Visionary author Jules
Verne would seem to be the perfect source for good adventure games.
His stories of exploration and discovery perfectly lend themselves
to the genre. I’d love to see The Mysterious Island, Journey
to the Center of the Earth, and Around the World in Eighty
Days turned into games. A few years ago adventure game fans (this
one, anyway) were crushed to learn that SouthPeak’s much-ballyhooed
Verne game, an update of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, had
been cancelled.

Well,
adventure-gaming Jules Verne lovers are in luck, sort of. Dreamcatcher
has released its own riff on the story of mad genius Captain Nemo.
The bad news is that the game isn’t nearly as ambitious as SouthPeak’s
was.

The good news is that,
unlike SouthPeak’s costly fiasco, this game was actually finished
and released!

Dreamcatcher’s The Mystery
of the Nautilus is, like Captain Nemo’s famed U-boat itself, sturdily
constructed. In this traditional first-person adventure you play a
modern sailor who stumbles across the fabled submarine quite by accident.
You decide to take a look inside (weirdly, alone) and promptly get
stuck in the mysterious craft. The rest of the game chronicles your
attempts to escape from the Nautilus.

The
game is presented with smoothly-panning 360 degree visibility. The
interface is full of helpful little touches that aren’t really helpful.
For instance, there’s an area of the interface where you can see “sketches”
of the various rooms and compartments in the sub. However, these are
nothing more than small directly-overhead screenshots of the rooms.
I never found a use for them. However, the various icon incarnations
of the pointer are consistent and clear.

At first, you are only
able to enter a few compartments of the puzzling submarine, but as
you solve more puzzles, you’re able to open up more and more areas
of the ship. Early on you stumble across a video diary made by Captain
Nemo himself, and throughout the game he helps fill in details on
the mysterious goings on aboard.

Though
you get to see and hear the good Captain throughout the proceedings,
there is no character interaction in the game (unless you count a
certain spectacular denizen of the deep).

Graphically, the game is
a disappointment. While the cut scenes look terrific, the gameplay
screens are woefully low-resolution, giving a muddy look to the entire
game. (This is the exact same problem Dreamcatcher’s recent The
Cameron Files had.) For years, adventure games had a visual
edge on games in many other genres, because graphics in most adventure
games were pre-rendered. Real-time-rendered graphics just could not
compete with the lush and realistic vistas we enjoyed in games like
Riven, Morpheus,
and Timelapse.
However, the times they are a-changin’, and we live in an era of dazzlingly
improving real-time-rendered images in games. Check out Max Payne.
Check out Dungeon Siege. It’s a very bad time for an adventure
game to come up short in the looks department.

In
Mystery of the Nautilus, this graphics failing makes the inventory
puzzles much more challenging than they should be. The puzzles generally
consist of the “pick up everything you see, it’ll eventually
be used somewhere” variety. And considering many of the environments
are a fuzzy, flat near-monotone, it can be quite difficult to find
all of the objects you need. Once you find the objects, the puzzles
generally make sense, with a couple of troubling exceptions. The biggest
howler involves a rope and a periodic table. Honestly, would it ever
occur to you to “use” a rope on a periodic
table? Me, neither.

However, the various rooms
and compartments on the mysterious vessel are, in general, attractive
and interesting. There are lovely staterooms, a library, parlors,
and other fun areas to explore. Throughout the adventure your character’s
biggest challenge will be overcoming Captain Nemo’s well-meaning but
overreaching security system. The heart of the puzzles in the game
deal with overcoming this challenging obstacle.

In
fact, you’ll have the most fun with The Mystery of the Nautilus
if you look at it as one big escape puzzle, because that’s basically
what it is. To successfully crack the various puzzles required for
escape, you’ll need to pay close attention as you gradually open up
the various diverse areas of the boat. You’ll need to think of the
entire vessel as a whole, remember what’s come before and continue
to ask yourself, “Okay, now what might be possible?”

If you’re willing to be
patient with the tricky exploration due to muddy graphics, you can
have a lot of fun with The Mystery of the Nautilus.

Final Grade: C

System Requirements:

WINDOWS® 98/ME/XP
Pentium® II 300 MHz
64 Mb RAM
12 x CD-ROM Drive
DirectX® 8.0 Compatible Video Card
DirectX® 8.0 Compatible Sound Card