The Mystery of the
Nautilus
Developer : T-Bot
Publisher: Cryo/DreamCatcher
2002 - W95/W98/ME/XP
1st Person Point and Click
The Story
You are a scientist aboard the USS Shark - a military submarine. You are
looking for submerged ruins, shipwrecks etc. when all of a sudden sonar
picks up a very large metal object (roughly four times the size of the USS
Shark) in the water. You of course want to explore it immediately - the
captain on the other hand says it's too dangerous and refuses to get any
closer. So being the erstwhile adventurer you are, you "borrow" a small
submersible sub and head out on your own (the captain is not happy about
this). What you find is Captain Nemo's sub The Nautilus.
You now must figure out how to get things working again and more
importantly stop a crazy AI that has taken over the ship and seems to view
humans as the enemy. Along the way you see the ghost of Nemo who explains
what happened to the crew and why the sub was abandoned where it was.
The puzzles are of the mechanical type - you fix a great many machines -
which makes total sense - you're in a broken down sub after all. And other
than one or two of the "try everything in inventory to see if something
will work" all of the puzzles are logical.
Inventory is held in a backpack that is always in view in the lower left
hand corner of the playing screen. You click on it to open it and click to
close it - along with the PDA with which you can access the options menu.
What I liked about the inventory is that if you ran your cursor over the
item it told you what it was - no guessing what they were - I wish all
games had this. There is also an option for text, speed, music and speech
volume control. What I didn't like is the fact that if you try to click on
the PDA while the backpack is open you spin around in circles - tends to
make one rather dizzy.
The graphics to me were fine. I really felt like I was in a rusty
submarine. And yes, it's dark in some places but on my computer I didn't
have any problems seeing things. That could be due to the fact my computer
room has no windows (on purpose) so I had no glare problems etc. However,
the grasping hand icon was the pits. You cannot run your cursor over items
fast - even slow can be a pain and you can miss something. You have to be
on the exact pixel before you can pick anything up. Under normal
circumstances this isn't that big of a deal - however, when you're trying
to beat the clock, not being able to grab something immediately will get
you dead and not only dead but frustratingly dead.
Which leads me into the timed sequences. I would guess that at least half
of this game is timed (it felt like more but could have been less). You
learn to save a lot because going through a door will get you killed
without warning. Lots and lots of replaying. I reloaded one saved game at
least 12 times before I could get through the sequence without seeing the
"you failed" screen. Reloading the same save over ad nauseum is not my idea
of a fun time. I get totally and completely bored with having to repeat
the same thing over and over and over and over (which is why FPS hold no
interest for me what-so-ever)
Conclusion
The game could have been one of my favorites because the story was
interesting and you wanted to keep going to see what happened next. And I
really did feel like I was in a submarine under the ocean. Unfortunately
all the timed sequences ruined it for me.
Oh and there is one nasty, game stopping bug right towards the end of the
game (BillyBob found it and I tested it out). It's in the diving room. If
you click on the green hose right above the two switches that activate the
diving bell (and you will get the grasping hand icon) - you cannot get out
of the room or do anything else for that matter other than alt-ctrl-del.
You don't need to touch that hose - so don't.
I played it on a P450
128 MB ram
32 Meg video card
SB Live sound card
DirectX8.1
System Requirements:
P350 (P450 recommended)
32 MB ram (64 MB recommended)
8X CD Rom
DirectX compatible video and sound card
copyright © 2002
GameBoomers
