We American adventure players
suffer great confusion when trying to keep track of game titles as
they cross the
Atlantic. Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templar infamously became
Circle of Blood when released in North America. Other games
underwent similar moniker mangling. When Dreamcatcher prepared its
NA release of the sequel to Cryo’s Atlantis: The Lost Tales,
they decided to call it Beyond Atlantis, thinking that saddling
it with the title Atlantis 2 would be a handicap, as the first
game was little-known in America. Now that there’s a third game in
the series, there’s bound to be a bit of a rumpus over whether to
refer to it as Atlantis 3 or by Dreamcatcher’s title, Beyond
Atlantis 2.

I don’t care what you call
it. I’m calling it “Go Buy This Game.” Because, though perhaps
not quite a home run, Beyond Atlantis II is a whole lot of
what adventure players have been pining for. Are you in the mood for
a breezy, gorgeous adventure game with more of what you like and less
of what you hate? You’re in luck, folks.

The
story begins in near future as your character, a pretty young archeologist
(is there any other kind?) is in search of some very out-of-the-way
Egyptian ruins. She inadvertently stumbles onto a mysterious, guarded
excavation site that contains a portal to a mysterious alternate reality.

I don’t want to spend much
time on the actual plot, because a) it actually doesn’t make tons
of sense and b) that totally doesn’t matter. What does matter is that
the designers of Beyond Atlantis 2 seem to have a good grasp
on what adventure gamers love. The game is a treasure trove of off-beat
puzzles, beautiful environments to explore and breathtaking cut scenes
to enjoy.

Graphically the game is
a delight. First, there’s great variety, and the environments are
a pleasure to explore. There are outdoor areas that live and breath
like something out of Riven or Timelapse. And there
are fanciful exotic locales that bring to mind the most entertainingly
excessive Hollywood Technicolor costume dramas.
Frequent use of in-screen animations – such as swaying tree branches,
running water, and flickering flames — add greatly to the atmosphere.
The presentation is first person point-and-click with 360-degree panning.
The cursors are intuitive. In fact, the whole presentation is elegant
and straightforward enough that a manual isn’t really necessary. Most
of the nodular movement is slideshow, but occasionally the steps are
animated.

The character models are
fantastic-looking, if you can overlook the curiously smug look plastered
on the face of the heroine for the entire game (you’d think all the
wild things she’s seeing would shock her a little).

You can die in several
places in the game, but – hallelujah! – when you die the game very
sensibly restores you to the point right before you made your fatal
mistake. No tedious reloading.

The cut scenes are also
a consistent delight, especially the ones that deal with transportation.
I don’t even want to spoil them here, but let me just say this: Think
Arabian Nights and Thief of Baghdad . . .

The
voice work is fine but nothing to write home about. The musical score
by David Rhodes, however, is exceptional. Rich and varied as the graphics
are, the music really helps create a series of vivid moods. This is
particularly evident during a cave scene, when the score echoes the
whispers of long-lost Siberian hunters.

As I said before, those
looking for a strong plot need not apply, but I promise you it doesn’t
matter a bit. (Can anyone honestly tell me more than ten words about
the plot of Beyond Atlantis?)

Since this is a sequel,
I also must report that the designers have done an admirable job of
improving on the previous game. Remember how trying some of those
puzzles were? This time around, there’s no hunting stars
in the grass or searching for arbitrary spots to hold an orb up to
the sky. The puzzles range from the very easy to the fairly challenging,
and they are all entertaining, with one pretty big exception.

There is an arcade puzzle
late in the Ice Age sequence that I found pretty frustrating. It reminded
me (shudder) of the “shoot the arrow through the hole in the
rock” puzzle in Timelapse. If you’re able to deal with
this toughie, you’ll have smooth sailing for the remainder of the
game.

The game takes place in
several interesting areas, including what may or may not be ancient
Egypt, a bewildering floating maze and a gorgeously-rendered ice-age
wilderness.

Easily
the most entertaining segment of the game, however, takes place in
a stunningly-imagined mythical Baghdad. You actually assume the role
of Scheherazade as well as the wily thief in the story she’s telling.
In your pursuit of a black rose you encounter a kaleidoscopic parade
of puzzles that are a tremendous pleasure to solve. There’s everything
from using a cat to divert a guard to guiding a unicorn through a
tricky maze to becoming a piece on a gigantic spiral game board. The
entire sequence is a triumph of design.

I’ve been pretty hard on
games with the Cryo label in the last few years, so it’s nice to be
able to report that Beyond Atlantis 2 is such a pleasure to
play. It’s as if someone sent out a memo reminding everyone that,
ahem, adventure games are supposed to be fun. And this game
is the most fun I’ve had with a Cryo game since their underrated 1999
Ring: The Legend of the Nibelungen. It’s a game that will bring
much pleasure to the desperately deprived adventure game audience.

Way
to go, Cryo. Way to go, Dreamcatcher. Please tell us you have this
team working on three more games right now! How about assigning them
to make sequels to The Crystal Key, Beyond Time and
Lightbringer?!

Ray’s Grade: A

System Requirements:

Windows 95/98/ME/XP
Pentium II 300 MHz
64 MB RAM
DirectX® Compatible Video and Sound card
8x CD-ROM Drive