I had heard many conflicting
reports of Ring before trying it — having now played it through – I
can totally understand why.

Let me say right up front
that I can forgive this game more or less all its faults simply
because it took me right back to my beginnings
as an adventurer. The first game I ever played was Riven and the
second was Atlantis by Cryo – (not surprisingly I became an
immediate adventure-game junkie!) Anyway, Ring is also by Cryo and
has many similarities to that first Atlantis production. In that
sense, this review may not be as objective as it should be…but
tough!

The first thing that hits
you about this game is the graphics. These days we are pretty blasé about gaming artwork and expect a
photo-realistic standard. It would be difficult to use this description
for Ring, in fact I would suggest that it has a quality all of its
own. Awesome, confusing, surreal are all adjectives I would use to
describe the look of this game. If anyone remembers those weird and
wonderful toys of the 1980s called ‘transformers’ – well,
that might give you some idea of what I’m trying to describe.
If not, then I would recommend taking a look at some of the screenshots – this
is art, with or without the game.

The music is of course
from Wagner’s opera of the same name,
and plays along very appropriately in the background (that is, naturally,
if you enjoy classical music). There are subtitles and I thought
at first that it would be a good idea to turn these off, however
I wouldn’t recommend it – there are a couple of places
where it’s quite difficult to hear what the characters are
saying and at those times it’s useful to have this back-up.
The voice-overs deserve a special mention – if only for the
fact that they range from the sublime to the ridiculous, literally.
There’s a goddess-narrator with a lovely soothing, female voice
and a couple of pleasant male characters: Siegmund and the story
presenter, Ish. However these are interwoven with several extremely
irritating and over-the-top attempts to characterize some of the
individual Nibelungen.

The game is split into 4 or 5 separate adventure-quests, which all
radiate out from a central point (much like Atlantis 2 where the
magic boat was the hub) in this case it’s a kind of asteroid
with a plateau in the middle of it. This is where characters are
introduced, and conversations or arguments take place with some
of the peripheral characters, such as the great god Wotan and a
couple of giant monster-gods called Fafner and Fasolt. There is
a moralistic element to the game and at the end of each quest,
Ish the presenter of the story, is asked what he has learnt…… why
this happens, I never quite found out. Perhaps it’s implicit
if you already know the story of the Ring, but for the purposes
of game-play I couldn’t find any real point to it.

During the game you will
inhabit four distinct characters ranging from an evil dwarf-king
to a female Valkyrie warrior. As Alberich,
the cruel and heartless dwarf-king, you will travel to Nibelheim,
his underground world of mines and the kingdom of the dwarves (the
Nibelungen of the title). Here your goal is to get the dwarves working
again, because, during Alberich’s absence, they have apparently
gone on strike. In order to complete this quest – still in
the character of Alberich – you will also have to travel to the Rhine,
the home of the Rhine-maidens, in order to steal their gold. It was
a new and disturbing experience for me to play this decidedly unpleasant
personality – being a born ‘goodie-two-shoes’ –
I kept trying to do the ‘right’ thing and make myself ‘agreeable’…….
not a good idea when you’re a baddie – I ended up dead
a couple of times on account of being ‘too nice’! That’s
something worth bearing in mind with this game: you can die! It’s
a good idea to save frequently.

Loge the fire spirit is
a much more mysterious character, who is only ‘allowing’ himself to be used by the gods for their
current purpose. It’s his mission to steal the ‘Ring’ and
magic crown from Alberich and bring them back to Wotan. Despite his
intention to steal, he definitely has the higher moral ground in
comparison with Alberich.

Siegmund, Wotan’s son, is half man and half wolf. This quest-segment
aims to explore the tragedy of Siegmund’s past, when his mother
was killed and his twin sister disappeared. At the end of this sequence
one of his other sisters, Brunnhilde, comes to his defense in battle
and saves him from his enemy. For some strange reason, this enrages
Wotan and means that Brunnhilde now has to run away to find help.

Finally as Brunnhilde, the Valkyrie warrior and also a child of
Wotan you have to flee to Walhall, the Necropolis, to find the final
artifact: A ball, which you must take back to the asteroid in order
to complete the game.

The game-play is predominantly
3rd person point and click, with full 360-degree movement and a
very simple, intuitive interface.
There are numerous cut-scenes (one hour’s worth according to
the box information) and twenty-two different characters to inhabit
or interact with.

The producers have very
kindly included a full walkthrough in the game manual, and I did
use this on a couple of occasions – I
have a tendency to be a lazy adventurer and will take the easy option
if it’s offered to me. However the puzzles in general are not
difficult and the main advantage of the walkthrough is that it prevented
all that interminable wandering about, wondering what to do next,
which is my pet hate.

On the subject of the
puzzles, this game has pretty much the standard arsenal: There’s a tile puzzle, a numbers puzzle, several ‘what-goes-where’ puzzles
(my favorites), some manipulation, and a music puzzle (why producers
always assume that adventure gamers are naturally musical has always
baffled me!) Plus of course it’s all inventory-based.

Specific good points:
It’s possible to save virtually anywhere
in the game, which means you can half-finish a puzzle and come back
to complete it after you’ve taken a phone call, or eaten your
tea.

Specific bad points: There was a very peculiar and out of place
sequence during one of the quests that involved a conversation with
Woden, father of Siegmund and Brunnhilde. Up to this point the graphics
had been extremely interesting and rewarding, why they then decided
to use poorly executed 2-dimensional box-drawings inserted onto the
screen is quite baffling. This bit would have lent itself nicely
to an animated cut-scene, which would have been far less boring and
in context with the rest of the game.

I think it would have
been a good idea with this game if the makers had used a pre-game
introduction built into the story, like in Riddle
of the Sphinx. This epic is far to complicated to be dropped off
somewhere in the middle and to be expected to make sense of it at
all – especially if like me, you have no previous knowledge
of Wagner’s opera. I did look at the story of the operas after
I had completed the game – (typical of me – I always
jump in and learn to swim afterwards!) Some of the main elements
of the Ring Cycle appear to have been included, but it’s by
no means a full representation and whilst this might have been a
mammoth task it could possibly have produced a real masterpiece.
Whatever the outcome, it would certainly have increased the length
of the game. I used the walkthrough as reference a couple of times
and it took me about 8 hours to play – an easy weekend completion.
Even without using the walkthrough at all, I can’t imagine
anyone getting much more than a dozen hours play from it.

Despite all that, I had
no problem enjoying the game without a coherent grasp of the story
– possibly since I approached it with no real
expectations. I imagine that most adventurers can accept a certain
level of puzzlement regarding what they’re doing and why – it
tends to be a feature of many adventure games.

Final Grade: B

System Requirements:

• Pentium 133
• 32 MB RAM
• 290 MB Free Hard Drive Space
• 8X CD ROM Drive
• Windows 95
• Direct X 6.0 compatible SVGA video card (65K colors)
• Sound Card and Speakers (highly recommended)
• Optimized for MMX