As far as adventure games go, there is so much wrong with the design of The Riddle of Master Lu, that it's not even funny. It is one of those games that have a good premise, but the way it is designed may cause you to rip your hair off, as it has some of the most convoluted puzzles ever devices for adventure games. This tied to the fact there is a fair amount of pixel hunting as well. There's also a particularly nasty maze in the mix, a stable element of adventure game padding. And you do know it is nasty when the developers have left in a cheat code that allows you to jump over most of it. Still, it is a game you can have some fun with if you have a walkthrough in hand, otherwise, the design choices and some bugs that crash the game might make you rage quit it more than once.
The star, and the namesake, of the game, Robert Ripley was a real-life cartoonist and a collector of oddities. The title of his cartoon, Ripley's Believe or Not! was later on expanded into books, radio- and TV shows and so on. After his death, the Ripley Entertainment company has continued in his footsteps, providing the oddest and the most interesting things and people to the limelight. The latest iteration of the show was done in 2019 with Bruce Campbell doing the hosting.
In the game, Ripley is looking for a fabled seal of Master Lu, a Chinese Wiseman, who lived in the era of the first emperor of China. Ripley and his girlfriend Mei Chen soon learn, that the tablet of Lu can't be read, as it requires the use of three other alphabets, which have since been lost in time. This leads Ripley into a globetrotting adventure in which he has to locate the Rosetta Stones for each language in order to decrypt the writing of Master Lu.
As Ripley is a collector of oddities and a cartoonist, you can keep an eye out on exciting items as well as locations and people worth sketching. Non-story relevant items can be sent back to New York to be added on display at Ripley's Odditorium, but I don't know if this has any genuine value as far the gameplay goes. It's just something little you can do.
The way I see it, the globe-trotting story of the game does hold enough intrigue to warrant a playthrough, even if it means heavy leaning on a walkthrough. It has solid production values and the FMV bits it has are reasonably well done as are the pre-rendered 3D backdrops of the locations. As far as FMV quality goes, The Riddle of Master Lu is on the upper echelon from what was released during the first wave of FMV titles.
But as it is a game, that was released in 1995, The Riddle of Master Lu does suffer from the design practices of the time, especially what goes to puzzle design. Without any rhyme or reason, it swings between easy to extra hard moonlogic puzzles. One of the most convoluted puzzles is in the Ace of Spade's castle, where one locked room puzzle requires you to at first find a way to get a gem out from a bottle and then use the bottle as a weight to open a door. This whole thing consists of over 40 steps, including assembling and dismantling two devices. There's also a couple of very easily missable hotspots on the scene, which can turn the whole process into even more agony.
There are other convoluted puzzles as well in the game, but the castle puzzle definitely takes the cake. I'd claim it is one of the most annoying puzzles I've ever encountered. It is the kind of a puzzle, that halts the game for a long time and the worst thing about it is, you have no idea if all you need is in the room or if you've stumbled on a walking dead scenario with the solution to the dilemma locked away somewhere outside the puzzle room. Of course, if you do enjoy puzzles that require you to do a lot of trial and error while taking minute notes about the process, then this might be for you.
And then... then there is the maze. A maze with all rooms looking exactly the same. It has around 100 screens dedicated to it. The way you navigate through it is by pulling ropes in the ceiling of every room. These ropes will light up the door if it can be passed through, but if you leave the room, you have to pull a rope again in order to be able to return from whence you came. It is a tedious and time-consuming maze, which you have to map out and hopefully even complete in one sitting, as you don't want to forget where you are, as THERE ARE NO NAVIGATION MARKERS THERE TO MAKE IT ANY WAY OR FORM SIMPLER, BECAUSE MAZES MUST BE HARD, GODDAMMIT. Things to ease up navigation are for idiots. And for other people, there is the cheat code, as the items you can find from the maze are just additional knickknacks for the Odditorium. The cheat code is CTRL+lee.
If you are one of those people, who finds every puzzle too easy, then Riddle of Master Lu is a game for you. Playing it through without a walkthrough really makes you work for it. For others with less patience or feebler brains, there are walkthroughs, if you want to see where the story goes, that is.
As far as I can tell, Riddle of Master Lu is not sold anywhere digitally at the moment. I would wager licensing issues as the culprit. For it not being sold is kind of a shame, but not really, as I do find it as one of those annoying adventure games ruined by poor design choices. But on the other hand, it has high-quality production values, for its time, bugs and design choices aside.
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