Beyond Atlantis is based on a successful adventure game formula.
Give the player a tidbit of a story, airlift him into breathtaking
locales he’d never see hanging around his local mini-market, and give
him some devious puzzles to solve. It’s a first-person game, with
beautifully animated cutscenes and very stylishly rendered locales
to wander around in.

The story is that in a long-ago past in Atlantis, good and evil existed
together as two halves of a larger whole. The people at this time
divided this into two parts, the Power of Light and the Power of Darkness.
You play as a young man named Ten, the descendant of Seth, who has
taken on the task of traveling to assorted countries in varying times
to solve this ages-old dilemma and reunite the two halves. Most of
this is just backstory, however, as you travel to Tibet, Yucatan,
China, Ireland, Shambala, and finally briefly to Atlantis, interacting
with the locals and, of course, solving puzzles.

The game itself is very beautifully drawn, with some really creative
work put into the intricately executed cutscenes. The graphics are
beautiful imagery, the kind that always bring adventure game players
back for more. Do I care if some of the leaves and rocks are day-glo
colors? Of course not! This is a feverish, surreal interpretation
of environments that would be otherwise dreary or dark in real life,
and the design gives them a fairy tale enchantment that draws the
player in and keeps her coming back for more. Beyond Atlantis features
Cryo’s Omni 3D engine, which allows the player a 360-degree examination
of all environments, so movement is fluid, and the player is allowed
the luxury of being able to explore environments freely and poke into
the corners of places to her heart’s content. There are several spots
in the game where the graphics are blocky and not well-defined, and
it seems there was some shortcutting going on during the rendering
process.

The music in the game is melodic and soothing. It has an ethereal
temperature to it that fits the nature of the dreamlike environments
that you are exploring. I suspect the soundtrack attempts to mimic
a bit of the style of music of the different countries the player
is exploring; however, this does not quite get pulled off, and the
themes are pretty interchangeable but nevertheless solidly done. The
only drawback I found to the music is that it was a bit too simplistic,
playing a safe sort of Yanni style to accompany the graphics, and
it did not really grab the my attention on its own creative merits.
Rather, it had the feeling of adventure game Muzak, urging me solemnly
ever on.

Voice acting in Beyond Atlantis is well-done, and the characters
are all very different and adroitly drawn, each with its own personality
and style. The characters do, however, have a rather wooden appearance
when talking, which gives them the look of an actor in a dubbed-language
film. But this is more than made up for in the delightful look of
each in their costume and bearing.

Puzzles in Beyond Atlantis are for the most part inventory-based,
and they are extremely difficult. One of my biggest points of contention
regarding the game is that some of the game actions that need to be
done are not clear from one step to the next. This is a recurring
problem throughout the game.

Locating inventory pieces in some instances was really like finding
a needle in a haystack. There are skull pieces in Ireland, for example,
that are placed in such a way that they look exactly the same texture
and color as the spot they’ve been laid down into, and this dissolves
gameplay into a pixel hunt, scanning each screen to see if the cursor
will change (and thank God for a well-designed smart cursor that does
this, because it is certainly needed).

The game also has some puzzles that are so convoluted as to act as
dead ends. For example, in China, there is a door that can be opened
either one of two ways. The incorrect one will cause the player to
hit a dead end later in the game. There is no indication that it has
been opened incorrectly. Later, a character makes an inexplicable
statement that is a quasi-hint that this was done wrong, and if you
don’t get the hint, why, just hand up your dancin’ shoes, because
for you, my friend, the jig is up, and the game is over. You can work
on the next puzzle until kingdom come, but you’re not going to get
anyplace, and the unforgiving design will not tell you that you are
stuck either.

There are a couple of puzzles that are either timed or action-oriented.
These are not impossible to complete for the average adventure game
player, and they are actually a lot of fun.

I experienced a couple of problems: First, there was some sound distortion
in the Yucatan portion of the game that nearly split my eardrums,
a little white noise. Also, in a couple portions of the game, the
speech was out of synch with the game. But these were minor and confined
to specific spots in the game, and they were not excessive.

There is a fair amount of disk swapping, but this is, for the most
part, kept down by having each of the various worlds on one disk each.
This is quite a feat, given the fact that the game comes on four CDs
(oh DVD, where art thou?) and it is a fairly long game. The game can
also be started from whatever CD the player is currently on, a real
time-saver.

Beyond Atlantis is an enchanting diversion for those players
who delight in exploring strange lands, wallowing in glorious scenery,
and diving into fiendish puzzles. For the experienced gamer, this
will fix any Timelapse/Crystal Key/Qin jones
you may have.

Final Grade: B

System Requirements:

Mac:
Mac OS 8.6-9.1
G3 233 MHz
64 MB RAM
Minimum 80 MB free hard drive space
8X CD ROM drive
Quicktime 4.0

PC:
Pentium 200 MHz processor
32 MB RAM
8X CD-ROM drive
2 MB video card
65,000 colors
Soundblaster-compatible sound card
70 MB available on hard drive
DirectX 6.0 compatibility (supplied with game)