Mystery of the Druids
2001 House of Tales/CDV
W95/W98/ME
Mouse driven, 3rd person Adventure

Disclaimer

Third person, talk to everyone, detective type of adventure games are my very favorite. Plus, the hottest graphics and fastest or newest whatever’s don’t impress me. I’m an old fashioned story first, all that other stuff second type of gal. So read this review with that thought in mind.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of time” Oops – wrong story – sorry, just watched a rerun of The Golden Girls lol.

Let’s try that again – from the game manual :

“In the year 1000 AD the Druids were facing their toughest test of time. Their numbers had dwindled dramatically through the rise of a new faith. Fearing extinction, the last of the Druids took it upon themselves to transfer their powers of magic and wisdom into five babies in a cruel rite at the megalith circle of Stonehenge. A faction of the Druids feared that the children would not grasp the huge responsibility bestowed upon them by the ritual. With great power and no guidance, the children would grow up to be a threat to mankind. To prevent this, the small faction abdicated from the ritual, and so it remained incomplete. The children, borne from the Druid’s sacrificial act, grew up and became powerful figures in society. The secret existence of the Druid Circle was guaranteed, but missing were the powers of the apathetic Druids of the past.”

You play a Scotland Yard detective named Brent Halligan – (who reminded me a lot of Peter Falk in Colombo -I think it was the trench coat). You have just been handed a murder investigation (called the Skeleton Murders) by your chief who is less than enthralled with you but seems to have no choice since his other investigator has bungled the case by arresting and jailing the wrong man. Your chief is pretty convinced the wrong man was arrested because bodies keep turning up and the MO is identical to the earlier murders. So begins your journey both in the Present (finding the ones responsible for the murders) and the Past (trying to prevent them from happening in the first place). Along the way you learn about an ancient religious sect known as The Druids. You are helped in your investigation by a well known expert on druids, one Arthur Blake and an anthropologist, Dr. Melanie Turner.

The game comes on 3 CD’s. One disk for installing, one for The Present and the third for the Past. You only swap disks when you change times – the game starts from whatever disk you are on. There also is a map feature that once a location has been triggered all you do is click on the location you want to go to and in a blink of an eye (or a ferryboat ride) you’re there.

Some puzzles are logical and some are a bit of a stretch. There are also a few of the “try everything in inventory to see if it works” type. But for the most part, if you pay attention to your surroundings and pick up on the clues from the people you talk to, you can generally figure out what you need to do. Except for the tile puzzle in the basement near the end of the game. If there was a clue on how to figure that one out it went completely over my head. I solved it by trial and error and about two hours of tile shuffling and muttering bad words at my monitor. And then there’s the maze, a miserable, multi-tiered maze. And what’s worse (as if that alone wasn’t enough) if you go back through the same door you came out of, guess what? You wind up in a different location. There is no way to back track on this baby. So my suggestion would be to just pull out a wt and cheat, that is unless you’re a masochist or just really love the challenge of a good maze (I am neither type, thank you very much).

The only major gripe I had were the few times that I knew I had the right inventory item chosen but because I didn’t click exactly on the correct pixeled hot spot it wouldn’t work. I spent a lot of time going back through inventory items trying everything only to have the first thing I tried work because this time I clicked in the right location. There are also a few gruesome scenes but nothing you haven’t seen on say Buffy the Vampire Killer. It was more of an “oh, yuck” rather than a “well, this is disgusting” type of thing.

I came across no bugs - not one - game installed and run beautifully on my computer.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed the game and it gets a big thumbs up from me (big surprise huh?)– it had a very satisfying ending – and i was sad to see it end -

Here’s hoping House of Tales is successful in their next sojourn.

System requirements

Minimum
P200
32 MB ram
2MB VGA video card (with or without 3D support)
16 bit sound card
Direct X8

Recommended

P400
3D accelerator card

Good job, Sydlett,
I loved this game. I had played the demo and thought the game would be lots of fun. I am very glad I got it as it is fun to replay.It has just the right degree of difficulty and it was a hoot watching Brent go down the ladder in the library.

I'm loving this game! Although, I do have some problems with skipping voices. Other than that, the game works like a charm!

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April Ryan: "A labyrinth. Great. I SO love these things."

April: "I'm off to save the world........WORLDS!"

From April's Diary: "The next time someone says the word 'Destiny'......run like hell."

