Mystery of the Druids is one of the latest additions to the
adventure genre, created by German company House of Tales and only
very recently released in the States. I had the privilege to start
playing a preview version of the game. Yes, only start playing – the
pre-release version couldn’t be finished due to a serious bug where
the game was consistently crashing at certain spot and I simply couldn’t
go on. This admittedly didn’t add to my gaming experience. The final
version is improved (this problem was certainly fixed) although I
wish it was improved more. But I’ll get to that later.

Mystery of the Druids comes on 3 CDs, labeled “Installation”,
“The Present” and “The Past”. This already gives
you some hints about the game (yes, time travel plays an important
role in the game). The installation CD isn’t even half full and contains
files that need to be copied to your hard drive. The other two are
the actual game CDs – no annoying CD swapping is involved by the way.
But here we come to the first problem with the game. If you have a
modern CD-ROM or DVD-ROM, you know that playing CD- based games is
not much fun due to the drive constantly spinning up and down. But
that’s not the game’s fault, right? Well, no. But the game’s big fault
is that it doesn’t offer installation to handwrite, even if that is
possible! The installer doesn’t give the slightest hint about this
option and there is no readme file. I found the information neatly
tucked away in a FAQ on the game’s web site. But naturally I only
went looking for a FAQ when I was in trouble, not before installing
the game.

But on to the actual game. The introduction scene shows some sort
of mysterious ritual taking place at druids’ favorite meeting place,
Stonehenge. When the intro is over, you find yourself in the Scotland
Yard, London, present time. You are detective Brent Halligan, member
of the glorious murder squad. Your boss calls you to his office and
explains the precarious situation the department is in: there has
been a series of strange killings, so called “skeleton murders”
where only skeletons of the victims have been found. A man has been
convicted and sentenced to jail – and killed by a cellmate. Nothing
too unusual so far. Unfortunately, another skeleton perfectly matching
the previous ones has been found which means the man had been innocent
and the real murderer is on the loose (and the press wants someone’s
head on the platter).

Your task now is to find the true murderer. This of course won’t
be easy as your only clue is the skeleton. I don’t think I’ll spoil
the game for anyone when I say that ancient and modern druids will
soon be involved in the investigation. Unfortunately your boss doesn’t
want to hear about druids so you’re pretty much on your own – although
you will meet a few people prepared to help you.

In the first part of the game you’ll spend a lot of time around Scotland
Yard offices, fighting bureaucracy and wonderfully unhelpful coworkers
as well as learning useful information in the forensics lab. And there’s
another of my gripes. It is possible to partially solve several puzzles
before you can actually complete them. It is often quite clear what
the objective is – but there is no way to tell that something entirely
unrelated has to happen first (as opposed to you simply missing some
important clue). This is rather confusing to say the least. Talk about
non-linear.

There is a lot of dialogue at the beginning of the game and that
could be improved too. Not that I mind long dialogues, but I didn’t
much like those in Mystery of the Druids. In many cases there
were lots of options and perhaps one of them would lead you
further. Unfortunately the topics you already discussed often don’t
disappear and aren’t marked in any way. As a result, you have to listen
to some sentences ten or fifteen times before you’ve mined all the
information you have to, and sometimes it’s hard to tell whether you’ve
exhausted all options or not. This doesn’t improve the gameplay much.

Speaking
of dialogues, there’s one other nit, not specific to Mystery of
the Druids in any way: in many cases the captions are slightly
(actually sometimes almost completely) different from what the people
actually say. I assume in this case this is mostly due to the translation
from German. There’s even one screen with “forgotten” German
text… some member of the QA staff must have been asleep I suppose.

The investigation will lead you to several places around England
and even France. One of those places is Oxford where you’ll meet a
handsome young anthropologist, Dr Melanie Turner. Yes, there is some
romance involved. You’ll even get to play Melanie on several occasions
although most of the time she’s just a passive sidekick giving you
potentially useful bits of information about druids, their beliefs
and their rituals.

