Hey, I did some sub time in my Navy days. Cool, a submarine adventure. Let's see - "port, starboard, forward, aft, bulkhead"…okay I'm ready.

The Mystery of the Nautilus is a first person point and clicker with numerous cutscenes and two NPCs - Captain Nemo's apparition and a denizen of the deep. Nemo appears periodically to provide the player with background information.

As the game begins, you play a professor aboard the USS Shark, a submarine doing underwater research. The Shark encounters a large metallic object on the ocean floor. You suspect it may be the long lost Nautilus. Against the wishes of the Shark's commander, you board a deep submergence vehicle and descend the depths. Yep, this looks like the real deal. You board the antiquated vessel and the game begins. The game starts out as an exploration. There are many items to be found in order to fix equipment, protect yourself, and get the craft operational. Did I say two NPCs? Maybe I should have said three - you'll encounter an artificial intelligence, which speaks to you. At first it thinks you're Capt. Nemo, but as the game progresses, the AI begins to have suspicions about you. What begins as an interesting exploration soon turns into a competition for control of the boat and ultimately the challenge to boogie out of there (escape from the vessel). It isn't easy! I was quite surprised at the depth (no pun, honest) of this game. There is a lot of real estate to explore and "puzzles" to solve. Some of the puzzles are "find parts to fix", "find ways to open doors", and "how to steer the boat" to avoid collision with undersea canyons. If you have a PHD in Rocket Science, you'll do well in this game. I don't, and found the hardest part of the game was remembering how to quickly get from one compartment to another.

The game interface is very well done. Only the mouse is used. The cursor shows arrows for allowed travel direction and morphs to show hotspot opportunities. Your character has 360 degrees of movement. On the screen you have two thingies. One is, of course, the proverbial backpack for inventory items. The other is a PDA with numerous user-friendly offerings: notebook, vocal transcripts, book extracts (which you have read), calculator (for boat headings), and maps of the various compartments. There are eight save game slots.

I really enjoyed this game. It ran flawlessly and provided plenty of diverse and well thought out challenges. On the negative side, however, the graphics were a disappointment. Throughout the game the background art looked washed out and somewhat indistinct. Pixel hunting for items or hotspots was sometimes as challenging as the puzzles themselves. The graphics were also somewhat on the dark side. I found myself squinting, closing the blinds, and turning off the lights.

This is a very traditional "old fashioned" adventure game - which I enjoy a lot. Although there is no ground broken here, you'll still get a lot of bang for the buck.

Final Grade: B

System Requirements:

WINDOWS 98/ME/XP
Pentium II 300mhz
64 MB RAM
12X CD-ROM Drive
DirectX 8 compatible video and sound cards