin with the Adventure Company's NiBiRu, chosen in completely arbitrary fashion from the shelf of the local Best Buy. We may have to get more scientific later, but for now casting about at random is preferable. This week, we'll take a first look at NiBiRu and go a few hours in looking for puzzles. On successive weeks we'll both introduce a new game and see how each of the others withstands deeper play.
NiBiRu, subtitled "Age of Secrets" has as one of its' back-of-the-box promotional tags "Solve stimulating and engaging puzzles throughout." This is good, though it also lists character interaction as a selling point. In addition, the box seems to imply that the citizenry of Prague have mystic wherewithal on par with the Ancient Mayans and Nazi Occultists. Assuming that the mysteries of the Praguers will be revealed in due time, there is nothing left for us but to dive in.
A brief aside on packaging. NiBiRu, like many of today's games, comes in the new smaller box. This is a move I applaud, as larger boxes haven't been necessary since the days of the 5.25" disk. The Adventure Company seems to go a step further, though, designing all of their components to fit in the CD case size box you see in the Wal-Mart discount bins. Feels somewhat defeatist to me, but it's probably an economically sound decision.
The first hour or so with NiBiRu reveals the foundation of what is shaping up to be a fine adventure game, but a decided lack of puzzle content. First, the game is very pretty. The Adventure Company does backgrounds very well and an early scene on a bridge in Prague gives them opportunity to display that talent. Interior scenes show some of the problems with the format, however, most notably items getting lost in the background. Adventure game designers have long struggled with how to delineate what is and is not manipulable in the environment. NiBiRu, like many similar games, does this through a mouse icon that changes color when something is usable in one way or another. This mostly works, aided by the insertion of quite a few red herring sort of objects that you can click on once and get some information about but not actually use and a short description of what your mouse is over in the top bar. The conversation interface shows a similarly well thought out development process, with pictorial icons representing topics of further conversation.
One problem with the interface is that you often have to keep pushing in directions you seem to have been told not to. In one case you're outside a locked apartment door. Clicking on the door results in an audible click noise and a voice over informing you that the door is locked. To proceed, you have to click the same door again, only then are you zoomed in to see that there is a panel of call buttons next to the door. It would not have been at all unreasonable to remain stuck on this for some time assuming that the door was currently impassable until something else changed. We were saved here, and in a conversation with a similar problem, by the adventure game maxim "click everything. Then, click it again. Then, think." Our only other hang-up with the interface comes from saving. The menu icon, only accessible via mouse, isn't visible unless you mouse over the particular corner of the screen in which it lives. We actually had to look up how to find the menu and save the game, something that seems wholly unnecessary in such an otherwise intuitive game.
Next week, we take a deeper dive into NiBiRu, hopefully both finding out why the German occultist/scientists considered it to be the 12th planet and discovering whether they actually left any puzzles in their wake. Also, we take a first look at Dark Fall, another Adventure Company offering with perhaps more puzzling promise.