April Ryan: "I shifted in my underwear!"

I want this game, but is it like the demo practically the whle time in the game. The first demo I mean, where you have to break into the mansion tyhrough the fence? Personally, this was the funnest time I've ever played adventure game, and I want more! It was so cool, and it was amazingly fun, and EASY. Now don't get me wrong, easy can be bad, because you just zip through it, but not zipping, I mean light thinking, and I was in. I also was stumped for a minute, where you had to combine stuff. These are what I like. Criminality, (is that a word!?!?! ) Fun combining and usingg stuff, tricking the gardener to get the choppy thingys by letting the bush on fire. It was just brillant, This was the best adventure game experience ever for me! I want more... and this was only the DEMO!
So the main question is: Is the full version as great or exactly like the game in a bigger world I want this game! I want more! If yu can find out how many times I said more in here, I'll give you aa candy apple

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Dr. Chud

Great review, Syd. You said everything and
I'm in total agreement about those pixelated
spots. I felt very frustrated knowing I had
the right item, but couldn't get it to work.
Also, be sure to read about the error message
that you might get saying the disc isn't in
the drive even when it is. You must install
the whole game to your hard drive to get it
to work. I just changed computers and it worked on my other one without the message.
The first one was on ME OS and the other on
Win98.

Well I am finally getting back to work

Great review Sydders. I loved this game and was really captivated by the plot and characters.

BAAG it yesterday!

Laura

Sorry folks, just got to disagree. I've played through the whole game, just to be sure I didn't miss out on the good bits... what good bits!

This is a police procedural mystery, so why does Halligan have to use such underhanded and, well, criminal methods to achieve his goals?

Graphically, the backgrounds are okay, but the 3D stuff is rubbish... polygon cracking and appalling QC on the z-ordering in hardware mode. The music was dull, and the sound effects non-existant.

Oh, and was there a plot? I must have missed it. And those interminable dialogue trees, that kept introducing topics that have no lead in!

If you want 3rd person graphics, time/world travel and mystery, give me The Longest Journey any day!

Tara
The Gremlin

The first sight of Twelve Bridges? I thought that was pretty amazing.

Quote:

This is a police procedural mystery, so why does Halligan have to use such underhanded and, well, criminal methods to achieve his goals?

Well it isn't REALLY a police procedural mystery.
That should have quickly become obvious when you find out about the trick Halligan apparently played on the royal family. IMHO that joke (and the convolutions you have to go through because of it) misfired a bit and they'd have been better off sticking with a straight police investigation more like GK1. They wanted to add some humor to the game, but it didn't really work so well.

Quote:

Graphically, the backgrounds are okay, but the 3D stuff is rubbish... polygon cracking and appalling QC on the z-ordering in hardware mode.

I ran it in software mode on a very low-tech computer. Compared to most of what that computer can run, it looked very good. So I guess you could say the target audience is not people with the latest, fastest computers.

Quote:

The music was dull, and the sound effects non-existant.

I thought the music suited the game. At least it wasn't annoying the way it is in some games.

Quote:

Oh, and was there a plot? I must have missed it.

I didn't. The plot had a few holes, but there was certainly a plot.

Quote:

And those interminable dialogue trees, that kept introducing topics that have no lead in!

Dialog could have been done better. The things I wanted to ask about kept disappearing. But I kept having to go through that same @$&# dialog tree with that jerk in order to get the scissors. I wanted to resort to violence and toss the jerk out the window or take the scissors and do him an injury, but alas these things were not options in the game.

Quote:

If you want 3rd person graphics, time/world travel and mystery, give me The Longest Journey any day!

Tara
The Gremlin

Well, TLJ had a lot more than 11 people working on it. So you expect more.

I just picked this game up for $9.99 the other day at Electronics Boutique, and am really enjoying it, the backround music is a little corny, but so far I think the game is great. but it just depends on what your cup of tea is, I personally liked TLJ, but didnt
understand what all the fuss was about. its not in my top ten games,and alot of people would probably like to horsewhip me for that one.

I thought this game was pretty intrigeing (sp?)
but not at the begining...The first few scenes I thought were boring and I really couldn't get into it. But I persevered and the game won out in the end. The music was rather corny but I thought it needed to be because of all the detective antics. I worked for me a couple of scenes into the adventure. I think it is worth playing.
Inferno