directed by Charles Cecil
written by Dave Cummins and Jonathan Howard
story and design by Charles Cecil, Dave Cummins, Jonathan Howard, and Steve Ince

developed for PC and PlayStation by Revolution Software
published for PC by Virgin Interactive Entertainment

~8 hrs

Another ridiculous piece of pulp from the waning days of the computer adventure game. As usual, I played it in search of pearls of game design, plot design, or puzzle design. But there were none to be had. I’m currently trying to piece together a pulpy Indiana Jones-type plot of my own, and my specific hope was that this game would spark some thought processes in that direction. But it didn’t.

I don’t need to complain at any length about the difference between junk and careless junk, because I have before. This was careless junk. The plot and game elements seemed to have been thrown into a salad spinner and left where they landed, then stitched together using the laziest possible game design. That is to say, a lot of “conversations” – click on the icon of an object or person you’ve encountered to ask about it. About 50% of the spoken dialogue in this game is myriad variations on the classic line “I wouldn’t know nothin’ about that!” – one per object per speaking character. When games went “talkie,” few game designers seemed to have considered that it takes a lot longer to listen than to read, and that listening to half-assed dialogue being spoken slowly is a huge drag compared to speed-clicking through half-assed printed text. The sub-adolescent sub-greeting-card sub-Bazooka-Joe “cracks” about every stupid object in the game – that underpants are a recurrent source of humor ought to give you a sense – are incredibly wearying, not to mention embarrassing, when performed by actual humans. A further source of weariness is the incredibly, infuriatingly slow walking animation that propels your character from one point of interest to another. Of the 8 hours that I’m estimating to have spent with this game, the majority of them were spent watching my choices play out in excruciatingly uneventful detail, one foot in front of the other, or else listening to every character in the game say, about every object in the game, “Gosh, a newspaper article about an upcoming total solar eclipse? I wouldn’t know nothin’ about solar eclipses!” This problem of “what do you actually do” is fundamental to all story-meets-game productions, but by 1997 there was enough accumulated wisdom on this subject that the designers should have known far better.

The actual downright incoherence of some sections of the game is evidence, to my eye, that this product was rushed to market, or else the budget was reduced after the design phase. Both the introduction and the ending are animated sequences that felt like just slightly less than a bare minimum, as though most of the storyboard had been pared away in desperation. At some points, a thing we haven’t yet heard about is suddenly assumed to be common knowledge: evidence of either a cut section or insufficient playtesting. Either way, shoddy stuff.

Plot: When the solar eclipse comes, an evil Mayan god will be released from a SMOKING MIRROR where he’s been imprisoned for centuries, and destroy all mankind, and that’s what the evil smuggler/general wants because he’s crazy or something. There are several sacred stones that can stop it from happening, and then the bad guys kidnap you because you have one, and then you get away, figure out what’s going on, find the other stones – one was buried by a pirate, the other is in the British Museum – and stop it. Hm. In summary it sounds almost like it works. But I assure you it doesn’t. The causal linkages suggested by my summary are not actually part of the gameplay.

The evil god, when he appears briefly in the final animated sequence, looks like Skeletor, which is to say not even remotely Mayan. That’s the last straw!

The previous game, Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars – or, as I bought it on its US release back in 1996, Circle of Blood (awesome!) – suffered from the same slow-walking, lame-talking problems, but the whole production felt much more cared-for, and the plot progression managed to be genuinely entertaining. The third game in the series (Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon (2003)) improved on the walk-cycle annoyance with a newfangled, fairly attractive 3D engine, and managed to keep the comedy at a good solid 12-to-14-year-old level – and, most importantly, it had a sense of atmosphere. Ridiculous as the word “taste” is in these surroundings, it really comes down to taste. Some of this crap is the good stuff and some isn’t. Is a skeletal Mayan god trapped in a magic mirror more stupid than a Templar conspiracy to harness cosmic energies? Absolutely it is.

What’s the lesson to learn here? That in writing my own bit of junk, I should be careful not to confuse the dumb with the merely stupid. Harder than it sounds! My sympathies do go out to Charles Cecil and company. But they failed. I guess the moral should be: Stupid is fine, but when in doubt, be smarter.