As their last traditional point-and-click adventure before the release of Under the Killing Moon, Access Software took a plunge into the 1950s b-movies with Amazon: Guardians of Eden. Again, they used the same engine as with Martian Memorandum and Mean Streets, so the game shares many of the same flaws as those two, despite technically, Amazon is perhaps the best game made with it. It just is, that the game design leaves quite a bit of room for improvement.
Allen Roberts is on an expedition in the Amazon when his camp is attacked in the dark of the night. The story cuts back to the USA, where Allen's brother Jason is just arriving at work when his boss asks to see him. He is told of the attack and that Allen is dead. Shocked, the young man goes back home, where he finds a letter and a parcel from his big brother, where Allen asks for his help.
Hopeful, Jason goes back to his office, from where he needs to find information on the exact location where Allen's expedition took place. After finding it, he books a ticket to South America, from where he needs to find Allen's contact person. This person is Maya, who takes Jason to his brother.
Long story short, Allen ends up dead after the local police get on their heels the look for the treasure they suspect Allen was after. Maya ends up leading Jason to the secret city of Amazons, where they are guarding the fountain of youth.
All this is told in the fashion of 1950s b-serials. The game is divided into 13 chapters, which all end in a proper cliffhanger moment. This in itself could be a fun little gimmick, if not for the uneven length of each chapter. Some of them take a long to solve because of multiple locations, and some are rather short affairs. But A for an effort.
If you do end up playing the game, it's very, very advisable to save often. Not only it is possible to die on many locations, there are quite a bit of puzzles revolving around pixel hunting. Generally speaking, when you do end up in a situation, where the solution was to pixel-hunt an item a couple of chapters back, the death screen does mention what chapter you might want to go back to, which is nice. There's also an in-game hint system, not quite the quality of what Access later did with their FMV Tex Murphy games, but a nice touch all in all. You can even decide the level of hints the system gives you, as an additional way of increasing difficulty. Of course, in this day and age, it might be just simpler to check out a walkthrough online, but those with patience can get far with the ingame system as well.
Interestingly enough, there's no maze in this game. Mazes are generally a crutch this kind of game utilizes to pad the length, but not this time around. Then again, to pad gameplay, there are some arcade sequences. Perhaps the most annoying bit in the game is a canoeing sequence, where you need to navigate a river, dodging rocks, and pick the right path from two possibilities. Thankfully, this isn't some randomized sequence, so you can get through it with trial and error and with a load of patience and game saves.
There are many timed events as well, where you are given only a couple of minutes to think of a solution to the problem at hand. What this really means is, that you end up dying a couple of times before you either figure it out or check a solution. At times, the timeframes are very strict, which just causes an annoying amount of reloading, especially if the solution is to interact with a specific pixel at the right time.
Technically the engine Access used for their point-and-click games has improved a bit. It was still far away from the best engines of the era, but it does feel a lot less clunky, despite it's still a good idea to use the cursor keys to control walking and mouse for the interactions. The interactions can again be chosen with the function keys, but there's also a handy row of icons you can use. So, all in all, while the game does feel less clunky than Access Software's previous adventure titles, it does play more or less the same way.
There are a lot more FMV sequences as well, albeit heavily compressed and generally just short looping segments. The game is fully voiced though, at least as far as dialogue goes. The voices do suffer from heavy compression as well, so don't expect a high-quality listening experience.
Speaking of technical improvements, Amazon has support for high-resolution SVGA mode. Not that the game itself has alternative SVGA resolution art assets, but the engine just divides the screen in half and shows the game screen and the inventory screen side by side, while both of them are still in their original resolution, effectively just making you play the game on a smaller window, which isn't really doing any favors for the many sequences asking for pixel hunting. There's also an FMV library available through this mode, but the FMVs are shown in a tiny window. The mode is more or less useless and does come out as a bit poorly thought out last-minute gimmick for utilizing SVGA mode, which had been introduced only a couple of years prior to the release of the game and had already started to find its way to home computers.
Technical and design woes aside, Amazon still is a far more playable game than Countdown for example. And it has its own charm, especially if you have a soft spot for 1950s-style pulp fiction. It's a bit of a silly story, just like most of these kinds of adventures are in any media, but
Just like the previous Access Software point-and-click adventurers Amazon is more interesting as an idea than it is in execution. There's a solid, nice B-movie feel about it, but the overall design leaves a lot of room for improvement and thus, a proper remake could be a decent idea. Access did, after all, make a pretty decent remake of the first Tex Murphy game, Mean Streets, and turned it into a proper FMV title. So maybe, at some point, they could be intrigued in trying to remake Amazon as well.
After Amazon, Access Software dropped traditional adventure games altogether. Their next adventure was Under a Killing Moon, which still is among one of the best 1990s FMV titles. This new direction was the direction for their future adventure titles as well and it made Tex Murphy one of the better known adventure heroes of the time.
If you think you can stomach this kind of game, or if you just like the type of adventure it represents, it might be an enjoyable experience. You can buy it digitally though GOG.
Comments
Post a Comment