Now is a good time for a warning. If you are squeamish, avoid Mystery
of the Druids. There are a few rather bloody scenes and one of
them is pretty revolting. Nothing that would turn off a hardened adventurer
like me, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

And here we come to the puzzles. Most of them are inventory based
and not overly difficult. Oh, the inventory – there’s another gripe.
Even at the end of the game our hero Brent is still lugging around
items found at the beginning and now completely useless. That means
the inventory is rather large and this in my opinion does not add
to playability at all. It would be much better if the game “flushed”
the inventory from time to time and removed the useless items. It
would be logical too – it’s rather surprising that Brent doesn’t lose
any of the junk considering what he has to go through. And while I’m
complaining let me tell you that there’s some pixel hunting too. Several
objects are very hard to find. This wouldn’t be so much of
a problem if you sometimes didn’t have access to perhaps 30 screens
at a time containing a total of four or five objects. That makes finding
them really difficult.

There are a few non-inventory based puzzles too (even one nice labyrinth)
and again, most of them are not difficult or can be solved with pencil
and paper and a bit of time. But one of those puzzles was pretty hellish
and I’m sure I’d never get past it without a walkthrough. It’s not
that it was completely illogical, there were just too many possibilities
and far too few clues. But
on the whole, the game is pretty playable and I enjoyed it.

I had some gripes with the game’s story too, although those might
not be shared by other players. I just have trouble accepting certain
things in games (and movies too). I have no problem accepting time
travel for some odd reason. But I have a problem with far more mundane
(in a manner of speaking) things like present day druids conducting
their rituals at Stonehenge. I mean, have you ever been there? I have
and let me tell you that there’s no way that would happen. The whole
place is fenced and you’re not allowed inside the inner stone circle
at all. Plus Stonehenge is swamped with tourists. If you wanted a
realistic scene of druidic rituals at Stonehenge, you’d have to add
lots of tourists and probably some TV too. Yes, I know that would
spoil the game. Forget I said anything.

And here we come to the game art. Let me tell you that the artists
working on the game were better than the programmers – that so much
reminds me of many Sierra games with stunning graphics and music and
sometimes buggy to the point of being unplayable. Anyway the graphics
in Mystery of the Druids are really pretty. The game uses the
2 1/2 D style previously seen in popular titles like Grim Fandango
or The Longest Journey. That is, there are 3D animated characters
on a 2D background. Only the character animation in the FMV sequences
could be better (but there isn’t that much FMV). Some of the game
locations are modeled after real places (Stonehenge comes to mind)
while others are entirely imaginary. All of them look pretty good
on the screen.

The sound isn’t bad either. The music is very pleasant and the voiceovers
are good. The characters speak with markedly British accents. I’ve
actually heard some complaints that the accents of the main characters
were too “posh”. While I agree that a Scotland Yard detective
probably doesn’t speak exactly Queen’s English, I certainly expect
an Oxford anthropologist to have a posh accent. This was not one of
my gripes.

The
two halves of the game – present and past – seemed noticeably different
to me (which is not a negative). In the first part there is a great
deal of talking and traveling with new locations opening and most
of the previously visited still being accessible. In the other half
there are far fewer people to meet and much less traveling (but the
locations are larger). Also the progress is more linear with no going
back – instead, there are more puzzles to solve.

Just for the sake of completeness I should probably mention that
there are one or two moments where it is possible to die – so don’t
attempt to win the entire game without saving. But as far as I could
tell there are no dead ends and the game can always be finished (provided
that you don’t get killed of course).

And now it’s time for me to weigh the pros and cons of Mystery
of the Druids. I had hard time deciding whether I actually liked
this game or not. It is certainly mysterious and there are druids
too. The game boasts quality artwork. I liked the story which kept
me glued to the screen for longer than is good for me. There is enough
blood and gore to keep me interested. But some of the puzzles are
just plain frustrating and there are bugs too. To be fair, the final
version is substantially more stable than the preview version and
never crashed on me (unlike the preview). After lengthy consideration
I gave Mystery of the Druids a B-. This game could easily get
better rating if it were just a little improved.

Michael’s Final Grade: Mystery of the Druids – B-

System Requirements:
P200
32MB RAM