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Like its predecessor, Aura: Fate of the Ages, the latest entry in the adventure genre The Sacred Rings tries to get a taste of Myst’s legendary success by borrowing just about every aspect of the game that made it interesting: shiny pre-rendered graphics, zillions of oddball machine-based puzzles, and a generally nonsensical storyline. That worked in 1995, but today it takes a lot more to capture gamers’ imaginations. The result is a new game that feels old, and not old in a classic sort of way.

Nikifor’s Moving Castle

Rings is a proper sequel to Aura: Fate of Ages in that it more or less picks up where the first game left off. Despite that, there’s no reason to fear you’re missing something if you never played the original. The storyline here, though dense, is only vaguely hinted at through the course of the game and really doesn’t factor into it. You basically get a blast of plot in the intro and then another at the end, but the middle, the game itself, is more or less devoid of story.

You start out in this odd house accompanied by odd guy named Nikifor who is alternately acting dumb or sleeping, leaving you to wander about and discover the house on your own. As you explore your character will at one point state that he thinks Nikifor’s house is actually some sort of a moving contraption that can travel around the land, having somehow come to this conclusion just by looking at a few sketches in a book. It is then of course up to you to get it operating.

You’ll do so by going from one room to the next, each one riddled with hidden sketches, locked compartments, and odd switches and levers sticking out all over the place. Throughout the game you’re literally inundated by puzzles and challenges, unable to take more than a step or two without bumping into something with an odd rune or dial on it. This means you’ll need to keep your eyes open, right from the beginning. Even the earliest puzzles you’ll encounter are fairly complex, requiring that you study every little pattern you find.

There’s a generally helpful in-game notebook that automatically copies down most things of interest for you to look up again, but there are more than a few choice bits of information scattered about you’ll need to sketch or remember on your own as you float from puzzle to puzzle. It all can be a bit overwhelming for the less than hardcore adventure gamers. Being inundated by challenges is fine, but the problem here is there’s little real direction given, often leaving you to spend at least as much time trying to figure out where to go after you solve a puzzle as you spent solving it in the first place.

Click Load Rinse Repeat

Rings follows the old school pre-rendered form, meaning everything you see is a looped video and, when you want to move, you click, wait for an animation to load, watch it whoosh you from A to B, then watch another looped video that represents the world around you. This is of course slow and tedious, but what makes it really frustrating is that the resulting graphics aren’t even all that good. It’s one thing to wait a second for a video to load if you’re dazzled by what you see. Sadly, there’s just nothing that dazzles here. A modern graphics engine could deliver 99% of the look of this game without the pre-rendered headaches.

The positive side of this is of course that the game has minimal system requirements; a plus for gamers with tired hardware. And, that the game runs without even needing one of its four CDs in the drive is another bonus. However, these benefits don’t make up for the generally lackluster look of the game, nor the sound. The stale voice acting and the awfully familiar sound effects you’ll hear every time a door swings open or a drawer slides shut don’t exactly make this game exude a feeling of quality.

Puzzle Addicts Only

As a traditional point-and-click adventure title, The Sacred Rings game has a fairly limited pool of interested gamers to begin with. Even so, many adventure fans won’t like what they find here. Those who find their adventure in exploring interesting environments may think the surroundings are a bit too drab, while those who like to lose themselves in interesting storylines will certainly find the game’s offerings lacking. Only those gamers in it for the puzzles will get a kick out of this one--those who don’t get overwhelmed, that is.

Article by: Tim Stevens