“Hello, My Name Is Ray and I Like Edutainment Games”

And
I’m not sorry. I’m a big fan of Cryo’s historical series (Egypt 1156 BC, Aztec,
China, Versailles), and I also really enjoyed the shamelessly educational
Discovery Channel game Connections. I’m a voracious reader with a particular
interest in history, so these games are right up my alley.

Of course, I
realize not all adventure players feel this way. Which is why I’m happy to report
that France Telecom Multimédia/Index’s new offering, Louvre: The Final
Curse (LTFC) is an edutainment game even an edutainment hater could love.
Though not from Cryo, the game was built in collaboration with Réunion
des Musées Nationaux, the organization that also helped provide the authenticity
to the Cryo historical games.

What Hath Thief Wrought?

Since
the success of Looking Glass Studios’ “first-person sneaker” Thief,
it seems like creeping around places you’re not supposed to be has become
all the rage. I thoroughly enjoyed DayDream Software’s Safecracker, for
example, and their Traitors Gate I consider to be a classic.

In Traitors
Gate, your character has to break into the Tower of London and steal the Crown
Jewels. In LTFC, it’s only the most famous museum in the world you have to break
into, the monumental Louvre in Paris.

The setup is yet another round of
Knights Templar hooey about four evil objects of power known as The Devil’s Keys.
(I guess we should be grateful to the Knights; otherwise I guess we’d be playing
even more games set in Egypt and Central America.) You play a buff young woman
named Morgane, of which absolutely nothing is ever learned during the course of
the game, except that she’s darned agile and ghost and time travel seem to have
no effect on her at all. Her father’s dying wish is that she break into the Louvre
and steal these dangerous four objects. Well, what’s a good daughter to do?

I
thought this premise was fun enough–I mean, sneaking around the Louvre after
hours, how appealing–but the stakes quickly get higher and the story more interesting.
Morgane meets a mysterious ghost (as opposed to, I suppose, an obvious, what-you-see-is-what-you-get
ghost) who sends her back in time. It turns out that in LTFC you get to skulk
around places you’re not supposed to be in the Louvre in five different
time periods! As the building complex has undergone radical evolution during its
eight-hundred-year history, this is quite an appealing prospect for a history
buff indeed. To help get you up to speed on the Louvre’s various incarnations,
there’s a handy in-game tutorial that gives you information on the Louvre of each
period you visit.

The format is the tried-and-true first-person point-and-click
that all adventure players will be comfortable with. The cursor is intelligent
and intuitive.

The graphics range from very good to excellent, and they
are all presented with 360-degree panning. (It’s particularly fun to go into the
central courtyard each time you’re transported to a new time period, to see how
the buildings have changed.) The movement is a combination of discrete slideshow
“steps” with occasional fully animated movement.

In another similarity
to Traitors Gate, your character is provided with a whole array of neato
gadgets, from gas mask to crossbow to diamond-edged knife. You frequently have
to combine one or more objects, and the inventory handles this task fairly well.
The game does have a peculiar quirk in dealing with excess inventory, however.
You can only carry about eight objects in your “wallet” at one time.
This is a problem, because, as in all adventures, you’re constantly picking cool
stuff up. In the very first room I found a chest in which I could store excess
items. Cool, I thought, this is that rare game that tries to make a stab at realism
where inventory is concerned and won’t let me carry around an entire hardware
store!

My delight in the game’s realism, however, was quickly dashed when
I began finding these chests all through the game–and lo and behold, every single
one of them contains whatever items you’ve put in any chest. So it’s really
sort of a Magic Chest. So much for jeux de verité, I thought, but
I had to admit it was a nice convenience.

Something Is Rotten in the
State of Ile-de-France

Alas, all is not pure unadulterated gaming goodness
in LTFC. The game is beset with several problems that keep it from getting a higher
rating.

First of all, it suffers even worse than Inherent Evil did
from the dreaded Pixel Hunt Syndrome. There are several vital items that are extremely
hard to find and in fact can only be found by accident or by literally “painting”
an entire screen with your cursor. Here’s an example: at one point you have to
find an important object that’s hidden under a table. You don’t know it’s hidden
under a table, and there’s nothing on the table to indicate you should look under
it. Only when you place your cursor on one particular spot on the table–which
is visually no different from any other spot on the table–do you
get the “look here!” cursor. This is not really playing fair with the
gamer.

The game was (quelle surprise) originally produced in French,
and unfortunately there are a few vital holes in the translations. Before releasing
their English-language version, I recommend Index make sure everything that’s
written in French gets translated into English.

Even worse are the voices.
The voice recording is the worst I can remember hearing in any recent adventure,
and I don’t mean the acting, I mean the actual technical recording. It sounds
like voices in a drum that’s been immersed in water on a foggy day. What makes
this situation much, much worse is that there is no onscreen text option!
C’est dommage! Not acceptable. Naturally, there are several instances of
characters giving you incredibly vital information that you simply cannot understand.
Imagine the teenage employee at an amusement park talking through one of those
terrible PA systems and giving you life-or-death information, and you pretty much
get the idea. This problem seriously mars a good game.

If Index could fix
these problems before releasing the English-language version of Louvre, they
could have a real winner on their hands.

Final Grade:
Without
voice problems fixed: C
With voice problems fixed: B

If you liked
Louvre:
Watch: Topkapi
Read: Timeline by
Michael Crichton
Play: Traitors Gate