Celtica??

Heya All ~

This may be something I should know and have lost in the murky depths of diminishing brain cells

(Any insider tips as to where to get one are also encouraged.)

thanx,

kateri - Resident Techno-Terror

No inside tips - just have to look at EBay or luck out with someone who wants a trade.

It did release in early 1998, but in game years that is a long time. Average press run on games is once or twice back then. It was released by H+a who also produced/published The Cassandra Galleries, UFO and a few others. They didn;t have a wide distribution. I got mine directly from H+a.

SO short press run/short shelf life - not many copies in circulation translates to rare and high re-sell prices. There are three on EBay right now and the lowest one is 49.00 with 3 1/2 days still left. I would assume a copy would go for 80 to 100 + these days.

It's very much in the Myst mode - I would call it a poor man's (woman's) Timelapse. Nice atmosphere, but some of the puzzles are poorly designed. Not a bad play if you're a Myst fan.

I don't think it's like either Timelapse or Myst. Timelapse and Myst had 4 or more different areas to explore. Celtica only had about 2 that looked different. There were the green hilly places and then there was the underground bunker/caves area, neither of which was as unusual as what you see in Timelapse or Myst.

Sometimes I wish I'd held onto my copy of Celtica, which I bought used for around $15 and sold for $12.

You're right, not in terms of the structure of the gameworld - but in so many other ways:

- the first-person slide-show perspective with ambient music
- the lonely atmosphere, wandering around previously populated areas now abandoned
- backstory information dolled out through a journal (although more Rivenesque than Mystic I guess)
- the collection of "sacred" objects
- Timelapse and Celtica had very similar style puzzles (while Myst's skewed more towards manipulating physical objects)

Hello Kateri,
The Celtica game is hard to find. Ebay $100 plus. Read the reviews, the game is a worth as much as you want to pay. Buy plywood for your windows,you have a big storm coming.

Nice to see a thread about this one as I just finished playing it.

First, let me say that obtaining a copy of this game is about impossible these days, and then, only if you are will to shell out a fortune. A month or two ago, a copy on eBay sold for something ridiculous--$150-200 IIRC. You might try GameTZ--at one time, there were a couple of copies listed, but you'd probably need to offer something equally rare.

As for the game itself, I really enjoyed it.

It *is* alot like Myst, both in appearance and gameplay. There's alot of "walking" around on an island filled with beautiful landscapes and curious ruins. I like the backstory alot better, too. Sure, alot of it has to do with Celtic mythology, but it has a nice bit of gritty realism in it as well, and a comparison to some elements of the film "Raiders of the Lost Ark" isn't a stretch. I wasn't expecting that part of it, and it really drew me in to the plot and cleaned things up for me.

The puzzles were pretty clever. Not too hard, but not pushovers, either. I did need a walkthrough for a couple of them.

You don't meet any characters, but rather read about them through diaries and journals. This may not be for everyone, but I very much enjoy this type of game.

Celtica is short, and you end up wishing for a few more locations to explore--particularly buildings of some type. In retrospect, a few more "red-herring" objects to read and/or tpy around with might have helped as well.

But I would say that if you enjoyed Myst, you'd like Celtica, too.