Azrael’s Tear is perhaps
one of the coolest sounding names ever used for an adventure game.
For Azrael is the angel of death – or, “The angel who separates
the soul from the body at death,” to quote the manual. Also prominent
on the game box is the inscription “Search for the Holy Grail”,
and in this case it’s not just any old holy grail but The Holy Grail.
The Knights Templar are naturally involved too – they and the Holy
Grail seem to go together, at least in adventure games.

You
play the role of a so-called raptor, a future day “archeologist”,
or rather professional scavenger, plunderer and tomb robber (we shall
avoid the term “tomb raider”– no girls with well-developed
chests here). The game box contains two important documents (no, not
the warranty information and registration card) that help set up and
explain the story. There is a letter from a rival raptor, Colin Scott,
who claims to have tracked down the Grail through careful study of
Templar documents and asks for your cooperation in retrieving it.
Apparently a detachment of twelve Templars had transported the Grail
from Jerusalem to Europe in 1146 and finally ended up in Scotland.
One of the twelve Templars was Sir Guy of Bramley. Now Colin has found
Sir Guy’s tombstone – dated 1763, over 600 years after the Templar
ship set sail from the Holy Land. But fortunately Sir Guy was nice
enough to keep a capsule with his testament on his body when he was
buried.

The testament is the second
document. Sir Guy talks about the Grail and the Templars who are guarding
it in the underground Temple of Aeternis. The grailstone has remarkable
properties – it “heals all wounds and denies the reaper his harvest”.
Sir Guy also makes veiled remarks about an evil that has escaped from
Aeternis into the world and begs forgiveness for not destroying it.

Your
next stop is, of course, Aeternis. This is where the actual game starts.
You descend into the temple but the last couple of feet you cover
in free fall. This means you can’t get back the way you came and will
have to find another exit — that is, if you live that long.

The Temple of Aeternis
is far from uninhabited. There are several surviving Templars and
some of them are none too friendly. There are competing raptors, mostly
hostile. And there are wild beasts, either small dinosaurs or really
big lizards, and their only goal seems to be to eat you (poor things,
they must be so hungry…). Oh, and did I mention traps? — sharp
spikes, nasty sharp pendulums, poisonous gasses, scalding water —
that kind of thing.

From the above it should
be clear that “save early, save often” is rule number one
in Azrael’s Tear. You never know when you will fall somewhere, something
will fall on you or someone will kill you. For your defense, you have
a rifle but unfortunately it is not powerful enough to kill all enemies.
However, you almost don’t have to use the rifle at all, because in
many cases you can turn the traps of which the temple is full against
your foes. Coupled with the fact that Azrael’s Tear is a 3D game,
this might make you think that it’s some kind of action or action-adventure
game. But it is not so – the number of enemies you can shoot is negligible
and you don’t really have to shoot any. Many enemies can simply be
avoided, although you can kill quite a few – if you figure out how
to do it.

But
not everyone wants to kill you, or at least not right away. You can
talk to people (and several ghosts too!) to mine some information.
There’s a spin to it though, because there are two factions among
the Templars and their members will give you conflicting messages.
You have to decide whom to trust. Moreover, the grailstone seems to
slowly drive most people insane so you might be best served by not
trusting anyone at all.

You do appear to have one
mysterious friend in Aeternis though. His name (or rather codename)
is Cobweb; he seems to be one of the Templars but he is really a secret
agent working for the Priory of Sion (or Prieure de Sion if you prefer
the French spelling), once a sister order to the Templars that is
now intent on obtaining the Grail for itself. Cobweb has left a number
of documents for you scattered around Aeternis. These are mostly entries
from the journal of Tobias de Treece, leader of the Templars. From
certain of these documents you might even deduce Cobweb’s identity
– and if you look hard enough, you will find original orders from
the Priory that make it quite clear who Cobweb is.

The journal entries and
the Templars who talk to you explain Tobias’ vision of the Holy Thief,
an outsider (could it be you?) destined to reach the Grail and bring
it to the outside world. Only instead of helping this Holy Thief,
Tobias has set up something called the Test to weed out impostors.
Most puzzles and traps in Aeternis are part of the Test, but that
does not make them any less deadly.

The good thing is that
most traps can be avoided and many puzzles have two or even more solutions.
Aeternis is a maze and navigating it is not easy at first. But once
you find your way you can travel between most locations fairly quickly
and avoid many dangers. There are even many places that you don’t
have to visit at all (but of course then you might miss parts of the
story). As a consequence, Azrael’s Tear is fairly nonlinear and for
the most part this makes the gameplay easier. The only drawback is
that sometimes your actions will have unforeseen consequences that
you will only discover much later. But I don’t think you can ever
get into a situation when the game couldn’t be won – the solution
can just be harder to find.

As
I mentioned above, Azrael’s Tear is a 3D game. It is from the short
period when PCs were already powerful enough to run a fully 3D texture
mapped game and hardware accelerators weren’t yet common. That is
to say, Azrael’s Tear uses software-only rendering (running at a 640×480
resolution) and will not take advantage of any 3D accelerator hardware.
This means that it doesn’t look nearly as nice as more modern games
because it does not use the techniques that greatly improve image
quality (primarily bilinear/trilinear filtering), but are only implemented
in hardware. As a result Azrael’s Tear looks a little pixely – but
if you’re only interested in visuals, you can’t afford to play any
game older than two months anyway and wouldn’t be reading this review
in the first place.

There is a fairly substantial
amount of dialogue in the game, all of it with voiceovers. Most of
it is not absolutely essential but gives you clues and background
information. Sound quality isn’t absolutely spotless but it is very
good. There is MIDI music in the game, not too remarkable but still
positively contributing to the “feel” of the game. There
is digitized music in the opening and closing sequences and that is
very good.

The puzzles in Azrael’s
Tear aren’t particularly difficult. To successfully solve them you
need to depend on your powers of observation more than brilliance.
That is to say, looking around carefully and finding things is more
important than lateral thinking. There are often multiple clues to
the puzzles’ solutions scattered around, so it pays to pay attention
– both to what people (or ghosts for that matter) say and what they
wrote, in addition to various diagrams, maps, drawings, paintings,
pictures and the like scattered around Aeternis.

The story of Azrael’s Tear
revolves around props far from unusual in adventure games: the Holy
Grail, the Knights Templar, secret conspiracies to rule the world.
These all are almost clichés. But like other good games (Gabriel
Knight 3 comes to mind), Azrael’s Tear manages to explain them with
unexpected twists. There’s even a connection between the Grail and
Azrael’s Tear in case you were wondering – but I’m not letting you
in on that secret. After all, this game is all about conspiracies
and secrets. My final rating of this game is no secret however – I
give Azrael’s Tear an A-.

Final Grade: A-

System Requirements:

486DX2 66MHz (Pentium
recommended), 8 MB of RAM (optimized for 16MB), 7 MB free XMS memory
(may require creating a boot disk or modifying system configuration
files), 10 MB free uncompressed hard disk space, 1 MB VESA compliant
SVGA video card, MS-DOS 5.0 or above, Microsoft and 100% compatible
mouse, driver version 7.26 or higher, 2x CD ROM drive (4x recommended),
Sound Blaster or 100% compatible sound card.