So, point and click adventure games then... Love ‘em or hate ‘em they are easy to make and just as easy to play. They require no long term strategy, no twitch reflex mouse-craft and can be picked up by anyone with enough brain cells to rub together and create a spark. This all goes some way to explain why there are so many of the bloody things around at the moment...
The trick to making a good point-and-click-puzzle-adventure-game (or PACPAG as absolutely no one in their right mind is calling them) is avoiding the pitfalls of reducing the game to a click hunt in a desperate attempt to find the [sausage] or making the puzzles so obtuse that you have to resort to combining the [parrot] with the [buzz saw] or similar. Of course, as adventure games are rapidly running out of clever, funny and entertaining gameplay mechanics (since all of those were used up in the great golden age of point and click adventure gaming in the '90s) they all resort to either one of these tactics, Nostradamus ends up resorting to both.
In fact, I say “ends up resorting to both” like it takes a long time for this degeneration to occur. In fact the very first puzzle you have to overcome is how you get out of your own house by both of these means, let me explain... You see, back in Renaissance France when that Nostradamus bloke of the title was incorrectly foreseeing the end of the world over and over again, women weren’t allowed out in public (this may not be true); this presents something of a difficulty as you play the role of Nostradamus’ daughter, Madeleine. As such, your first task is to dress up like a convincing man. Now I’m all for more drag in games and I felt pretty clever chopping a wig to make a hilarious moustache and a nice cropped hair cut for my new guise. But it all went a bit pear-shaped when I got the wrong end of the stick trying to darken my complexion. There is a fire going in the kitchen and I figured I’d get some water from the well, put it out and use the soot. It seemed so obvious! So down I went to the well, pulled up some water (by clicking, dragging downwards, waiting then doing it again; it took me a while to figure out that simply clicking isn’t enough, oh nooo… ) but the rope snapped so I had to go clicking wildly IN THE DARK to find a new rope and an empty bucket. I got the water, took it up to the fire and put soot on my face only to be told that this was “not befitting” of me. No other helpful hints. Nothing.
It turns out that by clicking randomly around in every room of my house I managed to open a tiny hidden drawer in a dressing table that contained a recipe for... wait for it... 'face colouring cream'! So much for my thinking outside the box, or, drawer in this case. If you don’t follow the recipe exactly you end up with soot and you have to start the whole long-winded process again. Now I know that games are supposed to be both “challenging” and “fun” but this one forgot the fun and just ended up “challenged”.
The game also suffered from unreasonably poor frame rates on my Dual Core, Dual Graphics card based PC. The diary-based puzzles were tedious enough on their own but when trying to complete them at 2 frames per second I could actually feel a burning hatred producing steam that was whistling out of my ears.
Having said all this there is still some hope; if you are interested in this game enough to read this far into the review then you’re probably persistent/masochistic enough to glean some entertainment from Nostradamus. As you complete some of the more elegant puzzles there is a small glimmer of self-satisfaction. Also the pre-rendered environments are far better than the rest of the mediocre drivel that some other titles are featuring (how’s that for a box quote?). I can also say, without hyperbole, that the voice acting is not the worse I’ve ever come across (again, box quote gold).
So it all amounts to a fairly average point and click adventure game, the plot is the driving force and luckily it’s actually quite compelling. Unfortunately it wasn’t compelling enough to overcome my desire to use the DVD as a Frisbee after clicking wildly in the dark to find a [hidden plot device] to combine with the [frustrating pattern matching minigame].
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