There is one thing that
Activision’s adventure game Sacred Ground absoultely, positively
isn’t: unique. In fact it looks and feels a lot like a twin sibling
of its predecessor in the Santa Fe Mysteries mini series, Elk
Moon Murder – which it in a way is. These two games are so
similar that it’s rather hard to tell them apart at first sight. But
for your exclusive benefit I’ll attempt to do just that.

In
Sacred Ground you return to Santa Fe as the mysterious homicide
investigator without name, face or voice. The game opens with a TV
news report of apparent kidnapping of Randa Tasker, the wife of an
influential developer. Just as you were sitting down to watch some
more TV, the Police Chief summons you to his office. Just like in
Elk Moon Murder, he complains how the FBI is breathing down
his neck and politicians are asking for immediate results. He then
gives you five days to solve the case, hands you a PDA and assigns
your old pal from the previous case, the Native American detective
John Night Sky, to help you with the investigation.

You start with a map of
of Santa Fe (identical to the one in Elk Moon Murder) and your
first task is of course to visit the crime scene, collect evidence,
interrogate witnesses, identify suspects, nail the culprits and please
your boss. OK, the latter probably won’t happen ever and catching
those responsible isn’t so easy. After arriving at Taskers’ residence,
you find signs of apparent struggle between Randa Tasker and her abductor
or abductors. Then you interrogate Martin Tasker, Randa’s husband.
It turns out that he has made quite a few enemies by pushing a development
project for a ski resort on Indian land (that explains the name of
the game I guess) – in the process he evicted thirty families from
their homes (lotsa suspects right?).

But
that’s naturally just the beginning. Taskers’ private life was somewhat
tumultuous too, with secret lovers and estranged children. Add to
the mix embezzlement, bribery, arson, extortion… you get the picture.
Nearly everyone you encounter is a potential suspect. Besides, Randa
Tasker’s sudden disappearance is wonderfully ambiguous: someone may
have wanted to take revenge on her or get back at her husband or maybe
did it just for the money. And there’s still a possibility that the
kidnapping was staged by Randa herself – she too had one or two possible
motives. 

Again, there is not enough
time to interrogate all suspects and follow all leads in the time
you have allotted to solve the crime. You can also have the alibi
of each suspect checked but that takes time and you won’t be able
to have them all screened. So you’ll have to employ heuristics, intuition,
scrying or whatever method works for you to determine who is more
suspect than others. At the beginning of the game you can only go
to the Police HQ and the crime scene but later in the game the map
will became a lot more interesting as you learn about new places,
witnesses and suspects.

To make matters a little
more complicated, just when you’ve nearly sorted things out, one of
the more promising looking suspects is murdered. Which on the one
hand casts an entirely new light on the case and seriously upsets
your elaborate theories (that is, if you’ve managed to come up with
any) but on the other hand this unfortunate event makes your dangerously
long list of suspects a little shorter, which is not all that unwelcome. 

The
fact that you are now investigating two crimes instead of one actually
makes your life quite a bit easier at the end of day five when you
need to get an arrest warrant and apprehend one of the suspects. The
reason is simple: for two crimes you can have two sets of alibis verified
for each suspects. And in this game (unlike Elk Moon Murder),
many of the suspects are so very nice to have at least one verified
alibi. Thus you end up with only three or four persons who may have
committed the crimes. Getting the arrest warrant is perhaps where
Sacred Ground differs most from its predecessor. Not only
you are dealing with two crimes but you have to correctly fill out
several key facts about each of them (time of the crime, weapon used
etc.) to have the warrant application accepted. Which means you’d
better pay some attention to the investigation. Fortunately most of
the facts will be in your PDA (notes from interrogation of informants
and suspects and results from forensics lab) unless you were asleep
while playing. 

Where I felt Elk Moon
Murder was unfair by apparently hiding key information
from you, Sacred Ground is the opposite: it is possible to
arrest the perpetrator of the crimes and win the game even after having
an arrest warrant issued for the wrong person! I thought this was
a little strange, but hey. At least it didn’t make me feel so frustrated.
Even the Chief seemed almost pleased.

I
won’t spend a lot of time dwelling on the technical aspects of Sacred
Ground because I’d have to repeat what I wrote in the Elk Moon
Murder review almost word for word. Technically these games really
are identical, including some of the artwork (map, PDA etc). Even
some characters introduced in the first Santa Fe Mysteries game reappear
in Sacred Ground, notably the Chief of SFPD and your partner
John Night Sky, but there are others as well. The music too is very similar if not identical
– quite nice actually, digitized (not MIDI type) and successfully
evoking the atmosphere of American Southwest (for me at least). The
game in fact contains several references to Elk Moon Murder,
mentioning for instance an exhibition of works of art by the late
Elk Moon.

Just like in its predecessor,
there aren’t really any puzzles in the Sacred Ground. Except
for one (sort of), which is getting the arrest warrant. That’s the
only place in the game which tests if the player had been paying any
attention at all and not just blindly clicking with the mouse on anything
that moved. 

The Sacred Ground
is not entirely easy to classify – somewhere between an interactive
movie and an adventure game. It requires modest amount of brain power
to win and gives the player a great degree of freedom like some adventure
games. But on the other hand it is rather short (I don’t see how anyone
could take more than about three hours to solve the game) with very
low replayability factor like most interactive movies. On the whole
I consider Sacred Ground to be a slight improvement over The
Elk Moon Murder and give it a B-.

Final Grade: B-

System Requirements:

PC:
DOS
WIN95
486/66
8 MB
2X CDROM
SVGA VESA 1 MB

MAC:
68LC040
66/33 Mhz
8 MB
2X CDROM
System 7.1