"Hello, My Name Is Ray and I Like Edutainment Games"

And I'm not sorry. I'm a big fan of Cryo's historical series (Egypt 1156 BC, Aztec, China, Versailles), and I also really enjoyed the shamelessly educational Discovery Channel game Connections. I'm a voracious reader with a particular interest in history, so these games are right up my alley.

Of course, I realize not all adventure players feel this way. Which is why I'm happy to report that France Telecom Multimédia/Index's new offering, Louvre: The Final Curse (LTFC) is an edutainment game even an edutainment hater could love. Though not from Cryo, the game was built in collaboration with Réunion des Musées Nationaux, the organization that also helped provide the authenticity to the Cryo historical games.

What Hath Thief Wrought?

Since the success of Looking Glass Studios' "first-person sneaker" Thief, it seems like creeping around places you're not supposed to be has become all the rage. I thoroughly enjoyed DayDream Software's Safecracker, for example, and their Traitors Gate I consider to be a classic.

In Traitors Gate, your character has to break into the Tower of London and steal the Crown Jewels. In LTFC, it's only the most famous museum in the world you have to break into, the monumental Louvre in Paris.

The setup is yet another round of Knights Templar hooey about four evil objects of power known as The Devil's Keys. (I guess we should be grateful to the Knights; otherwise I guess we'd be playing even more games set in Egypt and Central America.) You play a buff young woman named Morgane, of which absolutely nothing is ever learned during the course of the game, except that she's darned agile and ghost and time travel seem to have no effect on her at all. Her father's dying wish is that she break into the Louvre and steal these dangerous four objects. Well, what's a good daughter to do?

I thought this premise was fun enough--I mean, sneaking around the Louvre after hours, how appealing--but the stakes quickly get higher and the story more interesting. Morgane meets a mysterious ghost (as opposed to, I suppose, an obvious, what-you-see-is-what-you-get ghost) who sends her back in time. It turns out that in LTFC you get to skulk around places you're not supposed to be in the Louvre in five different time periods! As the building complex has undergone radical evolution during its eight-hundred-year history, this is quite an appealing prospect for a history buff indeed. To help get you up to speed on the Louvre's various incarnations, there's a handy in-game tutorial that gives you information on the Louvre of each period you visit.

The format is the tried-and-true first-person point-and-click that all adventure players will be comfortable with. The cursor is intelligent and intuitive.

The graphics range from very good to excellent, and they are all presented with 360-degree panning. (It's particularly fun to go into the central courtyard each time you're transported to a new time period, to see how the buildings have changed.) The movement is a combination of discrete slideshow "steps" with occasional fully animated movement.

In another similarity to Traitors Gate, your character is provided with a whole array of neato gadgets, from gas mask to crossbow to diamond-edged knife. You frequently have to combine one or more objects, and the inventory handles this task fairly well. The game does have a peculiar quirk in dealing with excess inventory, however. You can only carry about eight objects in your "wallet" at one time. This is a problem, because, as in all adventures, you're constantly picking cool stuff up. In the very first room I found a chest in which I could store excess items. Cool, I thought, this is that rare game that tries to make a stab at realism where inventory is concerned and won't let me carry around an entire hardware store!

My delight in the game's realism, however, was quickly dashed when I began finding these chests all through the game--and lo and behold, every single one of them contains whatever items you've put in any chest. So it's really sort of a Magic Chest. So much for jeux de verité, I thought, but I had to admit it was a nice convenience.

Something Is Rotten in the State of Ile-de-France

Alas, all is not pure unadulterated gaming goodness in LTFC. The game is beset with several problems that keep it from getting a higher rating.

First of all, it suffers even worse than Inherent Evil did from the dreaded Pixel Hunt Syndrome. There are several vital items that are extremely hard to find and in fact can only be found by accident or by literally "painting" an entire screen with your cursor. Here's an example: at one point you have to find an important object that's hidden under a table. You don't know it's hidden under a table, and there's nothing on the table to indicate you should look under it. Only when you place your cursor on one particular spot on the table--which is visually no different from any other spot on the table--do you get the "look here!" cursor. This is not really playing fair with the gamer.

The game was (quelle surprise) originally produced in French, and unfortunately there are a few vital holes in the translations. Before releasing their English-language version, I recommend Index make sure everything that's written in French gets translated into English.

Even worse are the voices. The voice recording is the worst I can remember hearing in any recent adventure, and I don't mean the acting, I mean the actual technical recording. It sounds like voices in a drum that's been immersed in water on a foggy day. What makes this situation much, much worse is that there is no onscreen text option! C'est dommage! Not acceptable. Naturally, there are several instances of characters giving you incredibly vital information that you simply cannot understand. Imagine the teenage employee at an amusement park talking through one of those terrible PA systems and giving you life-or-death information, and you pretty much get the idea. This problem seriously mars a good game.

If Index could fix these problems before releasing the English-language version of Louvre, they could have a real winner on their hands.

Final Grade:
Without voice problems fixed: C
With voice problems fixed: B

If you liked Louvre:
Watch: Topkapi
Read: Timeline by Michael Crichton
Play: Traitors Gate

This review is copyright Ray Ivey and Just Adventure and may not be republished elsewhere without the express written consent of the author. Republication of said review must also contain a link back to Just Adventure.